● 11.01.09

● Links 01/11/2009: OggCamp 2009 Coverage, Linux Graphics Survey Starts

Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Late October 2009 is proving to be an interesting time in the world of computer operating systems. Within the space of eight days we have seen Apple dramatically dropping their prices, Microsoft releasing Windows 7 and on Thursday 29 October Canonical will release Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” 9.10.

• Ubuntu is a direct competitor to Windows, and was named as such by Microsoft in this year’s Security and Exchange Commission filing.

• So, with this version does Ubuntu live up to it’s name of one of the most popular distributions? It certainly does and this version is certainly worth the upgrade for current Ubuntu users, especially those plagued by poor graphics drivers for Intel cards in the Jaunty release. There are 2 things which really excite me with Ubuntu. First is that, after six months when the next Ubuntu version comes out, which will be an LTS, things look really good for Ubuntu. Many computer manufacturers like Dell will use it for their netbooks, laptops and desktops. And when the cheap ARM chips based net books finally come out, Linux will certainly be a very good competitor to the proprietary Operating systems. The second thing is that with this release Canonical has come up with some innovative plans to profit from Ubuntu. If they actually are able to make money off the Linux desktop, it will be nothing short of spectacular!

• Well, here you are … a computer with twin display, running Kubuntu and then, under a Virtual Box system, running Windows XP. The mouse flows between them as if they were one system, as does the clipboard. If you want to know more, watch out for the series that will be coming up on Linux Crusade as I go through installing Kubuntu and also install the Virtual Box from Sun in order to do this. I’ll also be showing you around Kubuntu itself as well.

• With just a few tweaks, your Linux box can be lighter, sprightlier and quicker than ever before. Read on for the best ways to speed up your boot sequence, optimise KDE and Gnome, and get better performance from your favourite apps. We’ve also got some top tips from our favourite free software gurus…

Desktop

• As an added bonus, this project will be held at the Zareason shop in Berkeley, the site where many of us have purchased pre-installed Linux machines. Come on over and see the west coast’s best Linux-only retailed in action!

Kernel Space

• Jesse has added support to Mesa and the X Server that will allow for the appropriate OpenGL/GLX extensions that expose syncing and frame counting capabilities (SGI_swap_control, SGI_video_sync, SGIX_swap_barrier, etc). This code though is currently housed in his personal Git repositories as the patches await review and feedback (mailing list message). This DRI2 synchronization and buffer swaps code is also dependent upon revisions to dri2proto and libdrm along with the latest DRM code that will eventually be pushed into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel due to its vblank event support.

• This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.

Audio/Events

• Topics for this podcast:

• *-DoD memo and official use and consideration of open source *EnterpriseDB updates its Postgres Plus Server, gets Red Hat investment *Latest in Linux from Canonical’s Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Deltacloud *Roundup of Oracle-Sun-MySQL developments and perspectives

• The joint Linux Outlaws / Ubuntu UK Podcast live recording from OggCamp — uncut edition.

• I just got back from a three-conference trip, Futurecom in Sao Paulo, “I FÓRUM DE SOFTWARE LIVRE DE DUQUE DE CAXIAS” in the city of Duque de Caxias, a community of Rio de Janeiro, and Latinoware in Foz do Iguassu, Brazil. Each conference was interesting in its own way.

Applications

• Every Linux user that has used the GNOME desktop environment must have had at least an encounter with its default text editor, Gedit. You start it up, and it looks like a simple notepad type application with a toolbar added on top. However, don’t let yourself fooled by that simple appearance. If you know how to customize this application, it can be modified to serve almost any text exiting purpose, and you can even create an IDE-like environment.

• A home computer makes an ideal appliance to store and stream music. The purpose of a music server is to deliver tracks when requested by a client. The server can deliver music to machines over a local area network as well as computers connected over the internet.

• After reading the first part of this series, you should have a MythTV server up and running. To watch TV or schedule recordings you’ll need to setup one or more MythTV front ends. Since the front end has to decode, deinterlace, and display the video content, it normally has to perform more work than the MythTV back end. Luckily, I have a recent NVidia graphics card which is capable of performing much of the video processing grunt work for me.

Games

• Syntensity isn’t a single game, but rather a platform that can run all kinds of 3D games. There are already a few games, and anybody can create their own. The main game is a multiplayer first/third person shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and there is also a simple drawing game (in which multiple people can draw and see what each other are drawing in realtime). You can see both games in action in this video.

Desktop Environments

• Most of you, Linux users have always been limited to the two big desktop names in Linux. GNOME and KDE today represent the Linux desktop. But there exist other desktop environment along with these two; XFCE, LDE etc. All these desktop enviroment was made with a normal desktop or laptop in mind but one desktop was made with small screen and children in mind.

• Recently we have finished creating the materials for the Application development for GNOME and KDE course we have been working on for CENATIC. It is a modular course, so for example you can take only the modules for GNOME programming or KDE programming. It has been designed for on-line training (using e-larning systems that support SCORM format, as moodle), presential learning or mixed combination of boths.

GNOME

• The much anticipated GNOME 3.0 release is coming in March, but the first development release (v2.29.1) for GNOME 3.0 (a.k.a. 2.30) is now available this week. For months now we have seen early development snapshots of the new Zeitgeist, GNOME Shell, and Mutter modules, but now that GNOME 2.28 was released, all of these free software developers have turned their attention towards the major 3.0 release.

• Not long after the release of GNOME 2.8 comes a new version of NScripts. Included are a handful of new ease-of-use functions for GNOME’s Nautilus data manager.

• The Dark Turrican and Light Turrican themes are my variations of the Turrican theme for GNOME with window borders created by me. The Kioo and Pepper themes are original themes created by me.

Distributions

• We take the occasion to open new Mandriva groups on Flickr for artwork contribution in Mandriva Linux. You can now upload whenever you want some more backgrounds, screensavers, themes… in Mandriva Linux artwork group. You can also spread your favourite distribution and upload screenshots of your environment.

• Sabayon 5 (or Five oh!, as the project team likes to call it) came out on October 2, 2009. As has been the norm since the last couple of releases, it’s been divided into a KDE and GNOME live DVD. The last version LFY had bundled was version Four oh! (we skipped 4.1 and 4.2). It was a single Live DVD that contained both GNOME and KDE. So what our CD team has done this time is combine the two separate ISOs into a single live multi-boot DVD. The downside is, you’ll only get either of the two desktops, at a time.

• The need of such a list came when I was trying to find a Slackware-based mini distribution to install it in my usb pen-drive.

Fedora

• I’m very pleased that Fedora is able to contribute to this effort through our stance on freedom. While we try not to get in the way of users making their own personal choices in software, we are also working hard at making proprietary bits more unnecessary. With every new release of Fedora, you can see the advances that are gained through those efforts.

• The laptop arrived yesterday, I immediately removed the ‘Windows Vista’ off the body of the machine, and booted and installed Fedora 12 beta on it. It’s working great! I have had absolutely no problem with any piece of hardware interacting with Fedora 12. I couldn’t be happier with it.

Debian

• Lentz, a senior member of the Australian free and open source software community who for a long time was the face of MySQL Down Under, says he decided to talk about depression as a form of self-therapy.

• “The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf10,” the organization said in a statement Oct. 30.

Ubuntu

• With the switch to Ext4, the Ubuntu developers also updated the default boot manager, which is now Grub2. The new boot manager in Ubuntu 9.10 is visually the same, but offers several extended features: For instance, it can start the Linux kernel not only from Ext4, but also from LVM and RAID partitions. However, the installation of the latter two is still not supported in the graphic installation wizard of the standard desktop CD, and has to be done via the text-based installer on the Alternate CD.

• You may remember my mention of the Ubuntu Software Center in my article “Ubuntu Karmic Koala preview“. Well, Karmic Koala is now officially Ubuntu 9.10 and is on the streets. I have installed the release and am as pleased as I expected I would be. One aspect of 9.10 that I was most interested in was the new Ubuntu Software Center. I have always been a big fan of apt-get and Synaptic, so I was curious as to how Ubuntu could possibly improve on either of these tools. I have used the Software Center a few times already and I can see why Ubuntu migrated to this new system: It’s very user friendly (more so than the original Add/Remove Software tool), it’s reliable, it’s easier to add new repositories, and it has a much cleaner interface.

• At the end of the day, I had to make the call among vanilla Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint and wattOS. I really, really liked what the wattOS team was doing, but there were some elements that weren’t quite ready for prime time. It really looks like a solid project, but it was also obviously still in beta (a status which hasn’t changed recently), so I (reluctantly) crossed them off the list. I can deal with lack of polish, but there were still some bugs on the installation and administrative sides (I can’t remember what they are offhand, but I remember they were somewhat annoying.) Nevertheless, if anyone is in a similar situation, do give them a look. I think they’re on to something. My ultimate decision was for Mint, on the strength of its organization and the fact that it includes some really nifty extra tools (MintUpdate and MintBackup, for instance.) I also took the plunge and replaced Slackware 12.2 with Mint on my desktop computer. I don’t regard Mint as a “compromise” in any way, and fears that it might be a bit too robust for the laptop have not come true, so far.

• On Thursday 29 October 2009 Canonical released Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” 9.10. For existing users there are two main methods of upgrading to this latest release.

• Can you believe it? We’ve made it to thirty. That’s right; thirty issues of FCM, and they wouldn’t have happened without you! Here’s a giant thank you to all the editors, translators, writers, hosting donators, and everyone else that’s made FCM and Ubuntu possible.

Devices/Embedded

• 1. The Kindle isn’t a monopoly The Kindle, on which I was unduly harsh when it first appeared, has been the most popular e-reader. But it does not yet have the massive market presence that the iPod did by the time the first Zunes came out. (Amazon has not released sales numbers, but TechCrunch estimates it somewhere north of a million.) This matters because lending and borrowing are only attractive if you believe there will be other people near by you whose taste you trust to borrow from.

• The tide was clearly against the Zune by the time it came out, which did not give consumers confidence that there would be other Zune users to get music from. In that case, it was just safer to stick with the leader, the iPod.

Phones

• So it sounds to me like palm is getting money or other favors from Google to artificially restrict the capabilities of the Webos messenger.

• Linux Mobile is one of the underdogs of mobile operating systems. Playing practically the same role they have with desktop computers, Linux systems tend to play more towards function and practicality over style and form. This is usually compensated by skinning and other customization options.

Android

• In fact, Financial Times reporter Chris Nuttall claims, Android could soon emerge as the major smartphone that isn’t the iPhone. Android systems now operate on 12 different phones with 32 phone carriers supporting them around the world. And Motorola, HTC, and Samsung are all busy developing their own Android-based handsets.

• It’s time for me to do a mea culpa on Android.

• Google unveiled plans for its mobile operating system about two years ago, and rolled out the first phone based on Android about a year later. In both cases, I predicted doom.

• But I was wrong.

• I finally came to terms with this the other day while watching one of those suddenly ubiquitous “iDon’t” ads on TV. If you haven’t seen one, the ads slam the shortcomings of the iPhone (“iDon’t have interchangeable batteries”) while trumpeting the pending arrival of the Droid sometime in November.

• In this case, Droid is a smart-phone built by Motorola for Verizon that uses Android. Add those three corporate behemoths together, and you have some serious marketing dollars available to push this thing, whatever it actually turns out to be.

• The open-source Android operating system is gaining momentum, and Microsoft has been slow to respond, says a New York Times report.

• In its three years, the iPhone has redefined the mobile device. But despite the iPhone’s popularity, it is by no means certain to become the mobile equivalent of Windows, the dominant platform that defines our experience of a particular technology, as well as the business choices that surround it.

• Google’s Android 2.0 OS is the latest in a series of mobile offerings seeking to derail the iPhone’s momentum. Backed by heavyweights Google, Motorola, Verizon Wireless, Acer, and other big-name manufacturers, Android could potentially knock the iPhone down a peg. After all, while users love the iPhone, Apple’s controlling tendencies have frustrated developers, and its disrespect for business concerns have frustrated IT.

• The Motorola DROID is the first Android 2.0 device, and like other excellent competing smartphones it is being advertised as an iPhone-killer. With its sleek look and powerful features, I think it could become as successful as the RAZR and possibly surpass iPhone’s popularity. But it will depend on whether or not its OS can really deliver the goods.

• After a series of teaser ads that attack Apple’s iPhone, Verizon Wireless and Motorola officially unveiled Wednesday the Droid smartphone.

• Here you are, friends and Romans, the Motorola Droid from Verizon, the phone you’ve been salivating over for the past few months. It’s now sitting quietly on the desk next to me, wondering where you are. The Droid wants you.

• Android 2.0, nicknamed “Eclair,” will make its big entrance on the Droid next month, and other handsets are sure to follow. Version 2.0 brings a set of new features to the table, including native support for Microsoft Exchange. However, the wide-open Android ecosystem may be prone to fragmentation as the underlying platform grows in strength and ability.

Sub-notebooks

• Recently MTN Rwanda selected Wavion and Balton Uganda for the deployment of a large scale Wi-Fi network. The new network is based on Wavion WBS-2400 base stations, which will provide high speed wireless connectivity to SMEs and residential users in the capital.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s rare to find, then, a brochure produced with the intent of talking down free software as a whole. However, Wikileaks has turned up just such a document: the SirsiDynix brochure against “open source” library software, distributed on a restricted basis to certain customers. In particular, they’re raging against the likes of Evergreen and Koha. I should own up that I’ve known one particular Koha developer, MJ Ray, for a long while, but this isn’t an area I particularly have a lot of direct experience. If I were a Koha developer, though, reading this would be a bit smarting: they accuse it of many things, in particular of having priorities belonging in the 80s.

• For example, he encouraged audience members seeking a full-feature, Web-based enterprise document management system to consider the open-source version of KnowledgeTree or the community edition of Alfresco.

• Free software embodies the values of learning, sharing and open collaboration that have been the basis of knowledge creation throughout history. In Kerala, hundreds of thousands of children are not only learning with high-quality software but also are indirectly imbibing the values of sharing and openness that the software is built with. In this manner, free software promotes the highest values of human culture: that the hard work put into creating hundreds of millions of lines of software code is not meant entirely for private profit but for the benefit of people around the world.

• I return to the question I started with: Should we have access to the source code of software that we use? The answer is an unequivocal: yes, we should. Free and open source software represents openness, sharing, and a culture of learning and enquiry. It invites us to understand, build upon, and advance the software tools needed for our community. It presents an infinite potential for innovation and discovery, and a challenge to our youth to stand on the shoulders of giants to build software and tools for the future.

• It is still relatively concise, but the fact that the numbers keep showing double- and triple-digit improvements in important metrics (compared with proprietary software), I felt that it would only be fitting to expand the content and the data by a commensurate amount. The premise holds that proprietary software is responsible for a direct dead-loss costs of $1T USD per year, although it is enhanced by the analysis of Roger Sessions showing that the sum of direct and indirect costs are closer to $6T USD per year. Either way you slice it, in these economic times, we simply cannot afford the status quo of proprietary software dominance, either in the IT choices we make or in the economic and legal agendas that they promulgate.

• Open Source philosophy fosters environments where people readily exchange knowledge and willingly share innovations as a way to develop skills for the betterment of humankind.

• But as with all things open source, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. forks have already appeared on GitHub, and there are attempts to support ZFS with MacFUSE. So if you’re a die-hard ZFS fan on Mac OS X, there may be some hope for you yet.

• Web-based office productivity applications such as Zoho Office and Google Apps offer deployment and collaboration advantages over their desktop-bound cousins. However, these applications tend to require that organizations house their data outside the company firewall and give up the option of switching host without losing access to the application. Enter OpenGoo, an open source licensed online productivity suite that can be run from any LAMP server.

• At this years SAP TechEd 2009 event in Vienna, SAP announced that it has joined a number of Apache Software Foundation projects. The goal of the move is to integrate some of the software into future releases of its NetWeaver Application Server component.

• There haven’t been any protestations from Wall Street that I’ve seen that they’re unhappy with Oracle acquiring MySQL. Rather, this has been a European affair as Monty tries to get the EU to interfere in industrial policy for his own personal benefit. So why in the world would you send your sockpuppet to Wall Street to explain any positions? What interest would Wall Street have in the matter other than to provide funding?

Mozilla

• I narrated a tour of Firefox. Check it out.

• Corporate America hasn’t done much with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, a competitor to Microsoft Outlook. Europe, however, has given it a warm reception. For example, the French tax authority recently selected Thunderbird to power 130,000 of its personal computers, replacing IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.

• Native videos now have a full screen option: right click on a video and select Full screen. On related news, a new full screen button is now available to add to the toolbars.

Business

• Like the soccer economy, the open-source software economy is best measured by the total value it creates, which will have very little to do with the direct sales the Red Hats of the world report. Open source saves enterprises billions of dollars in license fees, and arguably has the potential to collectively add trillions of dollars in productivity gains.

• Today I saw a note that once high flier KANA was being sold for $49 million in cash to a private equity firm. Not because they have any real assets but because they have a $400 million operating loss. The company is essentially a publicly traded shell that might be used to roll a profitable or growing company who wants to go public into. This has many advantages I suppose for the shareholders of the new company but what about the customers?

Releases

• Samba 3.4.3 is released. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS. It provides interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

Government

• The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.

• “The fact that our own Department of Defense is recommending open source and Linux is huge,” wrote another commenter. “Even they realize the tremendous benefits of open source. Personally, I have migrated away from Microsoft years ago, and I couldn’t be happier. Not only is Linux much more secure than Windows, but it doesn’t have all of the maintenance headaches of Windows (removing spyware, viruses, having your personal information stolen, etc).”

Programming

• Personally, I see PHP 5.3 as a major release and perhaps a different language might have elected to give it a major version number. That said, Gutmans’ question about the relevance of PHP 6 remains.

Standards/Consortia

• The ODF Plugfest final agenda is on line, and few Italian speakers will talk on the first day, Monday 2nd of November.

Leftovers

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• INTERNET SERVICES JUGGERNAUT Google has offered its excuses to the FCC in an ongoing row with AT&T over allegations that it blocks phone numbers on its VoIP service Google Voice.

• It’s not the first group to complain about Amazon’s vice-like grip on the Kindle, not to mention its supporting services and customer information, but the Norwegian Consumer Council is able to impose fines against any company trading illegally in Norway, and believes that Amazon might just fit the bill.

• According to the bill text, “any Internet service provider that, on or through a system or network controlled or operated by the Internet service provider, transmits, routes, provides connections for, or stores any material containing any misrepresentation… shall be liable for any damages caused thereby, including damages suffered” by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, an entity that protects investors from financial harm if a broker-dealer company fails.

• On top of that, the idea is already incredibly unpopular with the majority of people in the UK… and (most importantly) there’s an election coming up soon in the UK. Backing a massively disliked proposal to kick people off the internet based on accusations using weak evidence… probably isn’t a savvy political move at this moment. Given all of that, I’m wondering if the plan ever really moves forward in the UK, or if it just makes a lot of noise so that Mandelson and his colleagues can tell the entertainment industry how they tried, to make sure the political donations keep coming in.

• I wonder how Watergate would have turned out if the Washington Post was relying on Nixon for cash… The editorial piece claims that no one is “filling the gap” left by fewer newspaper reporters, but presents no evidence whatsoever to support that. The market is changing, absolutely, but we’re seeing all sorts of new, unique and innovative ways of covering the news — often allowing much greater coverage than in the past.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• When most people think of the intellectual property fights with user-generated content websites, they think of cases like Viacom v. YouTube. Assuming that slow-moving case ever gets to trial, a court will determine what kinds of legal obligations the video sharing website has in policing its network for copyright infringement.

• It’s a natural impulse to want to support the little guy, the David who faces down a powerful Goliath. That’s why it’s easy to get behind this guy’s claims that a copycat business is suing him to force him to abandon his own copyrights. Wtf!, you might say when you read something like that. Is that even possible? It is, and the story is more nuanced when you look at both sides, which makes it a good example of why it’s sometimes hard to be a “good consumer” when deciding where to spend your money.

• Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General’s Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law.

• So, of course, as the news broke that there was a leak of a Congressional ethics investigation, because a staffer put the document on his or her home machine that had file sharing software on it, the usual crowd of folks wasted no time at all in highlighting the use of P2P software and presenting file sharing as if it (rather than dumb employees and bad government security) was a huge national security threat and (of course) to urge Congresss to pass laws against file sharing programs. The one thing in common? All of those calls come from people who get paychecks from the entertainment industry.

• Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement.

• In a motion filed in federal district court on Thursday, lawyers representing artist Shepard Fairey in the copyright fight with The Associated Press over his Obama “Hope” poster asked that they be allowed to withdraw from the case and that a Jones Day attorney and a pair of law professors be allowed to replace them.

• Ariel Hyatt has been blogging about the concept of 1,000 True Fans and has an interview with musician Matthew Ebel, an up-and-coming musician who makes a living from his music, and breaks down the details — including pointing out that he makes 26.3% of his net income from just 40 hard-core fans.

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