● 12.08.09

● Links 08/12/2009: Fedora Claims Over 20 Million Installations

Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Most businesses would die without centralized marketing and operations. The Linux kernel, however, thrives under this model.

• The biggest, most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams, is finally up and running, with Linux in control.

• After some LHC engineering problems were fixed, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)’s LHC is now back to work exploring if the standard theories of both how matter and energy holds up and how the universe was created. The LHC will do this by smashing together a pair of particle beams that are shot around the circle in opposite directions at just shy of the speed of light. The resulting collision will produce showers of new particles, including, scientists hope, the elusive Higgs Boson particle.

Children

• Mavis Beacon without a doubt, is the most popular typing package in the world. However, a less known but better alternative to Mavis Beacon is Tux Typing. This cross platform open source typing application is designed to be intuitive, fun and educative with a special emphasis on children. It features the ever funny Tux-the official mascot of Linux- as the tutor.

• Both my kids use Ubuntu at home; they are 5 & 9. They skip easily between Ubuntu & the Windows machines they use at school and with their friends. They also switch without difficulty between applications too. When necessary James does his homework in OpenOffice.org and takes a USB stick to school with the files saved in a nasty proprietary format.

Server

• IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new hardware, software and services packages to help clients consolidate and virtualize enterprise workloads on IBM System z. Included are two new enterprise Linux servers that provide attractive, off-the-shelf pricing and configurations for large-scale data center consolidation on Linux.

• IBM also announced two new offerings in its System z Solution Edition series that makes System z attractive to new workloads – such as data warehousing, electronic payments and disaster recovery – so clients can run a wider range of their business activities with the powerful reliability, transaction-processing capabilities, and management capabilities and efficiencies of IBM System z.

Applications

• Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own web server. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track. Piwik provides detailed web statistics such as the keywords used by your visitors to find your website, analytics report as beautiful graphs that provide visual cues, and much more.

• MedCon is a conversion utility intended for reconstructed nuclear medical images.

• In addition, the program allows to read unsupported files without compression, to print pixel values or to extract/reorder/reslice study images. It is possible to export images as PNG or annimated GIF for desktop applications. Its library can be used as a framework. With the help of GNU’s autoconf tool, make utility & C compiler, the project has been build successfully on a variety of architectures.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

• KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has been released, and of course I couldn’t stay still. Thanks to the friendly openSUSE Build Service, there were packages available, so I just pointed my zypper sources to KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository, adjusted a few other things (mainly other third-party repositories) and updated.

Distributions

Gentoo Family

• Pentoo linux is a Gentoo-based live CD with a selection of apps and tools designed to perform penetration testing. They recently released their 2009.0 version and we thought we’d take it for a spin and share our findings.

• So basically, if you can install Gentoo, with or without the handbook, you can install Exherbo. Granted at the moment I’m installing in a VM but that shouldn’t make much difference. It’s just easier for me to start over. Though I haven’t so far. On the same hand though I don’t recommend starting with the pre-made VM on the Exherbo website. The one for VirtualBox at least was so outdated I couldn’t get paludis to work properly to save my life. No matter what I did it just kept bombing because packages had invalid tags on the end of the names. Apparently paludis 0.3x.x.x doesn’t like having “beta1″ or “rc” on the end of your package ID.

Red Hat Family

• For the daring folks who follow Rawhide: life is about to get interesting for a while. Fedora developers have announced that Rawhide will be moving to upstart 0.60 and to RPM 4.8.0. Both postings should be considered required reading for people with Rawhide systems.

• With over 20 million installations, Fedora is among the most world’s popular Linux distributions. While that kind of success has been due to a rapid base of supporters, the distro originally launched by Red Hat as a community Linux project is having to bridge the divide between targeting a mass audience and keeping hardcore enthusiasts in the fold.

Debian Family

• Just in time for the Alpha 1 release of Ubuntu 10.04, X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 has been pulled into the Lucid Lynx package repository. With this push of new X.Org 7.5 packages comes a number of other upstream X package updates along with rebuilds of the other non-updated drivers so that they will work against this latest stable X Server.

• Right off the bat, Ubuntu earned my respect. Installing the entire OS, after deleting and creating new partitions, on my less-than-average HP dv5z took less than 20 minutes. (Side note- the HP dv5z disappoints me greatly. I do not recommend this slow, unstable, and easily-overheating laptop to anyone. I hope the new laptops in this series fare better than this.) I thought it would take a painful hour or more, so finishing the installation in this amount of time pleased me. After downloading all the necessary updates for the system, which went by pretty quickly, I restarted my computer (Ubuntu booted up in about 20 seconds), took a deep breath, and dove in.

Devices/Embedded

• The full technical specifications won’t be announced until CES, but the BoxeeBoxeeBoxee did announce some basic details about the Boxee Box at tonight’s event. The big news is that the box is being made by D-link, is WiFi enabled and has an SD slot.

Sub-notebooks

• With the growing popularity of netbooks, it is no surprise that many Linux distributions and software developers have created customized versions of their software to run on them. Some of the popular choices include Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix and Intel’s Moblin. Not to be counted out, KDE now has a version of their desktop environment designed for netbooks. While it is still under heavy development, I thought now would be a good time to get a little preview of what is to come. For the purposes of this preview, I installed Kubuntu Netbook Edition, but you can conceivably use any distribution that will support your netbook.

• Monday morning, former TechCrunch partner Fusion Garage revealed details of its plans to release its Linux-based Web browsing tablet.

• OLPC is not by any means going quietly into the night in the face of stiff competition. The company just completed the distribution of the XO-1 to 415,000 elementary schools in Uruguay. In addition, OLPC recently inked deals with Rwanda for 120,000 computers and Peru for 294,000 computers. In just three short years, OLPC has managed to sell over a million computers to some 31 countries. Kane proudly notes, “Indeed if a company would build a netbook that would have our qualities of low power and ruggedness, we would love to be out of the hardware business. We would love to have someone providing that machine at the right price point.” Yet it remains clear to Kane and his company that the XO-1 is still the only product suitable for meeting the needs of early childhood education in poorer countries.

Free Software/Open Source

OpenOffice.org

• In this regard, what we witnessed in Orvieto was important. For the first time we recorded about a dozen regions, states and any sort of upper administrative layers in many countries (Italy, Germany, South America, India, etc.) that migrated to OpenOffice.org and is effectively using it. In some countries, some of them earth giants and some others lesser giants, we witnessed purely and simply a national uptake. Brazil is a very telling example of this. It started by Brazilian states and the migration went up to the federal state. After that it reached large central administrations, central banks, large companies, and is now spreading to small businesses. We estimate today between 7 and 30 Million professional desktops that have been migrated to OpenOffice.org in Brazil. It is always possible that Brazilian citizens themselves are craving for MS Office and therefore lined up in IT stores to purchase licenses from Microsoft but local observers seemed skeptical of that. Brazil, some might think, might be the exception in all this (even if it were, what are you doing of their market share?) but we got very clear reports that such phenomena are witnessed elsewhere; albeit on a reduced scale. OpenOffice.org is gaining users in almost every public sector in the world, and gaining many more in the private sector (both small and large companies) while it’s quickly becoming the well known free (as in beer) alternative to Microsoft Office at home.

BSD

• De Raadt says that by the time one release takes place, the developers are already six weeks into the next development cycle. “The release is a branch off the main development tree. In many other projects, it is a live branch, as in a separate team cuts it off and then keeps making minor tweaks to it to make sure it is a good release (why? that is because the mainline is crap).

• “In OpenBSD, the release branch is a dead branch. The day it split from the trunk it was determined to be good enough for making a real release. Without any changes. That is because the trunk is good stuff.”

• For one, there is a higher degree of reliability. Running on a full computer system makes it infinitely upgradeable. It can be extended to do more than just shuffle packets back and forth. You can turn a simple firewall into a full intrusion detection system. You can analyze and track bandwidth usage. It can be a VPN end point, a Web proxy, DHCP and DNS server, load balancer, handle automatic failover, and provide great diagnostic tools.

• pfSense, a firewall system based on the FreeBSD kernel, can handle all of this and more.

Openness

• It’s hardly the image of transparency the Obama administration wants to project: A workshop on government openness is closed to the public.

• The Obama administration still has a very mixed record on transparency and openness. Despite promising to be a lot more transparent and open, the federal government has been extremely selective in where it actually is open.

Leftovers

Government

• SECRET police files on people protesting against Victoria’s $3.5 billion desalination project are being made available to the private consortium building the plant.

• Under a deal struck by the State Government in a bid to ensure the project is finished before Melbourne runs out of water, Victoria Police has agreed to hand over photos, video recordings and other police records to the international consortium AquaSure to help it ”manage” protests and potential security threats.

• A leaked email details how the party has begun offering wealthy backers the chance to attend ‘private presentations’ in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) with key figures including director of communications Andy Coulson and director of strategy Steve Hilton.

Finance

• We already know that Goldman Sachs is still engaging in many of the same behaviors that crashed our economy. But here’s what we don’t know – and what Goldman isn’t telling: how deep does it go?

• Numerous Public Citizen activists turned out, holding high our protest signs demanding “Put people before Wall Street profits” and “Don’t let the banks drive us off another cliff.”

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• I said that it was untrue that IPR negotiations are normally secret, mentioning as examples that drafts of the other IPR texts, including the proposed WIPO treaty for disabilities and the climate change agreement language on IPR, as well as several drafts of the FTAA text and the 1996 WIPO copyright treaties had been public. Kirk said that ACTA “was different” and the topics being negotiated in ACTA were “more complex.”

• I brought up to Kirk that the USTR had shown ACTA text to dozens of corporate lobbyists and all of its trading partners in the ACTA negotiation, and the text was only secret from the public. Kirk did say USTR was discussing this issue with the White House and its trading partners, but that was about all he could say at that moment.

• Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.

• The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $6 billion. If the dollars don’t shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

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