● 12.13.09

● Links 13/12/2009: Preview of Linux 2.6.33, Krita Gets €4,000

Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Me: “Do you mean Debian Linux?”

• Caller: “Yes, that! Is it some sort of computer mafia or something?”

• Me: “Uh, no, it’s just a different operating system. Nothing to worry about.”

• Caller: “But it’s illegal! It’s not Microsoft, not even Windows! They’re on a normal Microsoft computer, so they’re breaking the law! I think they stole my identity when I came in the building! I’m calling the FBI!” *hangs up*

• The truth of the matter is Gandhi-Con4 has already started. Brazil, the 10th largest world economy and growing, dumped Microsoft in favor of Linux years ago in a desire for transparency and has been tickeled pink ever since. The French Army just quit Outlook in favor of the open source email client, Thunderbird. It does not stop there, remember, countries in every corner of the world have ordered One-Laptop-Per-Child netbooks that run Linux. Tax-payers of the world will see this trend and get sick and tired of seeing that Microsoft is on their corporate welfare dole.

• Should we really have to call it GNU/Linux instead of just Linux?

• The question lingers in my mind after a recent reader commented and corrected me that I should use the term “GNU/Linux” when referring to the entire operating system. I guess the naming controversy quietly lives on.

• Your Linux costs don’t end with the Internet. I don’t think that the electricity that powers your computer is free. And the longer your days and nights spent in front of the computer the higher your light and heat bill. Furthermore, the more time you spend on Linux the more money you may end up spending on snacks, new eyeglasses, and taxis when you miss the bus to work because you just couldn’t tear yourself away from the computer in time. I think you get my drift. But we repeat. Linux, this website, and many of the references on the web are free. Should you outgrow Damn Small Linux the larger versions of Linux are free, or at least quite inexpensive when compared to ostensibly similar versions of Microsoft Windows.

Kernel Space

• Kernel versions 2.6.27.40, 2.6.27.41 and 2.6.31.7 offer minor improvements and correct several bugs – including one security hole. Torvalds has already incorporated more than 5,000 changes for Linux 2.6.33. Its merge window will probably be open for just over another week. Various developers are working on significant improvements to the open source Radeon graphics drivers.

Graphics Stack

• Less than two weeks ago the first release candidate for the xf86-video-intel 2.10 driver was released, but now the second release candidate can be obtained from its Git repository. Not a whole lot of work has been committed to the Intel DDX driver since xf86-video-intel 2.9.99.901, but 2.9.99.902 is out there and testing is appreciated.

• While the Gallium3D driver to provide 3D/OpenGL acceleration (along with OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL ES and other accelerated APIs through the state tracker interface) will not be released right away as this is where the bulk of the development is still taking place, the Nouveau driver already has many advantages over what it is replacing: xf86-video-nv. The xf86-video-nv driver is NVIDIA’s attempt at an open-source driver in the way of just providing very basic user mode-setting for their hardware and limited 2D acceleration. That’s about it for the features of this driver with no RandR 1.2 support or any other DDX features found in most other drivers.

• Leading up to this though, Red Hat attributed Nouveau not entering the mainline tree sooner on the basis of some microcode/firmware concerns. Without sorting out the issue for this mysterious microcode, known as ctx_voodoo, they could not sign off on the code. As of right now, they haven’t even fully resolved this situation but they are just having ctx_voodoo be loaded through the kernel’s firmware loader interface. However, we have learned that ctx_voodoo is not even needed for all graphics cards and that Red Hat was just attempting to ignore this little fact.

• For those not interested in the Nouveau driver, head on over to NVIDIA’s FTP server as a new 190.xx driver is available. Late last month NVIDIA released the 195.22 beta Linux driver as the first in this new driver series, and while there are new features and advancements going on there, NVIDIA is still maintaining the current 190.xx stable driver series. Released last night was the NVIDIA 190.53 pre-release driver.

Applications

• This is the second time I try to get into Python scripting for GIMP. My script in the first show about scripting was simple, just saving some clicks. Now it is more complicated, variables, loops and floating points included. But no parrots!

• This application is designed for the 95% of users who just want to connect their scanner and quickly have the image/document in an appropriate format.

• Songbird is the new Polio cure, the Elvis of digital media, King Henry V, you name it. It’s truly spectacular. And it achieves all this by being simple, unobtrusive. The interface is smooth and polished and intuitive. I did not even suffer a moment of confusion or hesitation while I played with Songbird.

• On top of that, you get lots of online services, decent and relatively cheap, tons of useful media info via mashTape, many worthy extensions, and a powerful, easy-to-use search. Everything is there, at the tip of your fingers. The colors are toned down, there are no useless visual tricks to steal your eye’s focus or distract you from pure pleasure.

• You get everything you need and then some. Furthermore, it’s fast, responsive and stable and works great. Songbird is simply superb!

• This should be and must be your music player. I give it a perfect ten! Enjoy!

• Thanks to all who suggested it!

• Only two weeks after our previous beta release, all the folks from the Getting Things GNOME! project are very proud to announce you that the new 0.2 version is now out! So, get it while it’s hot! You can either download it on our Launchpad project page or, if you prefer, grab a package and install it from our PPA. And if you want to know what’s new in this release (and this is not only a few things!), just continue to read!

• Now, it’s time to celebrate that 0.2 release and to spread GTG love everywhere (we are even on FR wikipedia). See you at FOSDEM 2010 or at GUADEC 2010?

• Purely in the name of science, I dumped every torrent I could find on the front page of LinuxTracker into the 600m, and let it spin up. That’s 86 torrents, probably more than 60Gb of disk space, and generally speaking a considerable workload.

• As I mentioned in a recent post, I have recently switched to a Linux distribution as my operating system of choice. Many other users may be put off from making a similar switch because they are concerned that they may not be able to use the applications that they know from the Windows environment. While some applications are not available on Linux, there are a number of alternatives that offer all the most important features and have the benefit of not costing a penny.

• The default Ubuntu experience might be good but this makes it more accessible ; ) Adding and removing applications could be quite confusing for new Linux users, no matter what distro it is. Ubuntu Geek has a good blog entry with screenshots that show us how easy it is to install applications with Ailurus. I hope to read more stories about how universities have used Ailurus to their advantage. Especially on the caching aspect and the downloading from the fastest mirror bit.

Instructionals

K Desktop Environment

• Krita’s team have reached their target to raise Krita to the next level since they’ve raised €4,000.00 so far, which is €1,000.00 over their goal!. This donation will be used to hire Lukáš Tvrdý for three months to work for accelerating Krita’s performance, stability and usability.

• Thanks to our latest donor, Silvio Grosso, we’re at four thousand euros now on Pledgie: Help raise Krita to the next level — which together with the donations people have made into my bank account directly, means that, even after Paypal has taken its cut, Lukas will be able to work on Krita for another month in the summer!

• So I got to wondering how much overall our community has generously given the KDE project. I dont have all of /KDE checked out, only /koffice, which is worth a stonking $ 34,484,962.

• For the fun time we’ve had working on KPilot or whining about the pity state of device synchronization on Linux in general (still today it seems that there’s not really a rock solid solution available). I’d also like to thank Robert and Doug for their contributions and of course the people who started KPilot in the first place like Dan Pilone and Rainhold Kainhofer. We’ll have to see what the future brings. But with all those new powerful devices, which are able to access various groupware solutions I doubt if anyone wants to really invest in a computer <-> phone/handheld solution. The curtain falls for KPilot, good bye old friend, fare well!

• For the longest time the only worthwhile network manage (especially of the wireless kind) was the GNOME Network Manager. Once KDE hit release 4 their network manager KNetwork Manager was plagued with issues to the point where it was nearly unusable.

Distributions

• Despite Google’s move into the operating system (OS) space, the idea of a primarily cloud-centric OS is nothing revolutionary; the earliest examples date back to 1999. And although numerous other attempts at developing Web-centric OSesn none up to this point have truly broken into the mainstream. But some current offerings present welcome alternatives to mainstream operating systems, packing in useful features and making it easier to access your online content.

Reviews

• Mangaka Chu is unique enough that it doesn’t remotely resemble its parent distribution. It has many interesting software choices and seems dedicated to helping their target audience enjoy anime and manga on Linux.

• And then along comes Slitaz.

• Slitaz has already given me the proverbial “middle finger,” as some of my American friends say — being the only distro I know that I didn’t build myself that can run comfortably on less than 16Mb of memory. A day or two ago it did it again, popping up a graphical desktop with Xorg 7.4, which hasn’t worked for me ever.

New Releases

• More than one year after the release of version 1.9, the GNUstep developers have released their GNUstep LiveCD 2.0, which allows the platform-independent, object-oriented GNUstep OS to be tried without installing it. The system is available for 32 and 64-bit systems, as well as for PowerPCs and UltraSPARC. GNUstep 2.0 comes with Linux kernel version 2.6.31 and is based on the Debian distribution. The GUI is provided by the WindowMaker window manager, a design similar to that of NeXTstep.

• The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Oneh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions! Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.1 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC 9.04.1 (formerly known as Xbox Media Center), KDE 4.3.4, GNOME 2.28, and so forth.

Red Hat Family

• Open source software developer Red Hat announced this week that it will host an online forum on open source cloud computing forum on February 10, 2010.

• Acrosser is shipping a fanless 1U network appliance that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.x. The AR-R5100FL is a 19-inch rackmount system that incorporates an Intel EP80579 (“Tolapai”) SoC with Intel QuickAssist technology, along with six to ten gigabit Ethernet ports, and dual USB, serial, and SATA ports.

• There’s also Bob Young from Red Hat Linux – a legendary figure and company hero-worshipped by many in the computer industry. From Young’s accounts over sessions that totalled 10 hours, Martin describes in The Opposable Mind the obstacles and contradictions the former had faced.

• Young was realistic enough to accept that to be sustainable, a revenue stream must be created for Red Hat. He also realised that companies were willing to pay for goods and services, including software. However, they must be reassured the vendor company will be around in the years ahead.

• Young’s competitors were formidable – Microsoft, which wanted to control the server operating system market, and the different Linux distributions. Through integrative thinking, Young focused on getting Red Hat to be seen as the market leader. He decided on a move which astonished everyone – he encouraged companies and users to download Red Hat for free! However, they would have to pay for future services; like in upgrading the software.

• The free downloadings resulted in Red Hat being tabulated in industry statistics and records as the leader in server operating system. It brought prestige, credibility and trust among businesses, with many deciding to use Linux rather than Windows for their servers. Young’s unique decisions and solutions from the opposable factors propelled Red Hat into the big time, and he became a billionaire upon the company’s IPO.

FUDCon/Fedora

• To that end, while there is a place for trademark law in open source, it’s my opinion, that the value a brand, or project be it Fedora, Red Hat or any other is more about how they deal with their users and community, than how they deal with Trademark law (but it’s always good to have a lawyer on hand..just in case).

• Coming up to this event, I’d been struggling a bit with some mental and spiritual exhaustion. This event helped me get Fedora back into perspective and reminded me what a beautiful thing it is to be surrounded by wonderful, smart people — and how much we can accomplish when we bring our ideas together and compare them constructively to find the best way forward. Thank you to every single one of you who participated either on-site or remotely, for the gift of renewal.

• Although my experiences with Fedora over the years have been riddled with installation issues, humdrum looks, and a lack of tools and default software, I seem to be in the minority. What works really well for me, my work flow, and my hardware may not work that well for you – and vise versa. This is why a particular distro may receive a bad review from one writer and a glowing review from another. It all boils down to personal experience. I’m reminded of this every time I try to use Fedora.

Debian Family

• I went ahead and just did a quick screenshot walk through of installing Ubuntu 9.10, and some possible points of interest for anyone that may need help understanding the steps.

• Ubuntu 9.10 didn’t end up seeing integration of Plymouth as USplash and the new XSplash ended up being used. However, the Ubuntu development community and Canonical seemed to have changed their mind. Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is in fact Plymouth.

• For those looking to play with Plymouth on Ubuntu right away, it’s as easy as sudo apt-get install plymouth when running on the Ubuntu 10.04 development branch. Yesterday we installed Plymouth on an Ubuntu Lucid box and recorded the video below.

• I hope you are as excited about 10.04 as I am. I believe this could be the Ubuntu release that the public would have a hard time turning down as its desktop OS. Not only will it have a very solid foundation, the overlaying structure will be much more modern looking.

• Ubuntu One, the service from Canonical that shares, stores, and syncs files across the cloud with your other devices.

Devices/Embedded

• Timesys announced that its LinuxLink embedded Linux development framework supports NetLogic Microsystems’ MIPS32-based Alchemy Au1250 and Alchemy Au1300 system-on-chips (SoCs). The LinuxLink framework provides access to hundreds of open source Linux middleware packages, as well as automated development tools for processors used in mobile consumer electronics, says the company.

• HardKernel is shipping a developer-focused handheld game device that runs Android and offers source code, schematics, and a debug board. The $350 Odroid is based on a Cortex-A8 Samsung S5PC100 clocked to 833Mhz, and offers 10GB of flash, a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 720p video via HDMI, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, and accelerometers.

Phones

• Google has handed out a new mobile phone running its Android software to some employees, stirring another wave of speculation that the oft-rumored Google Phone is real.

Sub-notebooks

• So why did they call it JooJoo instead of CrunchPad? Recent disagreements between Arrington and the Fusion Garage team ended the CrunchPad project. Chandra Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage CEO, later announced that the CrunchPad would be released by the company as the JooJoo to avoid lawsuits.

• [...]

• The JooJoo is basically just a web-browsing machine. It runs on a custom-made Linux operating system with a sole purpose of running a browser that’s based on Webkit. The home screen is your window to different web sites/applications. The “internet is the application” so you can’t save files like images and documents to your physical storage device.

• Check the operating system. If you can find a netbook with linux, I recommend that one, since it’s cheaper, and then you can install whatever you want, without extra costs for windows.

• Novell and other members of the Linux community have worked very hard with Intel to ensure compatible Linux drivers were available before netbooks went into production. The result: Solid Linux options for every manufacturer, with some offering pre-loads of Novell SUSE or Ubuntu Remix for netbooks. In addition, Intel has released its own Moblin (Mobile Linux) for the netbook. And the ever-hyped Google Chrome OS, for which open source code is now available, is aimed at netbooks. Google envisions it as a Web-centric complement to another PC.

• Google’s new netbook-oriented operating system, Chrome OS, got more than its fair share of press when its source code was released (including a download from our very own Jorge Sierra.) But Google’s not the only major tech company developing a speedy, open-source operating system for netbooks – Intel’s been working on Moblin netbook OS since 2007.

Free Software/Open Source

• Nobody wants to be feel helpless, to have increased stress, or have their freedom taken away. I care about free software because I value not just my own time and independence but that of my friends, family and customers. If you feel the same, try a 100% free software operating system, try a replacement for your billing software, or communicate with your proprietary software vendor about why they don’t publish their software under a free software license. You have a choice.

• My use of the term “free software fanatic” really rubbed one of my readers the wrong way, and he responded with this, er, rather blunt reply…

• [...]

• Oops! I certainly never intended to insult anybody with my choice of words, so I apologized in the comments section. But, in a way, I’m very glad that this issue came up as I think it’s one worth exploring.

• Taking Schaeffer’s three tactics as our lead, here is a FOSS perspective on these protection mechanisms:

• Best practices implies community effort: discussing, sharing and collectively building understanding and techniques for managing systems and their software components. FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities develop, discuss and share these best practices in their project support and development forums. Debian’s package management system implements some of these best practices in the operating system itself thereby allowing users who do not participate in the development and support communities to realize the benefits of best practices without understanding or even knowing that they exist. This is one of the important benefits of policy- and package-based operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu.

• There was a time years ago when open source software in the enterprise often had to be just ‘good enough.’ Over time, use and broader adoption, open source software has now reached the point that it must often be ‘as good or better’ than proprietary alternatives, now typically getting equal consideration from customers and users.

• So settle in for the mid-term march to profitable $100 million open-source companies. At current growth rates, we should start to see IPO action as early as 2012, and perhaps sooner.

• Making the Italian South Tyrol Free Software Centre (FSC) part of the Digital Technologies Area in the innovation centre in the Italian city of Bolzano, has given it the strength to support public authorities as well as companies in the region, says Patrick Ohnewein, head of the centre.

• The FSC was made part of the Digital Technologies Area of the innovation park (TIS), a project from the trilingual province of Bolzano-Bozen, earlier this year. “It has given us a lot more resources. We are now much closer to the four strategic teams at the Digital Technologies Area, and that has raised our profile with all the organisations that contact the innovation centre.”

• Add-ons product manager Justin Scott (reluctantly) announced the news this morning at an add-on-happy conference in Mozilla’s home town of Mountain View, California. “We’ll probably be doing a marketplace pilot in 2010,” he said.

Sun

• Eben Moglen, the founder and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), will assure European Regulators today, that the open source license under which MySQL is distributed can protect the program from any proprietary threats that could emerge from the merger of Oracle and Sun Microsystems.

• As a whole, VirtualBox is a simple-looking application. On the main screen, as seen above, there’s a VM list to the left, and detailed information on the respective VM you’ve clicked on to the right. There’s nothing much complicated here, and if you were judging the application simply by this screen, you’d likely imagine it’s not too powerful, but what an understatement that would be.

Government

• The undersecretary of Poland’s Interior Ministry, Witold Drożdż on 2 December became the honorary patron of a project on ‘sound and transparent procurement tools’, an information campaign by the Polish Foundation on Open and Free Software (Fwioo).

• So, the answer to the question is, no. Using open source software in government, in private business or at home actually puts you at less risk.

• The Obama Administration is moving in the right direction, as are many other of the world’s governments, by transitioning away from proprietary software and using software that is cost-free and open source. Maybe once the trend is set, private businesses will follow the example and adopt open source software for their use as well.

• Now there’s some change I can believe in.

Openness

• In this version of the guide on MAKE I will link to the product page and if it’s sold in the Maker Shed there is an additional link to the Maker Shed if you’d like to support OSH and get a kit or project. For 2009, this guide became so large that it cannot fit in to one post on MAKE so it will be divided up in to sections, 18 of them:

Leftovers

• Methods: We performed a prospective experiment involving otolaryngology residents in Vancouver, Canada. The main outcome was the proportion of “heads” coin tosses achieved (out of 300 attempts) by each participant. Each of the participants attempted to flip the coin so as to achieve a heads result.

• Results: All participants achieved more heads than tails results, with 7 of the 13 participants having significantly more heads results (p ? 0.05). The highest proportion of heads achieved was 0.68 (95% confidence interval 0.62-0.73, p < 0.001).

• Interpretation: Certain people are able to successfully manipulate the toss of a coin. This throws into doubt thevalidity of using a coin toss to determine a chance result

• IT’S an experience few police commissioners will ever endure: being fingerprinted, swabbed for DNA, strip-searched and shut in a cell.

• For Jack Johnston, 40 years a cop and six months chief of Tasmania Police, the strip search was a final and unnecessary humiliation.

Finance

• Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of U.S. mortgage assets that AIG insured during the housing boom. That is roughly twice as much as Société Générale and Merrill Lynch, the banks with the biggest exposure to AIG after Goldman, according an analysis of ratings-firm reports and an internal AIG document that details several financial firms’ roles in the transactions.

• In Goldman’s biggest deal, it acted as a middleman between AIG and banks, taking on the risk of as much as $14 billion of mortgage-related investments. Then Goldman insured that risk with one trading partner—AIG, according to the Journal’s analysis and people familiar with the trades.

• The trades yielded Goldman less than $50 million in profits, which were mostly booked from 2004 to 2006, according to a person familiar with the matter. But they piled risks onto AIG’s books, which later came to haunt the insurer and Goldman. The trades also gave Goldman a unique window into AIG’s exposure to losses on securities linked to mortgages.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We’re glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy “improvements” have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.

• Members of the House of Lords recently voiced concerns over the UK government’s Digital Economy Bill, stating that the problems facing the entertainment industry are largely of their own creation. There was also criticism of companies who demand cash from file-sharers in the UK, and ideas were put forward to end their scheme.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• While some do seem upset about the issue, others are actually figuring out ways to deal with it, including offering their own vastly cheaper ebook versions quickly (and with no DRM), or even working out deals with “pirate” sites to share some of the ad revenue. The one publisher that the article focuses on, Sergei Parchomenko, says that they’re not losing money from pirate sites, but the responsibility is on him to come up with a workable business model. It’s nice to see someone realizing that they need to react to the market, rather than freak out about things.

• By and large, thinking of music as commerce, as strictly a means through which money is made, is what got the record industry into this mess in the first place. Long before the Internet and file-sharing became common scapegoats, the record industry’s growth was already based on the notion of a forever expanding market for music that never existed. Because music is such a definitive part of the human experience and passionately embraced the world over, it was supposed that quarter to quarter not only could record labels achieve exponential growth, but that from album to album an artist ought to be able to achieve the same results. But, as we now know, this mindset can only persist for so long, because music as commerce expands rather differently from music as culture.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayStormy Peters, HP open source strategist 08 (2004)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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