● 12.15.09

● Links 15/12/2009: Elive 1.9.52 Released, Nook Liberated

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The larger thought came naturally: how much of the market dominance of Windows over Linux is due to people who either cannot or do not want to use pliers, who are afraid that any attempt to alter their machine is doomed to failure?

• The Mavizen TTX02 Super Sport bike brings the latest in cutting edge technology. The wonder bike stands as the world’s first production of electric super sport bikes. In addition, they come built with a dash mounted computer, powered by Linux. The computer system also has an onboard server, a dedicated IP address, USB and Wi-Fi connectivity. Now, that’s a real wonder.

• For those of you who still cling to a fat desktop virtual machine solution and one-to-one ratio for user desktops, then you should check out KVM. KVM offers that fat desktop and high performance that you require for bandwidth-hungry desktop applications.

• It still wasn’t the year of the Linux desktop, but 2009 showed Linux increasing its presence in the everyday electronics marketplace. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin coined it “Year of the Linux everything else.” From ATMs to netbooks and mobile phones, the strength of Linux has been recognized by device manufacturers and developers and is on the rise. Cloud computing was a hot topic in 2009 and Linux plays a strong role making the cloud function.

Desktop

• Fundamentally then, I disagree with the author that the advent of Chrome OS will be a good thing. I disagree that a single desktop environment for GNU/Linux would necessarily better serve the needs of it’s users or developers. And furthermore I disagree that it’s reasonable to measure the success of KDE and Gnome by whether they are worthy of being included as part of Chrome OS.

• Declaring these wildly creative and successful projects “dead” as a result of this way of thinking is to miss the point of their existence. They provide freedom and choice to computer users throughout the world. Being a key component of a new technology which seeks to dominate, control and spy on millions of users would not serve the ends of these projects, and would be no kind of victory.

• Ubuntu 9.10 — Free, Canonical, www.ubuntu.com. Got a Windows user on your list who’s been curious about trying the Linux operating system? Download the latest version of Ubuntu — code-named Karmic Koala ­— and burn it to a bootable CD. It can run right off the CD, where your recipient can try out its secure Windows-like desktop and sample its free software. When done, just remove the CD and reboot the computer, and the user will be back to Windows again. This makes a great stocking stuffer, but if you’re the family tech support, be prepared for the possibility that you’ll be asked to permanently install it. It’s that good.

Server

• Therefore they had to search for an alternative, and once they learned about GPGPU computing the researchers build a 4000EUR desktop supercomputer with four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 dual-GPU graphics cards. The results were stunning, for this niche application the eight NVIDIA GPUs outperformed the university’s three-year old 256-node supercomputer with AMD Opteron 250 2.4GHz processors. Besides the higher performance, other major advantages include the very low cost (4000EUR for FASTRA vs 3.5 million euro for the real supercomputer) and much lower power consumption.

Google

• Good news for Google Chrome users: the latest version of the browser supports extensions, so you can extend its default functionality by installing extensions from the official extension repository. While the repository offers only a few hundred extensions (compared to several thousand add-ons available on Firefox), it does feature a few neat modules that can make your browsing more productive.

Kernel Space

• One of the advantages we Linux geeks like to claim over competing operating systems is the flexibility of the system. We’re not talking about changing your screen saver–we’re talking the guts of the operating system itself.

Graphics Stack

• In the mailing list discussion that followed, it looked like Linus’ request wouldn’t be immediately acted upon due to legal issues with Nouveau surrounding some unknown microcode/firmware that is a critical part of the initialization process for newer graphics cards. However, this microcode ended up being pulled out of the driver itself and now relies upon it being loaded as firmware, which ended up in a Nouveau pull request just a day later. Now NVIDIA customers of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel and later can benefit from the mainline DRM with kernel mode-setting and when using the yet-to-be-released xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver and eventually its Gallium3D driver for providing 3D support.

• The most recent module for Gallium3D is one written by Marek Olšák that provides a blitter.

• Once the core blitter support is merged into Gallium3D, Marek has already implementing patches for the ATI r300g driver that are able to take advantage of this blitter work.

Applications

• TimeVault is alive! Ok, so maybe it was never really dead. But I’ve found some time to work it and after reworking most of the internals I’ve finally gotten it to back up again.

• Overall, Moovida is a good choice for users looking for visual polish and eclectic on-line content or who want to browse locally-stored media collections — and who don’t mind glitches or want to customize the look, feel or performance of the software. The design of the user interface is polished, and makes the stand-alone media apps in most Linux distros look primitive. The “works out of the box” quotient was moderate. What worked, like creating libraries of locally-stored media and some of the internet content options, worked well. The areas that didn’t work, like accessing share drives, often left few or cryptic clues as to why they weren’t working. The program is promising, but needs more work before it’s up to the standards of the best of breed in other OS’s.

Instructionals

• Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability scanning tool. It is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems. Tanable Network Security announced the release of Nessus 4.2.0 last month. Nessus is now using a web based interface to manage scans and their results. Scan results and policies are now stored on the server. Additionally you can now compare the current scan with „older“ scans.

Games

• We first shared that Aquaria was being ported to Linux back in August and then Ryan confirmed he was working on it, and now its close to completion. Ryan Gordon is hoping the Linux client will be fully set by mid-January. The native Linux version of Aquaria can be downloaded from right here with no need to mess around with any registration steps or other processes. The announcement was made at Icculus.org.

Distributions

• Puppy Linux is something different, a tiny version of Linux that can be stored on a USB memory drive, will run in memory, and can be used for working on the move.

• It’s a good looking desktop and one of the best and most stable implementations of KDE 4.x from what we’ve been able to see so far.

New Releases

• On December 13, the Elive team announced yet another (unstable) release of their Elive Live CD Linux distribution, now at version 1.9.52. Being powered by Debian, the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment and Linux kernel 2.6.30, the new development version of Elive brings many improvements and bug fixes in various areas. This release also features a new set of E17 modules, improved support for Bluetooth devices and a new MSN instant messenger.

Red Hat Family

• Open source vendor Red Hat (RHT) is offering its EMEA partners Virtualisation Specialist status, with several VARs, including Kelway in the UK, already becoming virtualisation domain experts.

• Fedora is not one of them. Fedora 12 is their best release to date. It is fast, attractive and stable (unlike Fedora 11). I am muddling along as any one would who is not familiar with it would be. I still have not got compositing working and can’t access all of my drives, but learning is half the fun. So, if you are looking for a new experience and are not averse to a challenge, give Fedora 12 a try. It isn’t K/Ubuntu, but then again it does not pretend to be. Fedora follows no footsteps. The same cannot be said for many others.

Debian Family

• The other day I had to help my wife with her work laptop. It was really weird working in a Windows environment. It felt very foreign, and I had to think really hard to find the right menus. It felt clunky and slow. I guess intuitiveness is somewhat based on familiarity. If I can’t find a menu where I expect it to be, then it isn’t very intuitive.

• So why do I use Ubuntu, because it’s better, and that’s that!

• Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 was released late last week and although very little cosmetically has changed, we’ve pointed out the obvious changes below.

Devices/Embedded

• IGEL Technology, the world’s third largest thin client vendor (2009 by revenue, IDC), today introduced its new Linux Universal Desktop firmware adding support for new hardware, additional user customization options, and enhanced multimedia and virtualization functionality to its wide range of Linux-based thin clients.

Nook

• Before you tut, toss your head and mutter ’so what?’ like some petulant teenager, think about the uses. The Nook is now a computer running a full Android operating system, with a built-in, free cellular connection to the internet. It also has a battery that lasts days, not hours. Now are you getting excited? This could turn into the Roomba of e-readers, only it won’t suck.

• As with any other Linux-based device, it didn’t take very long for the Barnes & Noble nook ebook reader to be rooted by some clever users. In fact it’s not much of a surprise that the people behind something called NookDevs.com were able to gain access to the device’s administrative controls.

• Now that some pre-ordered Nook e-readers have arrived in customers’ hands, users have begun posting raves and rants, as well as some interesting hacks.

• Nookdevs.com has even posted step-by-step directions for “rooting” the Nook, or gaining full system access.

Nokia

• Also, the N900 runs on Nokia’s Linux-based Maemo platform – their replacement for Symbian on their high-end devices. Maemo offers great customization options and multitasking abilities. But its far from perfect. There are issues on its user interface, and its app store that still hasn’t gone online won’t attract anyone right away.

• Immediately, I can feel and see that the Nokia N900 is a descendant of the N800 and N810, and at the same time it shares so much with the N97 that you can really tell that this new model represent a passing of the torch for Nokia. It will be interesting to see how Maemo 5 evolves from here — but so far, I like what I see, generally speaking.

• At this point, all things being equal with carrier support and productivity needs, it would be very hard not to choose the N900 over the N97. It’s a good device, and definitely one for those who like to be on the bleeding edge of mobile technology.

• For those who have been under an iPhone-shaped rock for the past few months, the Nokia N900 is an uber-powerful handset which uses the Maemo 5 operating system, based on Linux. This means it won’t melt when you want to do multi-tasking.

• Also on board is a high-res screen, 3.5-inch screen and although it’s resistive we have tried it and it works like a dream.

• Couple this with the fact that it will be among the first devices to have Firefox mobile and what you have is a device that looks ready to take on the Google and Apple’s of this world.

• The Nokia N900 is officially coming soon on the Vodafone website, with a release date of January.

Free Software/Open Source

• Back in November of 2008, we covered a project called StoryTlr, which put an interesting spin on the traditional lifestreaming concept. Instead of simply listing all of your updates from various networks and sources, StoryTlr lets you repackage that content so that it tells a story.

• [...]

• The first version of StoryTlr is now available from a Google Code repository, with installation instructions and answers to frequently asked questions.

• The leading IIMs, still smarting under the recent fiasco over the online CAT debut, are creating their own firewall against similar disasters in future. After an elaborate post-mortem of the recent disaster, many IIM officials are exploring the idea of using free and open source software (Foss), rather than going in for proprietary software, to prevent online common admission test disasters in future.

• “Online exams can be easily conducted using Foss as it can not only reduce costs by over 50%, but it is also safe against virus and malware attacks,” said one of the IIM officials. Infact, US-based Prometric — which bagged the high-profile $40-million contract to organise the online CAT using proprietary software like Microsoft Windows, along with NIIT — has pinned the main reason for this year’s disaster on the virus attacks.

• Mind maps have become a pretty mainstream way to brainstorm. Children as young as grade one are being taught how to create mind maps on paper as a brainstorming technique. If you’ve been interested in using mind mapping, but have been turned off by the surprisingly high cost of the commercial mind mapping products, you might want to check out XMind.

• JS: Not unlike the PC and Server software market, Open Source solutions are definitely affecting the IP-PBX telephony market space. And, more to the point, Open Source software licensing models definitely challenge certain fundamental business model assumptions as compared to the traditional IP-PBX systems. These dynamics are really important to understand.

• Over the last few years, Open Source solutions in the various flavors combined have made significant inroads into the IP-PBX space. In fact, John Malone of Eastern Management Group estimated that at the end of 2008, Open Source IP-PBX’s represented 18 percent of the total market space putting it into the number one market position. John is predicting this growth will continue to be experienced for at least a few more years.

• Linux PR expert Kim Terca gets credit for these ideas:

• 1. Join the Linux Foundation. There’s a new buy one, get one promotion on their site that can give you and a student discounts on books and other benefits for the cost of a single Cirque du Soleil ticket. 2. Ubuntu swag makes a great stocking stuffer, and if a black friend asks what it means you have a conversation starter. 3. Make a donation to the open source project of your choice. There are thousands at Sourceforge. Or go the “Hershey bars for kids in Beverly Hills” route and give it to Codeplex. (That’s a joke. Codeplex isn’t rich. But maybe Sam Ramji would like a Hershey bar.) 4. Support a developer’s travels. The Linux Foundation has an app for that.

• The Open Source movement has always been present. Whether proprietary software seems to be gaining ground or not, open source has always been a very enticing alternative. The problem has been, how do people know whether an open source alternative exists or not? Here’s two websites that hope to change that.

• If a user is sick and tired of some of the flaws of, say, Internet Explorer and they want to turn to an Open Source solution, the easy goto browser for surfing is FireFox hands down. In fact, FireFox does have what very few open source solutions have – a household name that most know about. Chances are, someone who knows someone who knows someone at the very least either knows or uses the famed browser. What about alternatives to, say, AutoCAD or Adobe Illustrator? That might be a bit more difficult to find.

• Need something unique for the open source Linux-loving GNU-spouting Free Software Foundation member in your life? ThinkGeek has the answer in the form of commemorative open source challenge coins. They will contribute to the open source cause and might even get you a free drink.

Events/Shows

• The call for papers to the 8th annual So Cal Linux Expo (SCALE 8x) has been extended to Dec. 24. Scheduled to be held at the Westin LAX on Feb. 19-21, the Linux event offers presentations covering topics including KDE4, GPL enforcement, Featherweight Linux, and Moblin.

• The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Beta 1, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 1, Sabayon Linux 5.1 and Elive 1.9.52. In other news: Google releases the Beta version of the amazing Chrome 4.0 web browser for Linux users; Mozilla releases the final version of the improved Thunderbird 3.0 mail and RSS client. This week’s video clip shows an amazingly well done commercial of the Sabayon 5 Linux-based operating system. The weekly ends with the latest Linux distributions released and updated last week, and the development releases.

Mozilla

• It tuns out Thunderbird 3, the latest version of the open source e-mail program (and, full disclosure, the program I use) contains an extension called TrustedBird which was originally contributed by the French military.

• (Picture from the Mozilla Foundation.)

• The software was quietly released last week. The Trusted Bird project page is here. It was originally called Milimail.

Databases

• French ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Nexedi made a public bid Monday to take over stewardship of the open-source MySQL database from Sun Microsystems, offering a symbolic €1 in return.

• Oracle offered the EU’s antitrust regulator a set of new terms over the weekend intended to curry favour for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. But sources close to the deal say Oracle’s “public remedies” are unlikely to satisfy the EU’s original objections to the deal.

• When the EU was considering stricter a patent regime in 2004, demonstrators marched around Brussels in yellow “No Software Patents” T-shirts. In 2005, some 200 programmers descended on the European Parliament with signs demanding the right to freely exchange computer code, beating back a proposed software patent law pushed by Microsoft Corp. and other proprietary software firms.

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• The mighty GNU tattoo image is from Rodolfo Borges of Brazil. The wildebeest photo is Schuyler Shepherd’s (and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.). Both of them will receive an FSF t-shirt for their contribution.

Releases

• Inkosi LIMS 2.2 is available for download on the General Public Service (GPL).

• The livetecs.com development team today announced the immediate available version 3.0.5 of open source of time tracking software.

Openness

• The data and tools housed on the free, editable and evolving wiki-platform will be used by government officials, the private sector, project developers, the international community, and others to help deploy clean energy technologies across the country and around the world.

• Ginger coons writes in about the Open Colour Standard, “an effort to create a new colour standard to help free/open source graphics programs bridge the gap between screen and print.”

• Open-source textbook firm Flat World Knowledge has raised an additional $2.5 million in funding. The company said back in March that it had raised $8 million in a first round of funding—but a spokesman says that round was expanded because of “momentum” in its business. The startup says that this fall more than 40,000 college students at 400 colleges used its textbooks, which it makes available for free online and are registered under a Creative Commons open license, up from 1,000 students at 30 colleges last spring. The additional funding comes as there appears to be a growing movement among students and colleges to find alternatives to purchasing high-priced textbooks. Rental textbook firms Chegg and BookRenter have both raised their own rounds in recent months.

• The free form aspects of the crowdsourcing effort attracts a consumer crowd. Product groups at Dell find Ideastorm useful. The Linux community is especially vocal on IdeaStorm and Dell now offers Ubuntu on Dell machines based on feedback from the Linux community.

Standards/Consortia

• Although most major ODF editors now write out new documents in ODF 1.1 format by default, they all are able to read and process ODF 1.0 documents as well. So they are all “consumers” of ODF 1.0 and conform to the ODF 1.0 standard. This occurs at the same time they are also conforming ODF 1.1 “producers”. So it is absolutely false to say that there are no ODF 1.0 implementations today. There are many, including OpenOffice, Symphony, Google Docs, KOffice, even Microsoft Office. The are all ODF 1.0 consumers.

Leftovers

• The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

• The US Supreme Court said Monday it will decide whether government employers can snoop on their workers’ personal text messages if they’re sent from department-issued devices.

• A lawsuit filed against Heartland Payment Systems over what is believed to be the biggest data breach in U.S. history has been dismissed.

• Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mail messages from 94 days in the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for more potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. The groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, said they were settling the lawsuits they filed in 2007.

• But under Mr. Murdoch’s leadership, the newspaper is no longer anchored by those deep dives into the boardrooms of American business with quaint stippled portraits, opting instead for a much broader template of breaking general interest news articles with a particular interest in politics and big splashy photos. Glenn R. Simpson, who left the newspaper back in March, is not a fan of the newsier, less analytical Journal.

Environment

• The climate change skeptics may be a lonely lot in Copenhagen, but no one disputes that they have had an effect, however hard to quantify. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, recently cautioned against the public being distracted by the “anti-science, flat-earth climate skeptics” while Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, derided them as being the “comfortable bedfellows of the global conspiracy theorists.”

• While very few of the skeptics have any scientific credentials in climate sciences, that doesn’t prevent them gaining significant coverage in pockets of the mainstream media? Why is this the case?

• There are thousands of business lobbyists at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, but the biggest group once again appears to be from the Angry Mermaid candidate, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA).

• IETA has 486 people in Copenhagen, including chief executive Henry Derwent and representatives from IETA member companies such as Gazprom, EON, CDC and another Angry Mermaid candidate Shell.

• And then it was over. I was not satisfied. Where is the plan to leverage this people power? What are we going to actually DO to stop coal burning by 2030 or lose Copenhagen to 25 feet of sea level rise by 2100? Despite the fire in the crowd, there wasn’t enough ignition on the stage to start any real fireworks.

Finance

• Terra Firma, the British private equity firm, sued Citigroup in a New York State court on Friday, accusing the bank of fraud in its handling of the 2007 sale of music publisher EMI.

• Having complained about “fat cat bankers” taking big bonuses, Obama said he also told the executives he had no intention of allowing lobbyists for the institutions to thwart legislation on financial reforms.

• But fog and bad weather kept some of the biggest names — Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup — on airport tarmacs and away from Washington. White House officials compensated by patching the trio into the meeting via teleconference.

• Also not present was Vikram S. Pandit, chief executive of Citigroup — who was busy negotiating a deal, reached early Monday morning, for Citigroup to exit the government’s bailout program, after persuading regulators that it was sound enough to stand on its own.

• Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons missed the 11:10 a.m. meeting at the White House this morning due to flight delays due to fog. The irony of the absence is the fact that these executives decided to fly commercial because they wanted to portray the image that they were “in touch” with everyday Americans. Had they taken a private flight they would have made the early afternoon meeting.

• The Wall Street Journal has put forward an article that adds color to the general view I have always held about securitization, risk-shedding, and what I allege amounts to organized, systemic fraud by our “big banks.”

• While they focused on Goldman Sachs, it is a serious error to maintain focus there as a “universal” or “sole” villain. Quite to the contrary – the entire financial system became one gigantic fraud machine during the last 20 and especially the last 10 years.

• This is nothing but a ‘PR move’: The press is playing this up as if Goldman is “curbing or cutting pay,” says Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s doing no such thing.” Giving top executives stock they can’t immediately sell is supposed to mean they won’t “be as tempted to blow up the world economy again in search of a quick buck,” but the bottom line is that their bonuses will probably get bigger.

• A pension fund said on Monday that it was suing Goldman Sachs, arguing that the firm’s planned compensation payouts this year are excessive and improper. It estimated that Goldman’s total payouts would exceed of $22 billion in 2009 and are based on the government’s bailout of the financial industry.

• Goldman is accused in the lawsuit of “blindly” rewarding executives “for corporate performance that has absolutely nothing to do with the skill of the company’s employees.” The lawsuit states that Goldman is estimated to issue payouts in excess of $22 billion.

• This is almost like a a circle jerk game of hot potato, each charging fees along the way to dump the thing before they get burned.

• The Federal Reserve and Treasury by May 2009 had increased the potential financial support to AIG, with the support of an investment of as much as $70 billion, a $60 billion credit line and $52.5 billion to buy mortgage-based assets owned or guaranteed by AIG, increasing the total amount available to as much as $182.5 billion.

• The paper says Goldman underwrote $23 billion of the $80 billion in CDOs that nearly toppled AIG.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• The city of Vancouver has ordered the removal of a mural hanging outside a Downtown Eastside gallery depicting the Olympic rings as four sad faces and one smiley face.

• The gallery says in 10 years, it has never before been asked to remove any work.

• The city issued the order under its graffiti bylaw, but it comes in the wake of a debate over a controversial city sign bylaw that opponents feared would allow officials to stifle anti-Olympic expression.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• We’ve already discussed the research on the UK music industry that shows both that live revenue is more than making up the decline in recorded revenue and that musicians themselves are making more revenue than ever before. Some people have suggested that this is a UK-only phenomenon, but a worldwide study found the same thing as well. And, now it looks like the same is being found in Sweden as well — home of The Pirate Bay, which we keep being told is destroying the industry. Swedish indie record label owner Martin sends in the news on data from the Swedish music industry, which looks quite similar to the UK data. First, it shows that while there was a tiny dip in overall revenue, it’s back up to being close to it’s high, mostly because of a big growth in live music…

• Independent artists who sold their music through imeem’s Snocap music storefronts on MySpace and other sites won’t be paid what’s owed even after MySpace Music’s acquisition of some — but not all — of imeem, Wired.com has learned.

• Hollywood’s top lobbyist, MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman, also praised the success of a six-day Yuletide sting against counterfeit DVDs and CDs called “Operation Holiday Hoax.”

• This is, in many ways, related to the concept that rather than finding news, for more and more people, the news finds them. Committing to a single publication, or a small group of publications does feel limiting. Now, some people will obviously disagree, but the more familiar you become with reading multiple sources on the web, the less and less it feels sensible to pay for a limited subset of them. And, even if you don’t find that to be true for yourself, the fact is that more and more people do feel that way — and for anyone trying to build a business model based on getting subscribers, they may find that to be quite difficult for this very reason. It’s asking for commitment to a single source in an age where sources are abundant.

• Yes, Apple. The company that at one point claimed DRM was bad and should be ditched, and convinced the record labels to ditch DRM. Yet, as we’ve noted in the past, outside of music, Apple is still a huge DRM supporter.

• Blu-ray’s “managed copy” feature has been a long time coming, but studios are now being asked to support it on their discs even without test hardware. One industry insider describes the process to Ars. So does it work? We won’t know until some time in 2010!

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