● 01.11.10

● Links 11/1/2010: Amarok 2.2.2 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has never been a favorite company among Linux fans, and that feeling was not improved by the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) ExpertZone training scandal that erupted last September. A whole new crop of reasons to hurl insults at the chain came up in recent weeks, however, following news of one blogger’s experience.

• The TechCrunch story above also points out a very notable statistic: it reported that there are more than 10,000 Android applications available. With, the story added, more likely on the way given the expected popularity of Google’s Nexus One phone, which had pretty much stolen the show even before CES started.

• Meanwhile, Intel announced its AppUp center, a new application store for Moblin- and Windows 7-based applications: the fruits of Intel’s Atom Developer SDK program.

• I’m happy to announce that the nominees have been selected and the polls for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards are now open. Congratulations to everyone that was nominated.

• 2: Open source helps newspapers salvage their future Let’s face it, newspapers (and magazines) are in serious jeopardy of going the way of the Dodo. Most newspapers can’t handle economic downturns and continue to grow. So this headline would be sure to please. How? Newspapers shift their websites to LAMP servers and their desktops to a Linux-based operating system. After that would come a deluge of print servers and more. It would be a win-win situation. Not only would open source gain a boost, but newspapers would live to write another headline.

• This means that, depending on your chosen binary distribution, the available packages may not be optimised for your particular hardware architecture and individual packages may have dependencies which you do not want nor will you use. The end result is a Linux distribution which does not run optimally for your particular situation.

• Linux Basement Live:

• WARNING: This episode has some language not appropriate for the kidlings or sensitive ears.

• Chad is joined by Threethirty, Lord_d, Pegwole, Claudio

Desktop

• I really think the future is mobile and Microsoft understands that well and is positioned to support that with mobile devices. Ubuntu and Linux in general is mobile oriented too. Motorola, Google and a host of other vendors are or have developed mobile devices using Linux and Apple Mac while cool is really a desktop OS and although the OS is inexpensive at $29 a copy it is very proprietary after that point. Their real mistake in my opinion is not opening up their platform like Microsoft did with Windows, but that’s because they are desktop or laptop oriented.

Kernel Space

• While the Nouveau driver is now beginning to be trimmed down a bit as non-KMS support is being dropped, this free software NVIDIA driver will be gaining some new code in the form of power management support. Power management for NVIDIA hardware in the Nouveau driver stack is still early on, but a patch is being prepared and a discussion has been initiated how to handle the power management controls for this driver. A discussion surrounding power management controls has also opened up to the larger Linux GPU driver development community at large.

Applications

• As Kaseya gears up to launch the Kaseya 2 managed services framework in late January 2010, the company also is preparing Kaseya Mobile — a suite of applications for smart phones. After that, watch for Kaseya to introduce remote management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux, and other Linux distributions. Here are the details.

Instructionals

Games

• Hacker Evolution: Untold which is available for MacOS and Windows for quite some time now goes Beta on GNU/Linux and beta testers are needed !

K Desktop Environment

• A Happy New Year to all of you! We hope you all had a nice holiday season, ate yummy meals and enjoyed some quality time with your family and friends. While doing exactly the same as everybody, the Amarok developers did also sneak out in the middle of the night to sit at their computers and add a bugfix here, a usability improvement there, and polish all around to make sure you will truly enjoy our new release: Amarok 2.2.2!

• now that the KDE Software Compilation 4.4 is branched, it’s time to think about the next iteration. Next to bug fixing that is.

GNOME Desktop

• Most of you probably know “Fences”, a program that organizes your cluttered desktop by letting you create and put boxes called “Fences” on your desktop and then you can create multiple fences and put your icons in them. For more info on Fences check out Jacob’s post on Fences. Now i really liked fences when i was using windows once upon a time and i was a little disappointed when i couldn’t find any Linux alternative to Fences BUT, thanks a youtuber named “gotbletu“, this problem has been solved because he found a screenlet called “Folder view” and that’s the same thing as Fences but for Linux. Keep in mind that Fences is still way better than Folder view but i not saying that Folder view is horrible either, as a matter a fact it’s pretty good. Lets begin

• Since this is a screenlet you need to install a program called screenlets first which is a widget program, so just get that from Ubuntu software center.

• The plasma desktop effect of KDE is mouth-watering. It not only looks beautiful, but also has a good amount of usability. But, the interface is available(by default) only on the KDE desktop environment.

Distributions

• Overall, it appears that openSolaris is suitable for someone who’s doing the basics on a UNIX or UNIX-like system. You’ve got Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice.org. But there is the weird file structure and the small repository. So I feel that it’s perhaps worth checking out, but I can’t really recommend it above Linux or even BSD. I’d say, if you need it for work (and a lot of businesses use Solaris), definitely get openSolaris so you can get familiar with the platform. Otherwise, stick to Linux or BSD and you’ll have a lot more support for a wider array of programs and standard POSIX directories.

• The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

• I wanted to find out and it’s not the first time I’ve attempted something like this. Starting Monday 11th at midday (London time), I’ll be using Ubuntu 9.10 for an entire 48 hours, and will only be able to use open-source applications.

• It’s been a month since I have installed Arch Linux on my workstation and I thought I would talk about this Linux distribution a bit. Arch Linux is pretty much all the rage these days in the world of Linux distributions. If we are to believe the famous Distrowatch stats that were recently published and compared with the data of 2008, Arch Linux is the fastest growing Linux distribution these days. It gained quite many users, probably at the expense of distributions like Gentoo, yet it is not usually considered to be an “user-friendly” distribution. I will briefly outline what have been, and what is, my experience with Arch, and I believe I am going to stick with this particular flavor for a very long time.

• During my time with SliTaz, I had the chance to exchange e-mails with one of the developers, Christophe Lincoln, and he had some interesting things to say about the project. He mentioned that SliTaz is already entering freeze and the development team will be doing testing and fixing bugs from now through to their next release in March. He also mentioned that SliTaz is being used in some organizations and the project is getting a lot of useful feedback. From what I’ve seen so far, I think their next version will be well worth trying out. It’s already stable and I’ve encountered no show-stopping issues.

New Releases

• The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.2pre2, the second technical preview of the upcoming 1.2 stable release.

• Release candidate of Pardus 2009.1 is ready ! Like always you can download this release from Pardus FTP servers…

Debian Family

• I received an interesting email from Debian developer Raphael Hertzog who has happily allowed me to blog about the ideas we were talking about. His email centers around the funding of infrastructure projects in the Debian distribution and ways to think about funding that avoid socio-political problems.

• PPA is means Personal Package Archive. It provides a way to easily install application which can not be found in the Ubuntu official repository on Ubuntu ( since the Ubuntu official repo takes a conservative approach to updates and number of applications it includes in its official repository with focus on stability over latest and greatest packages.) PPA is one of the coolest thing about Ubuntu. It creates an avenue for developers, packagers and even users to create their own personal repositories and include their packages which can easily be added and installed on Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.0 has now been released – just over a week after the launch of the online user-interactive database – UTCOM – that the application draws its data from.

• As I was wandering past Marvell’s exhibit at CES this weekend, I spotted an incredibly tiny PC called the EBOX connected to a big screen LCD. The display showed that the computer was running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and that it could handle 1080p HD video playback.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Despite the fact that the ELSE phone and OS were both at pre-production status, and clearly need work before any sort of launch, the unique ELSE Intuition UI was intuitive and innovative enough to hold our attention. Both the phone and the UI were designed with one-handed operation in mind. As you can see from our hands-on video (below), the UI is tailored to be used with your right-thumb, and your right-thumb only. Navigation buttons line the right side of the device as well, putting them within easy reach of your largest digit.

Android

• We’ve had the battle of the apps and now it’s the battle of the handset. But after all the hype, it has not been the greatest start for Google and the Nexus One phone – maybe we should be looking forward to the Nexus Two and all that might bring with it?

• Hewlett Packard is working on numerous tablet devices that will come in a variety of sizes, shapes and operating systems, including Windows 7, Google’s Android, and possibly the open-source operating system Linux.

• The company has so many different tablet-related projects in the works that a variety of coming publishing partners were surprised to see a Windows 7 version of the Hewlett-Packard slate announced at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show.

Sub-notebooks

• Thursday evening I broke my install on my Eee PC 1000HE in such a way that I needed to recover the data from my /home partition and reinstall the OS. I thought that since I’m waiting for EB4 I may as well just install another distribution and play.

• [...]

• Bottom line: This release is what Karmic could have and should have been.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of the greatest wonders of technology is how it’s made the world a small place. If you want a surefire way to cut traveling costs in your business, then you definitely need to take a look at Dimdim.

• Digium continues to build stronger partnerships in the unified communications market. The latest evidence: From Polycom to Skype, a long list of companies will evangelize Digium’s open source IP PBX during the Asterisk World conference (January 20-22, Miami Beach, Fla.). And yes, Digium will dial up channel partners during the event. Here’s the scoop.

Licensing

• The FreeType library is released under a dual license: you can choose either the FTL (FreeType License) or the GPL, version 2. That means that a software stack that uses FreeType has to be license-compatible with one or the other (or both). In cases where the rest of the software stack also allows choices, this can be slightly complex. You end up with a combinatorial explosion of licenses — in theory, if not in practice.

• But why is a choice necessary, anyway?

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• So there we are. With the multiyear HD DVD Blu-ray battle still a recent memory, we have a new standards face off in video, just as we do in eBooks, and just as it looks like we may in on-line print, where a new consortium led by the News Corporation and others is launching a standards-based “digital newsstand.” All of these devices, of course, are targeted at you and I, and each has the potential to not only extend the woes of the music/video/print vendors behind these standards battles, but to waste your money and mine as well.

• Does that strike you as a shame? Me to.

• So if you’ve still got a Betamax in the back of your closet, you might want to finally throw it out. After all, you may be needing the storage space soon for yet another wave of consumer electronic equipment that has been rendered obsolete by a needless standards war.

Leftovers

• This is embarrassing, but it’s 2010 and I still have an AOL e-mail address. I wonder if I hold some kind of record. I opened my AOL account in 1997. My first e-mail address was a combination of a nickname and the year I was born. Back then everyone had goofy screen names like Tarheels80 and SwimFan, so mine seemed appropriate. But as I started using e-mail more and more for freelance work, it seemed wrong. In 1998 I changed to a more respectable use of my initials and last name, still with AOL. It’s the e-mail address I have today.

• Arthur Firstenberg is suing his neighbour for $530,000 for refusing to switch off her iPhone, claiming that the electromagnetic fields generated are destroying his health.

Security

• The Central Intelligence Agency should be asking some painful questions this week about its performance: How could a suicide bomber have flown to Detroit despite a strong warning to a CIA station that he might be a terrorist? How could a Jordanian double agent have penetrated a CIA base in Afghanistan and killed seven agency employees?

• Bruce Schneier is holding a TSA logo-redesign contest, inspired by Patrick “Ask the Pilot” Smith’s suggestion, “a revised eagle, its talons clutching a box cutter and a toothpaste tube. It says ‘Transportation Security Administration’ around the top. Below are the three simple words of the TSA mission statement: ‘Tedium, Weakness, Farce’”.

Environment

• An unprecedented extreme in the northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation has driven a strong direct connecting current between the Gulf Stream and the West Greenland current. The unprecedented negativity of the “Arctic Oscillation” and the strong connection of the Gulf Stream with the Greenland current are exceptional events. More exceptional weather events are predicted with anthropogenic climate change, but this could be a natural variation of weather and currents.

Finance

• Titled “Support grows for tackling nation’s debt,” the article discusses a proposal to create a government commission to examine America’s growing debt. The new commission, according to the article, would be charged with exploring “how to rein in skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,” but the article failed to mention other significant sources of government spending, like the $663 billion military budget.

• [...]

• We want to give a hat tip to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) for outing the Fiscal Times as a propaganda outlet masquerading as a news service that was created and funded by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, a former member of President Nixon’s administration who has long used his wealth to promote cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other government entitlement programs. The Post initially failed to reveal to readers the origins and funding of the Fiscal Times, and only did so six days later, in a small correction run on January 5. That “correction,” however, reiterated the assertion that the Fiscal Times is “independent” and merely noted that the story should have disclosed that one of the sources quoted in the story was funded by the same funder as the writers of the story.

• All eyes are on Wall Street this week as the big banks get ready to report their earnings and bonuses. Rebounding banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the pre-crisis boom years.

• During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — together set aside about $90 billion for compensation.

• What’s with the apologies? Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein caught his fellow titans by surprise in November, admitting that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” That came less than two weeks after he infuriated pretty much everyone else by declaring that Goldman was “doing God’s work.”

• He was not the only banker indulging in the contrition thing. (In March, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, who presided over the bungled acquisition of Merrill Lynch, issued his own apology and was still pushed out.) Now the former Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, who is not even a banker, has plunged into the zeitgeist.

• Mr. Levin issued a belated — by a decade — mea culpa for buying AOL and urged others to follow his lead. “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently,” Mr. Levin said. “I guess it’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: You know what, I’m solely responsible for it.”

• Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules requiring public companies to disclose information about their board leadership structure, their risk oversight processes and certain information about compensation structure and how it relates to the company’s risks. The goal, according to the SEC, is to provide additional transparency regarding what goes on in the boardroom so that investors can make more informed decisions.

• The former human resources chief at Brocade was sentenced Wednesday to spend two months in prison and pay a fine of $1.25 million for her part in a stock options backdating scandal that dates to the early part of last decade.

Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

• The first controversy involves the portrayal of Michele Obama in a line of lesser celebrities — Oprah Winfrey, Tyra Banks, and Carrie Underwood — with the headline, “Fur-free and Fabulous.” Michele Obama did not appear physically in the line to be photographed (she was photo-shopped into the lineup), but the ad is based on the truthful statement that not only in the image, but also more generally, she does not wear furs. Although public opinion seems to vary about whether it is ethical or tasteful for PETA to use her image without her consent, nobody seems to dispute that the First Amendment would protect PETA’s right to use the photo without her consent, even though it effectively aligns her with PETA’s policy positions and, indeed, with PETA itself.

• Tech writing superstar David Pogue writes about his experiment with DRM-free ebook publishing. He concludes that even though his DRM-free book was pirated all over the net, the sales were as high as he expected them to be, based on his previous books’ sales. Pogue goes on to talk about what he’s learned here — that DRM-free isn’t necessarily bad for sales — and invites other publishers to try it out.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Google has apologized to a Chinese authors’ group over its scanning of books by local writers into an online search system, moving to defuse copyright concerns around the project in China.

• Walt Disney & Co. and other movie studios won dismissal of RealNetworks Inc.’s claims that they violated antitrust laws by preventing competitors from selling products that make copies of DVDs.

• U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel in San Francisco threw out anti-competition claims yesterday by Seattle-based RealNetworks, a maker of software for playing music and video games that in 2008 was blocked from selling a DVD-copying product after Patel ruled that it violated laws protecting copyrighted works.

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