● 01.15.10

● Links 15/1/2010: Linux Jobs Surge, GNOME 3 Previews, Norwegian Broadcasting Goes FOSS/ODF, YouTube Ogg Milestone

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux Foundation says that the market for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent over the past five years. In response to this trend, the foundation is launching a Linux job board to help connect employers with potential candidates for Linux-related jobs.

• An anonymous Best Buy customer told us in December that the Geek Squad refused to honor his extended warranty on his laptop because he had installed (horrors!) Linux.

• I have been busy installing an operating system to the repaired Laptop.

• Firstly I went with Ubuntu as I already had that installed to an external harddrive and could just boot it up but it needed about 2 days of upgrades added to it. The 2 days were for the amount of downloads needed. I upgraded and left it overnight only to find my installation was scuppered next morning.

• [...]

• I think you need to be prepared to look through forum posts to get the most from Linux as it is a learning curve but once you have your internet set up looking how you want, a few handy programmes, one or two small games and have personalised your desktop, it is very satisfying and ofcourse, free.

• So now we have an older computer that, if formatted with a less process intensive operating system, can last 2-3 more years. We have access to Ubuntu Linux as a free download with installation guides. We have the comprehensive OpenOffice application that will let users perform office functions like a professional. What do we do now? Obviously, the standard computer user cannot install and configure an operating system they have never even heard of, much less used. This is where a geek becomes a super hero. The equation is an easy one:

• To accomplish any task in Linux can be hard if you don’t know how to do it. Anything is hard to do the first time unless you are an absolute genius.

Kernel Space

• The newest member of the Ext file system, Ext4, became an official part of Linux last year with the release of the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Since then, it’s become the default file system in some popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, and it’s now available on all distributions.

• Ext4 enables faster disk performance and better drive space management than its predecessors. While it also includes journaling, you can turn that off for a modest speed boost. I’m sure Google was also interested in it because even without disabling journaling, Ext4 is a very fast file system, and it supports file systems of up to 1 EB (exabyte) and up to 16 TB (terabyte)-sized files.

• There hasn’t been a whole lot to report on in regards to LM_Sensors, the main sensor monitoring package and its kernel drivers for thermal/fan/voltage polling on Linux. It was nearly a year ago that LM_Sensors 3.1 was released, but since then we have run into plenty of new hardware (such as the ASRock ION 330HT-BD and ASUS Eee PC 1201N) that is not yet supported by drivers for LM_Sensors. While this does not improve the hardware support, a new sensor configuration utility has been unveiled for LM_Sensors.

Applications

• As is often the case, one purchase often begets another. So, on to buy a decent, but relatively inexpensive condensor mike (after shelling out too many $$$ on the mixer). I end up purchasing an MXL 990 condenser microphone with a shock mount for $49.00US. Then a proLine desktop mic stand, model MS112 ($29.99US). Finally, I purchase assorted cables and adapters.

• Currently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default.

• I should also make clear that I’m no video-editing professional. The extent of my work in this realm has mostly been limited to stringing clips together in Windows Movie Maker back when I was still using XP.

• [...]

• Overall, OpenShot is a highly usable and stable application for basic video editing. I’ve yet to try PiTiVi to see how it measures up, but hope to do so in the near future.

• So, after a couple weeks break, it’ll be on to a new feature cycle! I already have some ideas for what new features to work on, but if you have more ideas feel free to pipe up. I won’t be able to commit to adding any and everything thrown my way, but who knows, something might pop up that wasn’t on my radar. I’ll put up a target feature list on the gitorious wiki when I’ve narrowed them down to something manageable. (There will be periodic 1.0.x releases containing bug fixes and translation updates till the next feature release.)

• Till then, I hope you like Bangarang 1.0!

• A significant part of the IT expense of most businesses comprises the cost of acquiring and running enterprise applications. Would it not be better to have the same applications your business relies on at a much reduced cost but with higher productivity? Read on to find out 5 powerful open source enterprise applications you could try in your business establishment today.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

• One of the many great things about using UNIX or a UNIX-like operating system is the ability to tailor your environment to your liking. If you want a full-fledged GUI with all the bells and whistles then Gnome, KDE, or LXDE are probably for you.

• But, if you want something less resource intensive that offers a greater degree of control then Fluxbox Window Manager is what you’re looking for.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Interestingly, the latest build of KDE 4 (4.3.90 aka 4.4 RC1) no longer supports the underscore character in host names.

GNOME Desktop

• This page hopes to dispel myths about the upcoming GNOME 3 release, currently scheduled for September, 2010.

• I’ve been using the GNOME Shell preview available in Fedora 12 this week and I’m really enjoying it. I was testing out some candidates for updates to the free drivers for my ATI Radeon HD4850 (and the stuff that went with them) already, and decided to see what happened when I picked GNOME Shell. At F12 release time, my graphics card wasn’t quite ready for GNOME Shell use. But now I get the whole kit and kaboodle!

• Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.

• Reader naaamo2004’s Linux desktop sports a chocolate-coloured theme that is slick, polished and beautiful, with an impressive Firefox theme to match.

Distributions

• I’ve been using Parted Magic to work on my disks, and after recently replacing my old 1.x live Parted Magic CD with 4.6, I’m enjoying the little things that PM brings to the project.

• For instance, when you turn networking on with DHCP and the DHCP server to which you’re connecting doesn’t transmit nameserver info, Parted Magic uses OpenDNS to supply you with DNS lookup so you can actually use the Internet while in the live environment.

New Releases

• Pelican HPC, a Live distro for High Performance Computing (HPC), is now available in version 2.0 with updated software.

Debian Family

• By the end of 2004, I’d been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I’d lived with periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when I couldn’t even get X11 started — for the sake of using a distribution that maximally respected software freedom.

• [...]

• Twelve days in, I am very impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now available upstream as well. This isn’t the distribution I left in 2004; it’s much better, all while being truly community-oriented and software-freedom-respecting. It’s good to be home. Thank you, Debian developers.

• But having been an Ubuntu user for several years, I don’t think I could ever go back to Windows and be happy. As for OS X, I’m too frightened away by Apple’s high prices and obsession with controlling users to consider that route.

• The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named “Lucid Lynx”. The latest development milestone is the second of three planned alpha releases, which will be followed by two beta releases and then a release candidate.

• A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, due for release in late April this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development.

• “HAL” unfortunately isn’t the heinous supercomputer from Kubrick’s film 2001, but Ubuntu’s Hardware Abstraction Layer between Ubuntu’s hardware and software. It has now disappeared entirely from the current Ubuntu 10.04 test version, it’s function being taken over among other things by DeviceKit. The advantage to this, according to the official announcement, is that Ubuntu has a faster boot and startup from hibernate time.

• Overall, there are both good and bad performance improvements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures. You can run your own tests though if you wish using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.

• Ubuntu Linux will likely include an iTunes-like music service in its next release.

• Although it is not yet official, Ubuntu’s next release looks likely to include a music store service similar to Apple’s iTunes.

• Finally, appointment of a team leader is an unusual request for a team to make to the Community Council, but as a team we found ourselves in the unique position of being a four+ year old team that never had a formal leader and having largely been organically grown with no formal “membership ranks” or process for voting for a leader. A huge thanks to my fellow Community Council members for their consideration and support during this process.

• Our verdict: One of the best examples of what can be done standing on the shoulders of giants. 9/10

Devices/Embedded

• OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 is released. This is a Linux distribution for network routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, or the Asus WL-500g and a lot of other routers. This distribution adds a lot of new functionality to routers, like improved ipv6 functionality.

• This YouTube video chronicles some experiments I did using a low-cost Fresnel lens and a homemade cardboard container. My goal in this experiment was to find a way for people to comfortably and portably view the outstanding Inkscape screencasts by Richard Querin and HeathenX which they generously distribute for free. Inkscape is a free vector drawing program that is equivalent to Adobe Illustrator. It runs on all major platforms: Linux, Macintosh and Windows. Here is why I love Inkscape and why you’ll love this program, too. (Thanks, TogrutaJedi)

Free Software/Open Source

• The Jordanian Government announced the first ever agreement between an international company and a government to promote open source adoption.

• Jordan’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and Ingres Corporation have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to achieve the widespread use of information technology and communication, particularly open source technology from Ingres, throughout the local software infrastructure in the country.

• Matt’s statement suggests, and he confirmed in a follow-up, that it is harder to build a community with a restrictive license. The obvious argument against that statement is the number of community projects based around GPL code: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, Samba, Drupal, Gnome, and KDE for example.

• Clearly the GPL does not prevent vibrant community development projects. The important point about those projects is that they are the result of true development communities, however, rather than a vendor-initiated effort to create a community.

• # Is it good code and is it well architected? # Who are the founders, contributors, and users? # What are the motivations and behavior of each? # What is the form and governance of the community?

• 1983 – Richard Stallman starts the GNU Project

• Started by Richard Stallman in 1983, the GNU Project is a mass collaboration project for open and free software that has flourished even to this day. Stallman followed up the GNU Project with the creation of the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to further support the free software community.

• The GNU Project has resulted in a huge amount of open source software over time and gave birth to the GNU General Public License (GPL), arguably the most popular open source license model out there. And when the Linux kernel arrived, GNU software made it into a complete OS.

• For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption. As the project has run out of money, my involvement is at an end, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the project has achieved so far.

Sun

OpenOffice.org

• The new version 1.0 from OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin has been released. OpenOffice.org Thumbnail plugin is a plugin for KDE file managers (Dolphin and Konqueror) to preview OpenOffice.org files (Open Document Format) as Thumbnails. You do not need to install OpenOffice.org for it to work (it only uses KDE API).

• Norway’s national broadcasting and TV facility NRK is intent on using the Open Document Format as a standard and is therefore changing its clients over to OpenOffice.

• Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.

Solaris

• Open Solaris is getting better and more refined by the release, there’s no doubt about that. Small problems are gradually yet persistently solved. This is extremely encouraging.

• On the other hand, compared to most Linux distros, Open Solaris is still about 2-3 years behind when it comes to usability and hardware support. More programs would be nice, as well as the ability to solve common desktop usage problems more easily. 64-bit architecture would also be great, considering the fact Sun pioneered the 64-bit usage.

Mozilla

• Like most folks these days, I practically live in my Web browser. After completing the Week in the Life of a Browser Test Pilot project last week, I found that I spent more than 45 hours using Firefox actively in the span of seven days. And that includes the weekend, when I didn’t touch my primary workstation (where the test ran) at all.

• When spending that much time in a program, you want to use it as effectively as possible! Here’s how I make Firefox work for me.

• Mozilla has dumped Firefox 3.7 from the release schedule, replacing it with regular features updates for version 3.6 of the browser.

• Firefox has made changes to the way it develops the world’s most popular browser. Instead of providing incremental updates after every few days, for a change the guys at Firefox have decided to release the next stable release of Firefox as a major release, not a minor one.

• If you’ve been following the development of Firefox, you know that Mozilla separates security updates, which usually happen every couple of weeks, from feature updates, which are usually separated by months.

Openness

• The good news is that it looks like the Obama administration is looking to go in the other direction. The EFF points us to the news that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is looking at ways to have this requirement go beyond just NIH and require public access for all federally funded research, including from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF). OSTP is asking for comments and input on the idea — and it’s an idea that makes a ton of sense. It seems likely that journal publishers will protest, but hopefully common sense will prevail and federally funded research will become open, accessible and available to everyone.

Standards/Consortia

• WE DID IT! Thanks everyone!!!

• http://productideas.appspot.com/#8/e=3d60a

• Official response:

• We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.

• [...]

• YouTube Team

• Party time!

• As part of FCC’s Open Internet tour, I got invited into one of the many group meetings the FCC has been holding, along with Nicholas Reville of Miro and Cara Lisa Powers of PressPassTV.org.

• Nicholas talked about how difficult it would be for Miro to attract video producers if they had to worry that carriers might block or slow their traffic. Why not instead go to one of the Big Brands that can afford to pay the tariff? Miro — an innovative, public-spirited non-profit — would be unable to compete.

Leftovers

• What do you do with vaccine that no-one needs?

• That is the question currently puzzling the Department of Health. Back in May the government signed contracts with two suppliers – GSK and Baxter – to supply 90 million doses of H1N1 pandemic vaccine.

• For anyone paying attention to the larger trends in the video game market, this could hardly have come as a surprise. A few days ago, Gamestop, a key packaged goods distributor for EA, announced a similar miss. While Activision was setting sales records with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, EA had no major hits — although, in fairness the COD:MW2 revenue was probably just filling in a sinkhole at Activision created by a music game business that has fallen off a cliff. EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again.

Security

• I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! invite all Photographers to a mass photo gathering in defence of street photography.

• Civil libertarians hoped that the Obama era would see a renewed commitment to privacy protections. But their dreams are being dashed. Congress seems likely to recess without adjusting aspects of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year, which means that the existing law will be temporarily extended. Elements up for reconsideration include roving wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations that are not targeted to a specific communication mode or person and “section 215” ability to seize business or other records in a presumptive terror investigation.

• Different bills to reform these and other powers have come out of the Judiciary Committees of the House and Senate. The House version is slightly better in terms of demands it makes on law enforcement and intelligence agencies to have defensible reasons for their searches and seizures. But the controversial provisions will survive, even if slightly circumscribed.

• The policy of random laptop searches and seizures by U.S. government agents at border crossings is under attack again, with a pair of civil rights groups seeking potential plaintiffs for a lawsuit that challenges the practice.

• [...]

• Last year, a document surfaced on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Web site that authorized U.S. agents to seize and retain laptops indefinitely. Government agents belonging to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is a part of DHS, were also authorized to seize electronic devices including portable media players and cell phones and inspect documents in them.

• Stories of poor TSA security screenings are not new – several days ago we wrote about a man who passed through a Milwaukee checkpoint with shotgun shells. In this “TSA screw-up of the day”, we head to Gallatin Field, serving Bozeman, Montana.

• An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions.

• The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.

• ‘WMD in a year’ allegation halved original timescale after compilers told to compare contents with Bush speech

• Blair was determined to disarm Saddam, Campbell said. Blair’s message to the US in April 2002 was he would try to do it through UN resolutions. ­However, “if the only way is regime change through military action then the British government will support the American government”, Campbell said, describing Blair’s view.

Environment

• A CONCEPT PHONE being designed for Nokia has the battery replaced with an injection of sugar.

• Global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations. To keep pace with these changes, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter mile each year, says a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley.

• For some habitats, such as low-lying areas, climate belts are moving even faster, putting many species in jeopardy, especially where human development has blocked migration paths.

• Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.

• Advances in agricultural technology—including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops—have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech com­panies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.

• Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

• The health dangers from nuclear radiation have been oversold, stopping governments from fully exploiting nuclear power as a weapon against climate change, argues a professor of physics at Oxford University.

• The ancient Nazca people, who once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, literally fell with the trees they chopped down, new research has concluded.

• The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Finance

• Iceland was plunged back into crisis after its president refused to sign a bill promising to repay more than €3.8bn (£3.4bn) to Britain and the Netherlands after the collapse of the country’s Icesave bank in 2008.

• Let’s sum it up. There was massive fraud and criminal activity for self enrichment led by the very people that are testified at the FCIC hearings. Leading the cartel and earnging the most amount of money over the past three years was Lloyd Blankfein.

• Blankfein faced tough questioning during the hearing from former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, who heads the commission. Angelides, at one point, asked Blankfein whether a practice of betting against some of the subprime mortgage securities Goldman was selling to investors was a conflict of interest.

• He replied that Goldman didn’t have a legal obligation to disclose when it was betting against the securities it was selling. “We are not a fiduciary,” he said.

• A simple brief summary of the financial and banking crisis explained for the lay person:

• 1. US Government encourages an unprecedented build up of private sector debt by promoting asset price bubbles in residential and commercial real estate thru artificially low interest rates and reduced Capital Requirements. US Government underwrites loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• 2. Banking Industry creates complicated security bond investments (CDO) to spread the risk of default on the loans to multiple parties. Essentially the US Government, thru the Wall Street Banks, provided the credit for the loans and then packaged the loans into Bonds to be sold to other institutions sold worldwide such as Hedge Funds, Pension Plans, Governments, and other large Financial Institutions.

• 3. Banks then created Insurance to protect against a drop in value of these bonds called Credit Default Swaps (CDS). These unregulated Insurance Policies were bought by varies institutions that held the bonds to protect them in case the bonds dropped in value.

• 4. SEC ignores risks building in system.

• 5. Ben Bernanke is named Federal Reserve Chairman in October 2005.

• 6. Hank Paulson resigns from Goldman Sachs and is named US Treasury Secretary in July 2006.

Healthcare

• Former presidential hopeful Howard Dean leads leftwing attack on Barack Obama’s ‘abandoned’ election pledges

• Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

Censorship/Civil Rights

• The Florida Bar has a new attorney advertising rule that aggressively regulates attorney speech on the Internet. Florida Bar Rule 4-7.6 Indeed, the new rule regulates attorney speech so aggressively that it might even apply to this blog post. Until recently, the Florida Bar considered all attorney websites and web communications as information provided upon the request of a prospective client and did not apply its attorney advertising rules to them. But now the Florida Bar has extended its substantive advertising rules except for its filing requirement to all “Computer-Accessed Communications” by Florida attorneys.

• As Google considers withdrawing from China, the BBC looks at the highs and lows of internet access and freedom in the most populous country in the world.

Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

• More comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) proposed net neutrality rules rolled in before the midnight deadline Thursday night, and while there were no major surprises from companies like Comcast and groups like the Open Internet Coalition, Google and Verizon once again joined forces to submit a filing that outlined the points on which they agree.

• Three US universities have agreed not to use Amazon’s e-book reader the Kindle until it is easily usable by blind people. A fourth settled a complaint from blind people’s advocacy groups by saying that it will strive to use accessible devices in future.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• VOICE OVER IP AND CHAT OUTFIT Skype has been pressing its case in favour of net neutrality to the US Federal Communications Commision (FCC).

• Skype, which is based on its own proprietary technology, depends on net neutrality to survive. If the telcos and some ISPs get their way, Skype punters will probably be identified as filesharers and get throttled to within an inch of their lives.

• Skype told the FCC that net neutrality was “about growing the broadband ecosystem and preserving a borderless, open Internet” and that it would “promote investment, jobs and innovation.”

• Two recurring points that Metalitz raised were that the secrecy in the treaty was a requirement of foreign negotiating partners, and the US’s hands were tied; and that the treaty wouldn’t require any of the “advanced” nations to change their law (he repeated the oft-heard unfounded slur that Canada is a rogue nation when it comes to copyright law).

• Both of these points are simply wrong. The country demanding that ACTA be kept secret is the good old US of A, whose strategy for this is being driven by former entertainment industry lawyers who have found new homes as senior officials in the Obama government (the Democrats are terrible on copyright, sadly — we can thank Bill Clinton for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). These lawyers are Metalitz’s old pals, his colleagues in the decades he’s spent winning special privileges and public subsidy for his rich clients.

• The lobbying group for the top four recording companies wants to make sure that when regulations on Net neutrality are adopted, they don’t impede antipiracy efforts.

• That’s why the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday asked the Federal Communications Commission to “adopt flexible rules” that free Internet service providers to fight copyright theft.

• We were just explaining why it appeared that Alan Ellis, the admin for OiNK had not actually violated any UK laws, and it looks like the jury agreed. Ellis has been found not guilty. I have to admit that I’m really surprised by this, but it is certainly a good thing.

• A man who ran a music-sharing website with almost 200,000 members has been found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown Court.

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