● 01.19.10

● Links 19/1/2010: A Lot of LCA Coverage, Linux 2.6.32 Gets Extended Maintenance

Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• By monitoring and managing Linux systems, MSPs, VARs and IT support organisations can extend the services they offer and earn more revenue, says the firm. This new development also enables them to replace the more complex and costly monitoring systems they may be using to manage Linux devices while getting all the benefits of one consolidated monitoring and management system.

• Virginia Tech’s newest musical ensemble has a problem with one of its songs.

• A faint cough can be heard on the track “Citadel,” briefly interrupting soprano graduate student Chelsea Crane’s vocals. It seems only the most discerning listeners would take notice of the small blemish, but to composer Ivica Ico (pronounced Ee-zo) Bukvic, it is deafening.

• “In a song so serene, a cough sounds like an explosion of nuclear proportions,” he announces to the students in the room. His playful tone belies what the perfectionist composer considers a serious problem.

LCA

• Among the many conferences and conventions held in the Open Source world, a select few stand out from the pack. Among these is the annual linux.conf.au, which brings hundreds of Linux and Open Source advocates together each year for a week of learning, networking, and more than a little fun.

• I’ve followed with interest the NOSQL movement, and was interested to hear from Josh (of PostgreSQL Experts Inc.) what I expected would be a “relationalist” point of view.

• LXC uses existing Linux kernel facilities to group processes within containers into control groups, which can then be used to control access and scheduling of resources (network, CPU, storage, etc.). Each resource type has a namespace similar in principle to what chroot() provides for filesystems. Since all of the hardware is visible to a single kernel, there can be a great deal of flexibility in how resources are allocated. For example, a given network device and CPU can be dedicated to a container.

• Linus Torvalds was bitten by a penguin while holidaying in Australia. It’s widely believed this encounter encouraged Torvalds to select Tux as the official Linux mascot.

• The Wellington conference has been going on for 11 years and is one of the largest in the world to be held on the subject. More often, the conference is hosted by Australia, and this is the second time the New Zealand is getting to play host.

• Mark Osborne is not a technical person. That’s the first point he made when he stood up to deliver his presentation on The Open Source Secondary School at the 11th Australian national Linux conference this morning.

• He is an English teacher and the deputy principal of Albany Senior High School in Auckland which opened its doors in 2009. It has the proud distinction of being the first state-funded senior high school to exclusively use open source software for every need.

Windows Cloning/Compatibility

• In a blog posting by Matthew Helmke, a member of the Ubuntu Forum Council, Helmke wrote, “We are trying to gather preferences for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu. While we all believe in the power of open source applications we are also very keen that users should get to choose the software they want to use. There are some great apps that aren’t yet available to Ubuntu users and Canonical would like to know the priority that users would like to see them.”

• Still, Ubuntu is hedging its bets. Helmke carefully spells out that “This is not about applications to be included by default, but merely things that we may attempt to make more easily available for Ubuntu users to install for themselves from official repositories.”

• In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew (a official Canonical employee?) asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu.

• While we don’t normally talk much about ReactOS, the free software operating system that was started some twelve years ago to provide binary compatible with Windows NT, there is a new proposal to abandon much of its Win32 subsystem that has built up over the past decade and to create a new Windows subsystem that in large part is derived from Wine code.

Desktop

• The operating system devised by him, LinuXP, has minimal hardware requirement and was built using Linux and WINE, an open source software which allows you to run Windows programs like Microsoft Office and Notepad.

IBM

• Next is our friendly penguin friend sporting an “IBM Client for Smart Work” label. Get yours starting tomorrow at the Lotus Knows challenge immediately upon entering the exhibit hall at the bottom of the escalator.

• Here’s a another press release from today involving IBM, Symphony, Lotus Live, Ubuntu Linux, and Virtual Bridges.

• The underlying Linux operating system for the system is based on a flavor of Linux that was created by Net Integration Technologies (NiTIX), which IBM acquired in 2008 to get the core autonomic management software that would eventually give rise to IBM Lotus Foundations.

Kernel Space

• Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn’t? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it.

• With Ubuntu 10.04 basing off the Linux 2.6.32 kernel and this distribution release being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release that will be maintained longer than normal Ubuntu releases — and other vendors using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel for their enterprise updates too — this kernel will live on longer as well.

• The 2.6.27-stable kernel tree is still living on, as a “long-term” stable release. But, I do have to warn users of this tree, the older it gets, the less viable it becomes. Not all bugfixes are being backported to this kernel version due to massive code changes in the over 2 years since this kernel has been released. I am doing my best to backport fixes that I become aware of, and I encourage anyone who does fix any types of bugs in the main kernel tree to let me know if the change should be applied to this older kernel version.

• The Linux Foundation® (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that it has finalized its event schedule for 2010, which includes its Collaboration Summit, End User Summit, LinuxCon, Japan Linux Symposium and Linux Kernel Summit.

Files

• It will take about two or three years for the ext4 filesystem, that has been adopted as the default by some community GNU/Linux distributions, to be routinely deployed on production systems, according to senior Linux kernel hacker Theodore Ts’o.

• As the results in this article show, there are some dramatic performance drops with the EXT4 file-system that have occurred since this evolutionary file-system was marked stable in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Most of these drops are occurring as kernel developers work to improve the reliability and safety of this file-system, as we have shared numerous times now. Some of the biggest hits have occurred with the read performance in test scenarios like IOzone between the Linux 2.6.30 and 2.6.31 kernels where the performance was severely dampened. In the Linux 2.6.32 kernel due to EXT4 fsync changes, the PostgreSQL performance was slaughtered with pre-2.6.32 kernels being five times faster.

• Bartlett is one of those top programmers who still retains an air of humility. Once you’ve been around the block with FOSS types, you’ll notice that, as with the masses, it’s the empty vessels that make the most sound.

Applications

• Tray is Free Software, licensed under the GPL.

• The Nautilus file-manager included in Ubuntu is… well.. crowded. We already saw some changes developers are taking to tame to the vast areas of wasted space and useless buttons in our over-view of Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and prior to that we drooled over a ‘Simplified Nautilus’ – which is sadly no longer updated.

• When I first started using Ubuntu some 3 years ago, I found it really hard to get applications similar to the ones I used in Windows. After browsing for a long time, I made this amazing discovery. You don’t have to look for “similar” apps, you can have even better apps here in Ubuntu/Linux. Here are some of my all time favorite and most sought after multimedia apps for Ubuntu.

Web Browsers

• The people at Opera Labs are being very careful with this release, and taking much time before going so far as to call a delivered product a beta. Another build, 3199, has been released as alpha, dropping the pre- from the moniker.

Instructionals

GNOME Desktop

• Does GNOME 3.0 necessarily need 3D acceleration? Do GNOME 2.0 apps run under 3.0? A website tries to provide answers to some unsettling questions.

Distributions

• I came across a lengthy interview with the Arch Linux team, and having been using the distribution for the last several months, I thought I would write about my experiences and what makes it great for me.

• As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while already know, Kubuntu was previously my distribution of choice. To me, it was the perfect KDE distro and gave me the best that KDE had to offer with each release.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• When talking about the state of Fedora 13 features last week following our early Fedora 13 benchmarks, the Btrfs system snapshot feature was marked as being 0% complete. However, the Fedora 13 feature list has been updated and this feature is now deemed 80% complete.

Debian Family

• There has been an effort underway within the Debian development community to pull the FreeBSD kernel within this distribution to provide an alternative to using the Linux kernel. In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel is running underneath. The Debian project has also been working on Debian GNU/Hurd to effectively do the same thing but with the GNU Mach microkernel. But unlike Debian GNU/Hurd, with the release of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will reach a release status. With the Debian Squeeze release being just two months away we have decided to provide the first public set of benchmarks that compare the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD performance to that of Debian GNU/Linux. We have tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Debian with the Linux and FreeBSD kernels.

• As you are probably aware, in Lucid the platform team is working and re-planning in three separate milestones. Last week we passed the first such milestone, Alpha 2. The desktop team then re-planned for the next milestone, Alpha 3. This posting provides a chance to understand those plans. Note that these work items are documented in detail on the relevant blueprints.

• Lubuntu combines Ubuntu with the “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment”, more commonly known as LXDE, which provides a “fast-performing and energy-saving” working enviroment for users and it perfectly suited to low-power hardware.

• [..]

• Not having had many preconceptions regarding LXDE/Lubuntu i found myself presently surprised. It was pleasent to look at, pleasent to use and although i doubt i would switch from GNOME to LXDE it can give excellent performance to those who would benefit from doing so.

• Were my netbook still alive (needs a new charger!) i would have loved to have put Lubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 through its paces on more modest hardware. I would be especially interested to see how it stacks up against Xubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1… but for now i think Lubuntu is a very worthy entrant into the pantheon of *buntu!

Devices/Embedded

• MiFi runs on Linux, and has a 10 metre coverage range for its wireless network, which is protected by WPA2 security.

Gentoo

• It is no surprise that Gentoo Prefix works fine on arm-linux given the great work being done in Gentoo Linux by the ARM team (armin76, maekke, et al).

• This crazy guitar is actually an open source MIDI system using a sexy touchscreen with multi-touch and reactive fretboard. The result? Let’s just say while you probably won’t get much cherry pie playing this thing, the guys at Information Society will definitely invite you into their trailer at the Iowa State Fair this year.

• If you don’t believe me, then check out the video after the jump. You will note this guy is shredding on the Linux-powered Misa Digital Guitar, and there are no strings, just a light-up touchscreen.

Phones

• Nokia’s latest flagship device packs in plenty of power and a first-rate browser, but its design and app selection leave something to be desired.

Android

• The manufacturers of the telephone, which was scheduled for launch in China on Wednesday, are Motorola and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, and China Unicom would have been the carrier, a Google spokeswoman said.

• Google is not the leading search company in China, and it’s revenue from China is minor compared to its business elsewhere. Thus the affects on China’s search industry, and Google’s revenue stream are predictable. So this post takes a look at some unknowns, what might happen to Android in China if Google were to officially leave the Chinese market.

• Numerous consumer-focused tablet and slate computers were on display at this month’s CES show in Las Vegas, many of them loaded with Android, but few of them were actually shipping. Camangi announced its WebStation in October, and the device now appears to be shipping, joining only a few others in the 7-inch or larger tablet category for consumers, such as the Linux-based Archos 7.

• Although Android will see the most growth in terms of LG handsets, the company will continue to offer Windows Mobile phones, which have previously dominated its mobile phone line, and will also introduce more Linux models, according to the story.

• Movidius has announced that its Myriad mobile phone media processor supports the Android operating system.

• The Linux-based Android operating system developed by Google is growing in importance in the smartphone market and chipset suppliers clearly recognise the necessity to support it in their silicon.

Free Software/Open Source

• In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang. Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and 11 other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes 14 defendants.

• The Disney Ptex library is now available to the public community of texture artists, lighters and modelers. The new open source library supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (including quad and non-quad faces), Loop subdivision surfaces and polymeshes (either all-quad or all-triangle). Also, several data types are supported including 8 or 16-bit integer, float, and half-precision float. An arbitrary number of channels can be stored in a Ptex file. Arbitrary meta data can be stored in the Ptex file and accessed through the memory-managed cache.

• Misys Open Source Software says its Connect Exchange application was successfully tested at the Chicago IHE Connectathon, paving the way for an open source, standards-based platform for exchanging health info. Such a platform could represent an important step in moving medical data away from paper records and toward digital files.

• The OpenRouteService team at the University of Heidelberg has responded to the catastrophic situation of victims and destroyed infrastructure following the earthquake in Haiti by providing recovery forces with a new version of its live routing service.

• At 17, Elizabeth Garbee is quite a veteran of the various Linux conferences, having spoken at the Australian conference thrice, beginning in 2005 in Canberra.

• Recently Norway’s own broadcasting company (NRK) went to open standards by choosing ODF file formats over that of those provided by Microsoft’s Office products. This is not really that groundbreaking considering how much other parts of the world opt to embrace open standards while here in the U.S. we cling to what’s easiest. But it did serve as a reminder that changes are coming in what users want from their software.

• Clearly, there is significant interest in open source software as a potential cost saving, among other advantages. The key is making sure that legacy headaches among issues of software trust and familiarity. It’s an unfortunate mindset that is not only a problem in the corporate world, but in everyday homes as well.

• The Philippine Trade Training Center (PTTC) is inviting interested manager/owners/ HR managers/web enthusiasts in a two-day Basic Web Design Course using Joomla open source software.

Google

• There are a number of other firms and/or Open Source projects that would be good buys/plays which would form the other portions of the “Google Security” stack.

• It’s important at this point to note that Google’s code is not copyleft. It supports the Apache license, which is compatible with GPLV3 but not with GPLV2. Google understands the need to provide opportunity for software beneath its cloud layer, and for ongoing help in maintaining the cloud.

Databases

• According to the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week. The report which cites sources close to both companies, comes as the 27th of January deadline for the Commission’s decision approaches and suggests that the official announcement of the successful acquisition will be issued in early February.

CMS

• Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company.

Openness

• Maker Culture? It’s people taking things — food, entertainment, technology, politics, and even science — into their own hands. That’s a simple definition and it’s exactly where 45 Canadian journalism students began their journey in early September. That’s when Wayne MacPhail, the instructor of the online journalism courses at both Ryerson University in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario in London, introduced us, his students, to the idea of Maker Culture. We discovered that a lot lies beneath that simple definition.

Programming

• The Groovy-Eclipse developers have delivered version 2.0 of the plugin for developers who want to work with Groovy and Java in the Eclipse IDE. The new version is the culmination of work which began in May 2009 to create a more integrated, incremental compilation process. This has resulted in what the developers call an “almost completely rewritten” plugin.

Leftovers

Security

• NO they aren’t strange art installations or odd Christmas decorations.

• The mysterious black poles that have popped up along Hounslow High Street are in fact part of a council and police partnership to keep us safe, and are to hold new CCTV cameras.

• Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

• The office of India’s National Security Advisor, M.K. Narayanan, and other government offices in India were targeted by hackers believed to be from China, according to a report.

• China on Tuesday denied any role in alleged cyberattacks on Indian government offices, calling China itself the biggest victim of hackers.

• Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him’.

• Last week saw a flagrant attack on civil liberty mounted in the name of peace. A man who likes to walk around with a rucksack was told that he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison.

• The rucksack, in this case, was not the cause of this draconian warning. It contained no bombs, real or fake. The problem was what the man, Stephen Gough, wore underneath the backpack: nothing.

• A British environmental campaigner who was arrested in India during a crackdown on terrorism for carrying a satellite phone without permission will tomorrow hear if he will be released after a week in custody.

• The Attorney-General sent a furious letter to the Defence Secretary a year before the invasion of Iraq warning that he saw “considerable difficulties” in giving legal approval for war, it emerged this morning.

• Lord Goldsmith complained to Geoff Hoon that he had put in a “difficult position” by the Defence Secretary’s public claim that Britain would be entitled to use force without a specific United Nations resolution.

• In a previously secret letter released by the Iraq Inquiry this morning, Lord Goldsmith said that he had given no opinion on the legality of military action.

• “I think you should know that I see considerable difficulties in being satisfied that military action would be justified on the basis of self-defence,” he wrote.

• The US military has taken control of the only airport in Port-au-Prince and is facing criticism for diverting some aid planes. Doctors Without Borders says five of its planes carrying surgical teams and equipment weren’t allowed to land and were diverted to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. US forces also turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital. Al Jazeera English aired this report on Sunday.

• THE CARIBBEAN Community’s emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising Heads of Government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devasted country’s aiport, now under the control of the United States.

• Consequently, the Caricom ’assessment mission’, that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster of Haiti last Tuesday, had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations..

• Cuba has sent ten tons of medications. Since 1998, Cuba’s health cooperation with Haiti has made it possible for 6,000 doctors, paramedics and health technicians to work there. Besides, 450 young Haitians have graduated as doctors from Cuban colleges, free of charge, in the past 12 years.

• A Christian group calling themselves Faith Comes by Hearing is sending not food or medicines to the needy population of Haiti, but 600 solar-powered digital Bibles that speak and proclaim the gospel in Creole.

• The war on terror? Here it is. The casualties of that war? Here they are. And now, as spotlights swings towards Sana’a and political packs yelp excitedly about Yemeni training camps, Pakistan’s problems suddenly fade from view. Other countries must hear the tough talk. One pair of pants and the west wallows in hysteria before ordering stops, searches and profilings for hapless doctors who keep health systems going. One pair of pants against 3,021 violent deaths. Is that what we mean by proportionality?

Environment

• The dreaded shipworm is moving into the Baltic Sea, threatening artefacts of the area’s cultural heritage. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, suspect that the unfortunate spread is due to climate change, and are currently involved in an EU project to determine which archaeological remains are at risk.

• There has been a massive surge in illegal ivory trading, researchers warned last week. They have found that more than 14,000 products made from the tusks and other body parts of elephants were seized in 2009, an increase of more than 2,000 on their previous analysis in 2007.

• Pity executives at genetically modified seed giant Monsanto. Not only are they having to knock heads with Department of Justice lawyers over the company’s business practices, but some of their most-cherished PR talking points are being obliterated by researchers.

• In the past few months, we’ve learned that its much-vaunted technologies don’t really increase yields after all; and aren’t really all that promising for adapting to climate change.

• People here have one thing to thank Somali pirates for: Better fishing.

• In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

Censorship/Civil Rights

• The E-Commerce Directive protects service providers from liability for material that they neither create nor monitor but simply store or pass on to users of their service. The Directive is implemented in the UK by the E-Commerce Regulations.

• But rather than just demand the takedown of the specific content in question, the judge ordered the sites taken down completely, and even a Facebook group closed. That’s way over the line and goes well beyond what the lawsuit was about. It was great to see the EFF take up the case, but it’s a shame to see others miss the bigger picture.Esahc writes in to point out that Vivek Wadhwa has penned a column for TechCrunch blasting the EFF for defending these sites. I can understand why Wadhwa is upset about the sites. The sites are undoubtedly racist and despicable. They are also ignorant and economically illiterate. Some of the posts are, clearly, hate speech, and inciting violence against certain individuals.

• One of the biggest issues facing individuals and corporations choosing to adopt public cloud computing (or any Internet service, for that matter) is the relative lack of clarity with respect to legal rights over data stored online. I’ve reported on this early legal landscape a couple of times, looking at decisions to relax expectations of privacy for e-mail stored online and the decision to allow the FBI to confiscate servers belonging to dozens of companies from a co-location facility whose owners were suspected of fraud.

• Maybe it’s because I was schooled in political science, not computer science. But frankly I’ve been surprised by the extent to which some respected commentators have focused on trashing Google for lacking purity of motive. As if that were some kind of brilliant revelation. Of course Google’s actions are motivated by self-interest.

• [...]

• In the United States, Google’s policy positions are frequently aligned with free speech activists and the open source/free culture community – as they go head-to-head against traditional telcos and media companies in policy fights over copyright law, Net Neutrality, the evil secretive and scary ACTA trade agreement, and other issues. In Italy, for example, Google executives are facing criminal charges because the Italian government wants to hold Internet companies like Google more directly liable for what users do on their services, which encourages a global trend that would inevitably result in companies having to massively increase the extent to which they track, police and censor users – which in turn not only has serious implications for human rights and free expression but also drastically increases Internet companies’ overhead, making their business model much less sustainable. This isn’t just a problem in Italy.

Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

• The telecom package pushed the European legislation process to its limits. Hopefully Kroes won’t make the same mistake as Reding and make proposals that can be easier processed and reviewed. Some stakeholders are still clouded by the fog of war. But we also have a very nice technical overview of the process.

• With comments due last week on the FCC’s proposed new net neutrality rules, we’ve already covered some of the filings, while noting the problems of carving out a special exemption for copyright. But, of course, that special exemption for copyright means everything to an entertainment industry that has no interest in adapting its business models. Both the RIAA and MPAA filed their own comments, which were pretty similar, and equally misleading. The RIAA’s filing (pdf) repeatedly referred to copyright infringement as “theft” (you would think lawyers would know the difference) and insisted not just that there should be a copyright exemption, but that the FCC itself should require ISPs to act as copyright cops. The MPAA’s filing (pdf) is almost a carbon copy of the RIAA’s. There is very little difference between the two.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Separately, with so much pressure coming from other countries, we wondered if Canada would be able to resist implementing ever more draconian copyright laws, which would be a serious drain on the Canadian economy. So far they have resisted, but the pressure from outside continues to be fierce. We recently noted that US lobbyists and lawyers were insisting that Canada needed to be dragged into the 21st century, and now European trade negotiators are pushing hard on Canada to change its copyright laws despite no actual evidence of any problem with existing laws.

• There have been rumors for a while that, despite the NY Times massive failure with its last attempt at a paywall — which drove away users in bunches, pissed off NY Times writers and did little to help the bottom line — the NY Times might consider going back down that cursed road. And now reports are leaking out that the braintrust at the NYT has made a decision and it’s to kill off whatever value the NY Times’ online presence may have had by putting up a paywall designed to piss off users and take itself out of the online conversation.

• Tom Silverman (TommyBoy Entertainment) tells Rick Goetz (Musician Coaching – great blog by the way) that in 2008, 1,500 releases broke the “obscurity line” (sold over 10,000 albums).

• Oxford University has decided to ban the music streaming application Spotify because it uses P2P technology. Although Spotify is completely legal, the University has banned the application because the underlying P2P technology allegedly turns it into a bandwidth hog.

• The Swedish ISP TeliaSonera is refusing to comply with a court ruling ordering the company to hand over information identifying the owner of SweTorrents. Instead, it has appealed the decision, arguing that the verdict is in violation of the European data retention directive and claiming that SweTorrents doesn’t host any copyrighted files.

• The upcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals, shows how copyright has outrageously criminalized the use of sampling, which has been disproportionately popular in hip hop music. In this, it calls to mind the racially disproportionate impact of drug laws on minorities…

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