● 02.07.10

● Links 07/2/2010: Linux Mint 8 KDE, Linus on Nexus One

Posted in News Roundup at 10:03 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Horizons Regional Council “would be remiss not to investigate alternatives” to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

• Horizons, covering a large area of the mid-North Island, has agreed to participate in the Public Sector Remix project, devised by the NZ Open Source Society.

• “We’ll be trialling the Ubuntu-based desktop devised for the Remix project, initially on six to eight PCs,” Gordon says.

• The council expects to start the trial within the next two months. There is no firm plan for project duration, but it will probably last between four and six weeks, he says. Horizons wants to have a month-end included in the test, to test the open source systems’ ability to handle regular peaks in workload.

• The main driver for Horizons to consider open source was the failure of the government’s G2009 negotiations for bulk purchase of Microsoft software last year.

• “That caused us to realise that we should be investigating alternatives for the next three-year cycle.”

• In this article I shall attempt to relive my experience finding, beginning to use; and finally full conversion into a GNU/Linux desktop user. I will enumerate both the frustrations and the pleasures experienced during this first year of use. In an attempt at full disclosure my opinions and bias will be sprinkled throughout; after all this is written entirely from personal perspective. In the end the purpose of writing this is to provide the experience of one local (eastbay) user to any and all people who have started to use, or contemplated using Linux (shortened from Gnu/Linux for brevity) for any reason.

• Recently there has been a discussion on the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) mailing list about why LPI does not publish its own training materials to help students prepare for their tests. I started to answer in the mailing list, but instead I decided to answer here.

• LPI, of course, is a non-profit organization that creates certification exams for Linux systems administrators. It is distribution neutral, and tries to be comprehensive in its tests.

Audiocasts

• In this podcast comprookie talks about learning Python as a group, and his Gentoo unslacking.

• Feb 05: #092 – Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• The call for participation and registration opened for LinuxCon today signaling the beginning of planning for the 2nd Annual LinuxCon.

• Most people should use ALB (mode=6) for NIC teaming their Linux server because it is the simplest method to achieve fault-tolerance and load balancing. If you require higher bandwidth, and you have an internally redundant switch, and you can configure your switchports to use LACP, then you should use LACP (mode=4) for NIC teaming.

Graphics Stack

• Peter Hutterer has put out a new release candidate for X Server 1.7.5, which also marks this point release as being just about complete.

• Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop’s graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.

Applications

• For many Linux users one area where Linux needs some improvement is money management. Yes there is the very powerful GnuCash (check out GnuCash in my article “GnuCash: Open source Accounting/Financing goodness“). But many users find GnuCash to be too much power for what they need. There is also the slick KMyMoney, but that depends upon KDE. So what do the non-power, non-KDE users have? One option is HomeBank.

Instructionals

• Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) is a modified version of Ubuntu specially for the netbooks. The latest version of UNR runs Ubuntu Karmic in the backend, but the interface has been heavily customized to make it looks/functions good in small screen. Recently, I installed UNR on my netbook (as a replacement for WinXP). While I like the interface, I find that there are still many places that can be improved for better usability and performance. Here I will highlight several of my own customizations.

Games

• Let’s face it, we sit at our computers for hours on end. Be it administrating, working, or just plain killing time. Everyone knows that the interwebs is a sure-fire time killer. But what happens, gasp, when those interwebs are down and you’ve no way to pass time? You shrivel up and die right? No! You waste your time coding, writing, or playing games!

• One of the Unknown Worlds developers, Max has posted a blogpost about the GNU/Linux port for their upcoming game Natural Selection 2 :

• “Beat Wolf asks: What platforms will be supported? (Linux, OS X, XBox, etc..) The web page still mentions Linux and OS X as target platforms, but there have been many doubts with the inclusion of Steamworks and because the question seems to be avoided for some time now.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• What is the usual you do in cases like that? Of course, you write a Plasmoid that checks the web-service periodically and informs you when your passport is ready. This plasmoid – PersonalKwery – can be seen in screenshot 1.

• The Skrooge team is proud to announce the release of version 0.6.0, bringing new features and a lot of bugfixes.

Distributions

• Last time it was a great decision by Tex and the Gang to stick with KDE 3.5.10 on their 2009.2 release. They played safe for the welfare of the community and the users, while many desktop-wannabes plunged into KDE4 line. Now that KDE 4 has become a lot more stable and feature-complete, it’s time for a release.

Debian Family

• I got this little Toshiba Libretto for myself for Christmas as a tinkering project, as I’ve mentioned previously. I like to tinker with computers, and I wanted a machine that I could use to experiment with a full installation of Linux. I also wanted to restrict myself to a command line interface only to internalize the use on the console.

Ubuntu

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #179 for the week January 31st – February 6th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Open source industry veteran Matt Asay joins Canonical as COO, Lucid Translations now open, Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap, Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS Maintenance release, Lucid Ubuntu Global Jam Announced, Project Awesome Opportunity, New Ubuntu Review Team: Reviewing bug with patches, Jane Silber Interview, Dustin Kirkland Interview: Encryption in Ubuntu, Nicaraguan LoCo Team’s Third Anniversary, Report on Launchpad down-time of 4th Feb 2010, January Team Meeting Reports, and much, much more!

• Last week, I made note of one of the more intriguing software packages I have come across in a long time: Portable Ubuntu. I said at the time that, as a means of bringing the convenience of Unix utilities to my Windows workstation…

• In the continued interests of making Ubuntu a rocking platform for opportunistic developers, today we formulated the plan for Project Awesome Opportunity. The goal is simple: build an opportunistic development workflow into Ubuntu. You will install one package from Universe and your Ubuntu will be hot-rodded for opportunistic application development, making development more fun and more accessible for a glorious itch scratching smackdown.

• The Lucid (10.04) development cycle has some really interesting … er … developments with regard to … uh … the development landscape. Wow. That was an awful sentence.

Mint

• I then decided I’d test the “upgrade” feature when Ubuntu 9.10 came out, and let it upgrade itself via APT. That was interesting, but a few things didn’t work quite right. I’ve never been one to upgrade an OS because of this. I’m a clean install kind of guy. So when things didn’t work quite right, I wiped it and installed my next project. Linux Mint 8. Mmmm, Mint

• Now, back in September-ish, I rebuilt my main desktop machine at home. I had initial plans to install Slackware 13, but since Slackware now doesn’t fit my needs, I decided to go with something else entirely, so I ended up installing Linux Mint 7 on it.

• My desktop is still running happily on Mint 7, and while that process came with its own issues (the default kernel didn’t like my DVD-ROM drive, plus I discovered massive problems trying to set up Mint 7 on a machine that uses both IDE and SATA drives together), once I got everything set up, it’s been really great.

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE Community Edition.

• The final release of Linux Mint 8 (Helena) KDE Community Edition is available for download. I wrote about the Release Candidate of this a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t add too much more now. I’m still more of a Gnome desktop user than KDE, but as KDE 4 gets better and better, and combined with the excellent integration with Linux Mint, this one is a real alternative for me.

• [...]

• It may be that this is the same one used by Kubuntu, I haven’t installed that in quite a long time so I don’t know what it looks like any more. But this is nice, clean, easy to use and easy to understand.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Palm Inc. (PALM) shares advanced Tuesday after an analyst raised his price target on the stock, citing strong potential for the company’s wireless devices as well as a takeover possibility.

Android

• But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

• The Nexus One ships with a 2.6.29 kernel but if you like living on the bleeding edge you can install your own kernel (e.g. the experimental 2.6.32 kernel). Below you’ll find an update image I built which includes a 2.6.32 kernel, su, scp and ssh.

• The venture has launched two handsets, the Nuvifone G60 with a Linux OS on board and the Nuvifone M20 with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The M10 will be its third smartphone, and the company is widely expected to announce its first smartphone with Google’s Android mobile OS on board at the Mobile World Congress, which opens in Barcelona on Feb. 15.

Tablets

• In my opinion, the ideal OS for a tablet PC would be a Linux-based OS running the Elive distribution. This distribution would be lightweight enough, yet have plenty of 3D eye candy for a modern desktop. The Elive desktop would be ideal for a touchscreen-based hardware. Yes, this is me showing favoritism, but if you really put some thought to it, the E17 desktop is perfect for the touchscreen. If you’ve not experienced Elive, download a Live CD of it and try it out. Once you have it running, imagine it being used on a tablet PC. The only hitch would be how to initiate some of the compiz features without having the keyboard handy. Of course, after seeing what the Elive team has done so far, any hitches to tablet migration would be minor.

Free Software/Open Source

• Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Williams. “About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”

• “Space: the final frontier.” The folks at the OpenLuna project take that line to heart. OpenLuna is an open source, wiki-based attempt to design a leaner, meaner, public driven moon mission. As with any open source project, they encourage everyone to participate. When they run into questions, problems and challenges, they pose them to the crowd and invite people from every field to weigh in.

• credativ, a global open source service and support company, announced today a partnership with OpenLogic, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source software solutions. Together the companies are able to offer credativ’s in-depth third level support to OpenLogic’s customers throughout Europe and North America.

• Index Ventures, a leading venture capital firm today announced that Marten Mickos has joined the firm as a European Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

• Olliance will be running a series of CEO Interviews throughout the year. I sat down with Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft ( www.jaspersoft.com ), to get his thoughts on Open Source software and current market trends. This is the first in a two part series with Brian where he shares his thoughts.

• Open-Xchange will offer its e-mail and groupware in cooperation with hardware manufacturer Pyramid as pre-configured and ready-to-run appliances for up to either 50 users or 300.

• Proprietary vendors are using “anti-features”, features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month.

• But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.

• An anti-feature serves the interests of the vendor, he says, not the user. A typical example is the set of limitations placed on the Home Basic version of Microsoft’s Vista operating system; these restricted memory and disk-storage support and limited the user to at most three concurrent applications using the graphical user interface, Hill says.

FOSDEM

Sun/OpenOffice.org

• IBM has released Lotus Symphony 3, the latest version of its office productivity suite which is based on new code that supports Microsoft Office applications.

• IBM has upgraded its free Lotus Symphony productivity suite, adding several features that make its word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications work with Microsoft documents. Launched in 2007 to chip away at Microsoft Office, Symphony failed to budge Office’s share of 500 million seats. Instead, Symphony has acquired a more potent rival in free, Web-based platforms such as Google Docs. IBM is working to build the Web-based version of Symphony under the Project Concord banner. Concord will initially allow Web-based editing for documents and proceed to Web-based spreadsheets and presentations.

• The announcement, which was actually a planned webcast, reassured those worried over the fate of two open-source Sun products for small business: the database software, MySQL and the productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The acquisition might make MySQL and OpenOffice.org even more competitive against costly Microsoft counterparts (SQL Server and Microsoft Office).

• With all of its newly acquired Sun intellectual property and R&D in hand, Oracle is now moving headlong into the server, storage, processor, networking and, yes, even the switch business. But the most hotly debated factor in the acquisition has been the MySQL database.

• On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle’s liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB.

• The memo, sent Tuesday under the subject line “Thanks for a great 28 years,” has more genuine emotion than you’ll see in a year’s worth of official communications from most corporate leaders. And even as he departs the Sun stage, he couldn’t resist sprinkling in a number of characteristic barbs–even taking his beloved auto industry to task.

• The only bet Oracle had to make was that it could run the business profitably. Given Sun’s bloated infrastructure and broad range of unprofitable products, I don’t think it’s that hard a task. Both Oracle and IBM have become adept at running legacy businesses for profit rather than growth.

• [...]

• Personally, I’ve enjoyed my time with MySQL and Sun. It was a heckuva ride. I’ve never had as much fun as we did growing MySQL from a few million in revenue to more than $100 million, with a community that measures in tens of millions of users around the world. The one side effect of working for a high-growth startup is that it can be quite addictive.

• I have to admit that I was one of those people who sat through the entire 5 hours of the Oracle/Sun presentations the other day (it seemed longer!) In a way it’s sad to see Sun finally set over the horizon, but in another way it has been inevitable for a while and the whole process of the acquisition really couldn’t have been drawn out much longer. So there we are: gone is Sun and in its place is Snorcle (or is that Oracun?) But where does this leave the industry as a whole? Well Sun had quite a portfolio of hardware and software, so unlike the BEA or PeopleSoft acquisitions this has potential wider ramifications. But if you listened to the presentations then it’s almost as if Sun hasn’t really gone away but Oracle is just injecting a lot more cash (and people) into the business.

• With the EU’s approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, Oracle is acquiring a major hardware and software player, and perhaps most significantly, they are now taking stewardship of the Java platform. As Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said shortly after the acquisition announcement in April of last year, Java is “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.”

• When Oracle lays its cards on the table to present its road map for the combined Oracle and Sun Microsystems organization, one thing developers can expect is consistency as far as Java is concerned, according to an Oracle executive.

• To understand Texas Tech’s bold new classroom, one must first shake away the wholesale confines of reality and its pesky restrictions like space and time.

• Project Wonderland developers say they will continue working on the virtual world platform, despite being laid off after Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems.

• In the wake of its merger with Sun Microsystems, Oracle is discontinuing access to Project Kenai, which was developed by Sun as an open source project-hosting site.

Databases

• …[B]ut 46% use MySQL. MySQL is slightly stronger in India and Latin America, but MS SQL Server leads in China and Latin America.

• Ingres is inviting data munchers to take a bite out of its planned software architecture targeting high-performance analytics.

• The open-source database company has released alpha code for its VectorWise project, a high-performance storage engine computing-intensive data warehouses running on standard Intel boxes. A first beta of VectorWise is planned for the current quarter.

CMS

Funding

• Laszlo Systems, builder of integrated internet applications for email, workplace dashboards, calendaring and other services, has brought in $3 million in new funding, according to Dow Jones VentureWire.

Business Intelligence (BI)

Government

• San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered equally with commercial software within the city’s procurement process.

• Cuban Enterprise software DESOFT has reported that the U.S. impeded home users access to Source Forge, the largest repository of open source projects online.

• Sources from the Cuban company that is dedicated to finding solutions within and outside the island, said the U.S. restriction strengthens Washington’s hostility against Havana.

Programming

• The developers of the Ruby on Rails framework have, as promised, made the first beta of Rails 3 available within their scheduled time frame. Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson announced that more than 250 developers contributed to the release, submitting a total of 4,000 commits since the current 2.3 development line.

Standards/Consortia

• Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.

Leftovers

• This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

• This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

• Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said search engine will release a version of Google Voice for businesses, roll out Google Wave to all users who want it, and may deliver as much as 200 new features to Google Apps this year. Google Voice offered as part of Google Apps could be a powerful combination for businesses in the market for a UCC (unified communications and collaboration) suite, particularly at a time when companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for UCC from Microsoft or IBM. Google will also release Google Wave, the company’s real-time collaboration platform, for all consumers and businesses in 2010.

• I was a bit distracted from the Apple iPad news due to the marathon Oracle conference Wednesday on its shiny new Sun Microsystems acquisition.

• But the more I thought about it, the more these two companies are extremely well positioned to actually fulfill what other powerful companies tried to do and failed. Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades.

• Service or organizational systems are quite different. While they also include extensive infrastructures and lots of technologies, people constitute the major part of their components, if not the most distinctive.

Science

• The British Homeopathic Association has been accused of misrepresenting scientific evidence on alternative medicine in documents it gave to a parliamentary inquiry.

Security

• The Serious Fraud Office said in its announcement yesterday that some of the £30m penalty BAE was to hand over in the UK would be “an ex gratia payment for the benefit of the people of Tanzania”.

• There has been a massive increase in the funding of US war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and private military contractors are flourishing in its wake, even though their reputations are at an all-time low.

• Jurors found Nuevelle guilty of unlawful entry, stalking and second degree burglary. Prosecutors alleged that Nuevelle broke into the home of her former girlfriend, Magistrate Judge Janet Albert of the D.C. Superior Court, in an attempt to harass her after their breakup, and inundated her with e-mails, text messages and phone calls. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said Nuevelle could face a maximum of 16 years in prison.

• The “backdoors” that Cisco and other networking companies implement in their routers and switches for lawful intercept are front and center again at this week’s Black Hat security conference. A few years ago, they were cause celebre in some VoIP wiretapping arguments and court rulings.

• Cross revealed a collection of security weaknesses in Cisco’s architecture that he says add up to a lawful intercept system that could be easily hijacked by a skilled cybercriminal. When hackers try to gain access to a Cisco router, the system doesn’t block them after failed password-guessing attempts and it doesn’t alert an administrator. Many Cisco routers are still vulnerable, he said, to a bug that was publicized in June 2008, since some administrators haven’t implemented the patch that Cisco later released. And once data has been collected using the lawful intercept, it can be sent to any destination, not merely to an authorized user.

• In late January, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report that provided startling new details on illegal operations by the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) and America’s grifting telecoms.

• For years, AT&T, Verizon, MCI and others fed the Bureau phone records of journalists and citizens under the guise of America’s endless, and highly profitable, “War on Terror.”

• EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act Request, asking for records pertaining to the partnership. That would certainly help, because otherwise we have no idea what’s actually going on.

Finance

• New York attorney general files civil charges against the bank and its former chief executive, Ken Lewis, over last year’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch

PR/AstroTurf

• Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.

• On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

• The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.

• The most complete and eloquent account of Lessig’s views is The Nation piece. Here he picks up on the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which would make any limit on campaign contributions unconstitutional. “… the clear signal of the Roberts Court is that any reform designed to muck about with whatever wealth wants is constitutionally suspect.” He despairs of getting the Congress, (that he calls the Fundraising Congress) to do anything. He proposes instead a Convention to amend the Constitution as the only possible avenue.

• After insisting for a year that failure was not an option, President Barack Obama is now acknowledging his health care overhaul may die in Congress.

Censorship/Civil Rights

• Computer scientists in the US have discovered ways to “re-identify” the names of people included in supposedly anonymous datasets.

• In one example, a movie rental company released an anonymous list of film-ratings taken from its 500,000 subscribers. Using a statistical “de-anonymisation” technique, the academics were able to identify individuals and their film preferences.

• A federal appeals court today agreed that a high school student’s parody profile of his principal was protected free speech.

• Justin Layshock, who in December 2005 created a MySpace profile of then Hickory High School principal Eric Trosch, filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the school district, claiming the administration had no say over the online parody.

Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

• Internet companies and civil liberty groups have voiced alarm over a proposed Italian law which would make online service providers responsible for their audiovisual content and copyright infringements by users.

• Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site.

• Taking a few moments to secure a residential wireless network with a password is a good idea, a fact recently noted by the Federal Trade Commission. An open network is an invitation for piggy-backers and data thieves.

• Who knew that password-protecting a wireless router also had constitutional significance? According to a recent court decision from Oregon, the failure to password-protect a wireless network can diminish the extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects computers and information on that network from government searches.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• In a definitive defeat for film studios—and in a first case of its kind worldwide—Australia’s Federal Court has ruled that ISPs have no obligation to act on copyright infringement notices or to disconnect subscribers after receiving multiple letters. If copyright holders want justice for illegal file-sharing, they need to start by targeting the right people: those who committed the infringement.

• The ruling handed down today by Judge J. Cowdroy aims to be nothing less than magisterial: in 200 pages, it examines the issue from every possible angle because of the “obvious importance of these proceedings to the law of copyright both in this country and possibly overseas.”

• Men at Work’s Colin Hay has issued an angry statement calling the Down Under plagiarism case “opportunistic greed”.

• Earlier this week, a federal court in Sydney ruled that Men at Work had plagiarised Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree in its 1983 hit, Down Under.

• The 7th round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations begins tomorrow in Guadalajara, Mexico. The negotiation round will be the longest to-date, with three and a half days planned to address civil enforcement, border measures, the Internet provisions, and (one hour for) transparency. Over the next five days, I plan to post a five-part ACTA Guide that will include sourcing for much of the discussion on ACTA, links to all the leaked documents, information on the transparency issue, and a look at who has been speaking out.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayWilliam Fischer, Harvard law professor and Free Culture Business Theorist 02 (2004)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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