● 02.26.10

● Links 26/2/2010: OpenSolaris Support Model to Change

Posted in News Roundup at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• With each new convert, Linux joins the mainstream, but even that statement is not fair. Linux is mainstream. It is viable and it is used in hundreds, if not thousands of businesses, schools and governmental agencies every day. Yet we keep talking about the day the desktop will take over, or the day…

• Maybe, instead of plotting the overthrow of Redmond, we should just be focusing on our own systems, one at a time. And let the nine year-olds tell us they want the penguin.

• I am hoping that the community will soon discover and become a part of our site which we tout as a “Community based PC Vendor.” We believe anyone with a computer for sale loaded with Linux is a vendor and supporter of open-source software and should have a unified place that focuses on selling their Linux or BSD computer while promoting the use of open-source software.

Audiocasts

• This week on the show: The Ubuntu One Music Store, big GPL case settled, Ubuntu soon powered by Bing, Google sued over Buzz, Apple hates naked people and much more…

Events

• SCALE attracts largest crowd in its history, 30 percent increase in registration bodes well for show, FOSS in general. Observers looking to take the pulse of the Free/Open Source Software movement looked to the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x, the first-of-the-year Linux event in the U.S., and found that this year, and the immediate future, may be at its brightest.

Desktop

• Linux, specifically Ubuntu linux is Grandma and Mom ready. for two simple reasons… It will NOT get full of viruses and spyware for you to clean out every visit, AND via VNC or even log-me-in you can easily help them remotely if you need to. Not having to fix and clean a PC every week because the user is not a computer expert is a holy grail for any tech person. It’s easier to use than a Windows PC, Far FAR cheaper as there are no licensing costs, and most software someone would want at home is available free for it with a single click. But the big test is a real world non-techie. can they use it? My wife will be the test subject. Yes that will do nicely, use family as guinea pigs!

• In the case of Alex, it’s not clear what role Linux is meant to play. The way the deal is set up appears to offer few of the benefits of open source, but has the high cost more commonly associated with Windows.

Kernel Space

• The 2.6.32.9 stable kernel update is available. There are over 90 fixes in this update, quite a few of which are security-related. Subscribers can refer to our detailed summary for more information on the changes in this release.

• The Linux 2.6.33 kernel is the first new kernel release of 2010 and follows the 2.6.32 kernel release by nearly three months. Key to the new update are enhancements in graphics and storage capabilities.

Graphics Stack

• This is what XGI’s Jong Lin wrote today to the xorg-devel mailing list. It looks like Jonh is getting ready to send a batch of patches to the list, but apparently the patches are big because of “big features” (hopefully more than just EXA) so Jong is concerned about the length. We’ll see what patches end up getting submitted.

Applications

• In this article, I didn’t mention about softwares which don’t have gui like rtorrent. In Linux there are more alternatives than following softwares’. I didn’t use some of the softwares’ last versions. I’ve also mentioned the versions which I used, near the titles.

• Under the terms of the agreement, the developers at StormOS will develop the future Bordeaux (UI) User Interface and StormOS will receive an exclusive license to distribute all related intellectual property.

Instructionals

Games

• I was late to write news about Galcon Fusion release so I’ve decided to write a review… When Galcon Fusion was released for GNU/Linux I thought it was another of those simple games that I will play for 10 minutes and lose interest very quickly – but I was so wrong… This is one of the most addictive games I have ever played ! After 10 minutes of playing I just had to buy it (and it’s very cheap, just $8.99 this week, original price $9.99).

• So my test is Quake III. If I’m talking to someone and trying to make the point that they’ve got a computer, I’ll point out that if you can run Quake III on the device, it must qualify as a computer. Not just that specific device, or the specific game, but all devices in that class.

• And Quake III has the added bonus of being open source. So it’s a great study in what’s possible as long as devices are open and allow modification.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• KDE is a nice desktop manager for linux operating systems. KDE usually comes with almost everything you might need. But have you ever dreamed if you could make your kde better, smarter and powerful with more amazing applications . Here are a few wonderful applications for kde which are not included in kde by default. If you have any suggestions , please do comment .

GNOME Desktop

• Martin Owens points out in his blog post deriding this decision that removing the icons and the ability to easily re-enable them, stating that it makes it harder for people with dyslexia (he himself is dyslexic) to use Ubuntu. I can equally imagine that users with visual disabilities also find their removal a hindrance.

• I often use my sister as an example of non-tech users using Ubuntu on this blog (she can’t tell an OS from a browser). What was one of the first grumbles I heard after installing Ubuntu Karmic on her notebook? Missing icons. She had become used to them, she knew what they stood for and allowed her to quickly navigate around menus – menus of which she is continual fearful of in case of screwing something up! Their removal only served to worry her that something was wrong.

Distributions

• If you have friends or colleagues who you would like to have try the Linux OS, an important decision would be the distro you choose. There are over 500 out there and whatever distro you choose will be a great factor in shaping your friends view of Linux. The following 5 Linux distros are my personal favorites when it comes with giving people a feel of what Linux is and is not.

Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Ubuntu has become third Linux operating system approved by the General Services Administration for use by federal purchasers. It joins Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell, already available through the GSA Advantage purchasing program.

• A source from inside the Ubuntu team has informed a blogger that there will be an important announcement coming from Canonical regarding a possible rebranding of Ubuntu. A lot of enthusiasts are quick to speculate that the changes will be all about the color schemes used by Ubuntu and that it may go from brown to gray.

• The third and final Alpha of the Lucid development cycle has been released this evening – but what can you expect to find inside?

• In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article was published last year, including the introduction of Plymouth and many kernel mode-setting improvements along with the introduction of Nouveau for NVIDIA KMS support. We’ve ran a new boot performance comparison on two laptops and a netbook as we see how the boot times are looking with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS when compared to Ubuntu 9.10. We have also looked at how the power consumption has changed in the Lucid Lynx for these mobile devices.

• As Canonical continues work on Ubuntu 10.04, it’s becoming more and more apparent that they’re serious about delivering an OS with some serious consumer appeal. Ubuntu One — Canonical’s cloud sync service — and the U1 Music Store will no doubt contribute to that appeal.

• Linux is the operating system of choice for devices with ARM processors. Unfortunately problems with graphics appear in most cases. Ubuntu wants to fix this with a new GUI.

• No matter if a smartphone, smart netbook or embedded device, most hardware with an ARM CPU is currently running Linux. It’s natural that Ubuntu therefore wants a large slice of the ARM pie, but, like many GUIs, is running into resistance from graphics drivers that in many cases don’t support direct rendering

Variants

• I have liked Mandriva since Mandrake Linux 9.1. Its been an amazing distribution ever since. Pure visual delight and ease of use. I like KDE for the look and feel, GNOME is mostly a no no for me. Mandriva being a KDE centric distro fits the bill perfectly. Mandriva is the default king of our two year old Family Desktop. We all loved the latest version and despite KDE being a little buggy, find it convenient to use. I gave this info to emphasize that it was not easy for me to think about moving from Mandriva to any other distro, specially a GNOME centric Mint. Here goes the story :

• My wife’s vaio completed 1 year and ran out of official warranty. Hence she allowed me to dual boot it with Mandriva and Vista. She was already comfortable with Mandriva, so it was supposed to be a smooth move. The problem started right after the first install.

Devices/Embedded

• Leopard Imaging is shipping two Texas Instruments DaVinci-based vision/imaging development boards supported by the company’s Designsomething.org development community. The $84 Leopard Board 355 and $129 Leopard Board 365 tap TI’s TMS320DM355 and TMS320DM365 processors, respectively, support 720 video, and ship with a Linux SDK from RidgeRun, says the company.

Android

• Philips has given journalists some info, at the company’s Winter Media 2010 event, of an Android-based media player that will be hitting the markets in July 2010.

• The January AdMob report (PDF) is out today and it shines a little bit of light on who the typical Android users are. We already know that Android growth is steady, but just are the people using these phones? As it turns out, we’re mostly Android Guys. See what we did there?

• Broadcom demonstrated an Android-ready tablet design that offers video-conferencing and DLNA streaming to IP set-top boxes and HDTVs. The Persona Tablet is equipped with a BCM11211 VoIP processor, coprocessors including one or two BCM11181 chips, and can process simultaneous 720p video streams, says the company.

• it’s expected to sell for about £100 (US$155) unlocked. That’s over 54% less than the price tag that came on the original Pulse only a few months ago. Granted the screen size does factor in for most heavy users, the general public will likely fall in love with the price.

Sub-notebooks

• The One Laptop Per Child project has so far deployed 1,000 of its XO laptops in Australia and taken the first delivery of the next generation devices which it will unveil in coming weeks.

Free Software/Open Source

• It wasn’t that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting, even if you’re currently happy with your video and encoding apps. Here is an update to our ongoing collection of open source tools, with nine good choices here–all free.

• System administrators are responsible for the maintenance and operation of a computer system and network. This is a major task with a huge number of decisions to be made regarding the configuration of the system.

• Streaming video websites like YouTube face growing pressure from consumers to provide support for native standards-based Web video playback. The HTML5 video element provides the necessary functionality to build robust Web media players without having to depend on proprietary plugins, but the browser vendors have not been able to build a consensus around a video codec.

• Although the h264 codec has gained dominance due to its excellent compression and broad support in the consumer electronics ecosystem, it is covered by patents that preclude broad royalty-free usage. Several browser vendors, including Opera and Mozilla, favor the Ogg Theora media codec, which is believed to be unencumbered by patents. Ogg may offer advantages from a licensing standpoint, but there are still many unanswered questions about its quality and suitability for Internet video streaming services.

• [...]

• Some streaming video experts, including Ozer, are not convinced that royalty-free VP8 will solve all of the problems that the industry is facing with standards-based video. He contends that the cost of reencoding existing content will make it difficult for streaming content providers to adopt alternatives to h264 at this stage regardless of whether the alternative is royalty-free.

• Boxee has always surprised everyone with its lightning fast and unique interface. Boxee is like the Google Chrome of Multimedia apps. It is truly a revolutionary application. Only a month has been passed since the official release of Boxee Beta and you have a newer version of Boxee Beta up for grabs.

• Backup and data recovery specialist SEP AG has announced that it has released several components of its SEP Sesam backup software to the open source community. The SEP Sesam Storage Server consists of two modules; the Sesam Multiplex Stream-Server (SMS) module and the Sesam Transfer Protocol Server (STPD) module.

• The answer is to manage raw resources using the features of a Document Management package such as the Open Source product Alfresco. Alfresco’s Smart Space concept allows rules to be set on shared folders (say a public folder allocated for the VLE ‘drop off’ point) which in effect converts most of the mess into some kind of order.

Sun/OpenSolaris

• To be sure, some people could read the page and ascertain that OpenSolaris is not long for the enterprise world. Oracle, a famously proprietary software company, already does plenty of business with Windows, Solaris, AIX, Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu and other operating systems.

• OpenSolaris, however, appears to be safe for the time being.

• As one former Sun customer points out, the subscription link for OpenSolaris has been removed. George Shepard formerly of Sun and now with Oracle has iterated that Oracle is indeed planning on changing the support model for OpenSolaris, but no announcements are yet available.

Events

• OSS 2010, the 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems, will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, USA, from May 30 to June 2.

Web

• IBM Big Sheets is based on the Apache Hadoop Java framework, and promises to process large amounts of data “quickly and efficiently”.

• Boloker explained that BigSheets is a private cloud service running parallel MapReduce jobs on all of the library’s machines. And while it’s a private cloud (take note–private cloud spotted in the wild), the British Library will make the data and services available for people to access.

• Tracking games and achievements have both gotten simpler, and Valve has dropped the Internet Explorer rendering engine in favor of WebKit.

Releases

• Ready for the awesomeness that is Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, we have a shiny new Lernid for you all to rock the week with. Lernid is the online learning tool for getting the most out of our learning weeks. It makes connecting a doddle and provides interactive features such as showing slides, web pages and more.

Government

• The Spanish government’s Technology Transfer Centre (CTT) is the newest name on the list of federated open source software sites in the European Union.

• As of Thursday this week searches for open source applications on OSOR.eu will also provide links to the more than 130 software projects that are hosted on CTT’s software development website.

Openness

• Imagine just finishing a great dish at a restaurant and wishing you could make that at home. Well at the Instructables Restaurant you can do just that. In fact not only can you get the “source code” of the dish you ate, but you can download the plans to the furniture and fixtures as well.

Programming

• Zend Logo Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the development of PHP, has announced the release of version 5.0 of its Zend PHP Web application server. Zend Server is a complete package for implementing web applications via PHP. In addition to the web and application server, the company also offers the Zend Studio development environment for Eclipse and Zend’s PHP framework. Zend released version 1.10.2 of the framework at the same time as the new server release.

• In conclusion, if you or anyone you know wants to learn how to program computers, I recommend starting with Python using MIT’s on-line course materials supplemented with the other on-line resources mentioned above (and summarized in the table below). I’ve now watched more than half of the videos from the MIT 6.00 course and I’ve worked through several of their assignments: this is a great course! Even with nearly three decades experience programming including a couple of college-level courses in the 1980s, I’m finding the class is more than just good review for me: I’ve learned a few new things (in particular, dynamic programming and the knapsack problem). Python’s clean syntax and elegant design will help as one delves into writing code for the first time. Its extensive libraries and repositories will support the application of one’s newly acquired computing skills to solve problems in the area of the student’s special interests whatever they may be … and that’s the way we learn best: by doing something that we personally care about!

ODF

• Web based Open Office Presentation Viewer -v0.0000 – A effort to make a pure Javascript ODP Viewer

• A study published by the Norwegian “Direktoratet for forvaltning og IKT” (Agency for public adminstration and ICT) comes to the result that OOXML is not suitable for being used by the Norwegian government. The study is available online in Norwegian.

• You can download the manual from SVN, here. It is in ODF, and it would be great if it could stay that way — if you are using software by The Man, you can download an ODF add-in to open and save the format. (For downloads, I will convert it to PDF, and probably many other formats. The key is keeping the source in ODF).

• Many years ago (10 December 2003), I helped to cofound an organisation with the aim of uniting all the good forces to promote the commercial use of open source in Denmark. The result was The Danish Open Source Vendors’ Association (aka OSL – an acronym from the Danish name Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører). Yesterday, OSL held another general meeting where among other more important things I was reelected to its board of directors for another 2 year period.

Leftovers

• In 1997, the EFF awarded George Antheil (who was long dead) and my hero (who by that time was retired in Florida) a “Pioneer Award”, fifty-six years after they had submitted their patent.

• If you look at the patent, you still might not recognize the name of my hero, Hedy Kiesler Markey, nor might you know her by her birth name of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, but most of you probably have at least heard of her stage name, Hedy Lamarr, once called “The most beautiful woman in the World”.

Science

• A Senate science subcommittee clashed with NASA’s chief on Wednesday, saying the firm and the White House lacked a clear vision and goal for the program.

• NASA said on Tuesday that a flyby of planet’s Enceladus moon showed small jets of water spewing from the southern hemisphere, while infrared mapping of the surface revealed temperatures warmer than previously expected.

• “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

• Gemstone producer Gemfields today announced the discovery of an “exceptional” 6,225 carat rough emerald in its Kagem mine in Zambia.

• A technical hiccup has delayed the planned restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the titanic subterranean magno-doughnut particle smasher situated deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

Security

• They thought they were being helpful by collecting litter around their village.

• But despite leaving the pavements and verges spotless not everyone was pleased with their efforts.

• For it seems the volunteers of North Stifford, Essex, who filled 43 bags of rubbish during three hours of hard work, turned out to be a little too good at their job for the likes of the local council.

• According to the lawyer for the family of the boy whose school spied on him at home through a covert webcam application on his laptop, the boy was disciplined for eating candies that bear a passing resemblance to pills.

• The Lower Merion School District has admitted that the laptops it distributed to students were configured so that administrators could activate their webcams without alerting the user, but insists that the spying capability was only used to help find stolen laptops.

Environment

• No fish represents the growing crisis in our oceans better than the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Thanks to relentless overfishing by large commercial fleets in the last 40 years, the bluefin population has crashed by over 80%. Marine biologists worldwide are warning that unless the Atlantic bluefin is declared endangered and international trade in the fish is banned, the fish will go extinct in a matter of years.

• The climate of the city is altered, in other words, literally from the ground up; using the functional equivalent of terrestrially powered ovens, otherwise botanically impossible species can healthily take root.

• Let’s imagine 10 moments of an average day that might be different in a carbon neutral city. The following are a collection of ideas, from my point of view. They are a thought explorations in how I think carbon neutrality will benefit cities and the people who live there. Even if your city has not announced carbon neutrality as a goal, you too can think about just how different your city would be in a bright green future.

• A Taiwanese manufacturer that makes LCD screens and components for tech giants like Apple confirmed Thursday that more of its workers in China were sickened by chemical exposure than it previously reported.

Finance

• In a bit of strange and disturbing news, fabulis discovered today that someone(s) at Citibank had decided arbitrarily to block fabulis’ bank account due to what was described to us on the phone as “objectionable content” on our blog. In fact, the account — it turns out — was blocked a few days ago without anyone letting us know about it by phone or email.

• Huh?

• Bernanke said the Fed is examining companies’ use of credit default swaps, a form of insurance against bond defaults. Bernanke made the comments at the start of a Senate Banking Committee hearing. It marked the second day where the Fed chief testified on Capitol Hill about the state of the economy.

• U.S. regulators are looking into how Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs (GS.N) helped debt-stricken Greece arrange derivatives deals that critics say were used to disguise the size of its budget deficits.

• It’s almost worth accepting the bad idea of a new government bureaucracy just to see how it would handle the Goldman Sachs-Wall Street Journal claim that buyers of Goldman Sachs mutual funds and individual customers of its asset management business somehow don’t qualify as retail customers or consumers. It’s really a preposterous claim by both Mr. Blankfein and by the Journal.

• Video: Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) — Stefano Harney, a professor at the University of London, talks with Bloomberg’s Andrea Catherwood about Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s involvement in $15 billion of bond sales for Greece after arranging a currency swap that allowed the government to hide the extent of its deficit.

• In a signature polemic, Matt Taibbi, columnist for Rolling Stone, takes on his favorite target, Goldman Sachs, accusing Wall Street’s most profitable investment bank of setting the stage for the country’s next crisis hardly more than a year after it was on the brink of collapse.

• Though difficult to quote at length in this publication, Mr. Taibbi tries to explain how the bank made the gains it did given the pitiful state of the American economy.

• Malvinder Singh, the 37-year-old Indian billionaire trying to build a global financial-services company, says there’s one rival whose playbook he won’t copy: Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• That’s about 4,525 total lobbyists from 1,750 companies that include 207 hospitals, 105 insurance companies and 85 manufacturing companies.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Many people now obtain their news from the internet. This method of communication has allowed a remarkable explosion of free speech, of providers of information (usually providing content which can be obtained for free) and a muliplicity of choice in what one reads. It is to be applauded.

• The Crown Prosecution Service has revealed that it is working with a top barrister on a potential criminal case against BT over its secret trials of Phorm’s targeted advertising system.

• On last night’s Colbert Report, Stephen brought on his brother, Ed Colbert, an international copyright lawyer to discuss the totally ridiculous restrictions on what he can and cannot say concerning his Olympics coverage, to avoid getting sued by either NBC or the Olympics, leading Colbert to dub his reports the “Vancouverage of the quadrennial cold weather competition” to avoid saying things like Vancouver, Olympics or even winter games, as those are all on the forbidden list.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Since the late 1990s, a handful of media and technology companies has waged war against the public, imposing digital restrictions on the technology we use. Here’s a rundown of this decade’s most important moments in the fight against DRM, and an important announcement: Day Against DRM 2010 is happening on May 4th!

• Since the late 1990s, a handful of media and technology companies has waged war against the public. Their goal? To seize total control of our use of our copies of published works. Their method? Building restrictions into our technology — Digital Restrictions Management, or DRM.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Authors are always very happy when their paper is accepted for publication in a journal, as this shows that their work was deemed important but editors and referees. But they also want to make sure that their work gets read and does not disappear behind a subscription wall. There are several steps an author can take here.

• But if it takes off, it will benefit the student with lower prices–which have been a scandal. And it could benefit publishers by lowering their costs and get around the monopoly power of the patented ebook readers. This could also have differential impact on small publishers, if the software to update material is readily available. Authors may even end up liking it.

• EMI Music has lodged an appeal against the ruling that the flute riff in Down Under by Oz band Men at Work was plagiarised from Lucky Country kids’ favourite Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

• AFACT has lodged a last minute appeal against a Federal Court judgement earlier this month which exonerated ISP iiNet for the copyright infringing activities of its subscribers.

• Hollywood copyright lawyers are having another go at the Aussie ISP iiNet which recently won a case brought by the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayDr. Hoang Le Minh, Deputy General Director, Department of Science and Technology, Ho Chi Minh City 03 (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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