● 03.03.10

● Links 3/3/2010: Orange for Linux, SystemRescueCd 1.4 Out

Posted in News Roundup at 10:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Nuruddin Hadii said that the e-School system is based on Linux platform since it is cheaper and secure compared to other operating systems.

• Nadzirun Hazim, the Solution Developer, said the solution he is using in this e-School system is based on Linux platform.

• Khairunnisaa Saaniah added that the idea of publishing “My PSR Puzzle” books sprang when they were struggling in completing the e-School system.

• The update also officially launches its Linux client alpha test.

• In response to this morning’s Google Car post, tipster George sent through a pic of this Mercedes with Linux licence plates. Considering the Merc would cost a lot more than the Holden, does that mean that Linux is better than Google?

• Not only does North Korea have “its own Internet” – a national information network independent from the US-based Internet regulator – it also has an operating system, developed under by order of Kim Jong-il.

• Russian student Mikhail, who studies in the Kim Il-sung University and writes a blog from the Russian embassy in Pyongyang, has recently purchased the Red Star Operating System (OS) and tested it. Courtesy of Mikhail, RT gives you an opportunity to take glimpse at IT life of world’s most closed country.

• North Korea has had its own internet from a long time now. Their internet is free of any American influence and now, they have their own operating system to power that internet. The Red Star OS is a Linux based OS, developed by orders from Kim Jong-il.

• In response to the recent success of their Rapid Recovery offering, Storagepipe Solutions (http://storagepipe.com) has issued several important new updates that allow support for Linux systems and data deduplication for minimized storage costs and improved recovery speeds.

• The more ambitious new users can find plenty of challenges (and rewards) by creating Linux one-liners involving pipes or commands like awk or sed. These appear quite complex, but they are manageable when started with cookbook-style cheat sheets. Keeping a project’s set of commands in a file makes it very easy to document and tweak the pipeline, and to remember recently learned tricks. This expertise in basic Linux command-line use is all that separates many biologists from a ton of great, publicly available bioinformatics tools.

• Are you looking to make a great career in the field of Linux then here is a certification that would help you in that. In this article you would come to now about the Linux+ certification course and its requirements. Here is a chance to certify your knowledge.

• “If the company succeeds it will be a huge boost for the cause of Linux computing.”

• The Alex uses an operating system that was based on the Ubuntu Linux system and includes applications that have been designed by Broadband Computer designers.

Fast Boot

• Q: Are you working with a Linux distribution partner? Who is it? A: Yes Thundersoft. Lenovo recognized the value of running Linux as a base platform for the Skylight User Interface for everything from performance to extensive customization. This allowed us to pick the best and most appropriate elements to solve the SmartBook equation. An extensive team of partners along with internal development teams from Lenovo and Qualcomm worked together to pick, customize and create what we needed to provide a world-class solution.

• Yes my friend. It is still a Linux OS.

• Day Starter is a Linux application that comes on within five seconds of hitting the Power button and provides a look at the day’s schedule, along with battery status. The system continues to boot in the background while Day Starter is displayed, allowing the user to see Outlook (only) schedule information without affecting system boot time. HP Day Starter is for information only, no interaction with the information displayed is possible.

Server

• The Offload parallel programming tool suite from Codeplay Software Ltd. is now available for all programmers developing software to run under Linux on the Cell Broadband Engine processor.

• The POWER7, like other IBM power systems which run on the AIX, Linux and IBM i operating systems, is aimed to help clients manage their current applications and services at less cost, more energy savings, and with cost-efficient use of memory and better performance, IBM said.

• Multicore software specialist Fixstars Corporation has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA, the first commercial Linux distribution for GPU computing. The OS is aimed at HPC customers using NVIDIA GPU hardware to accelerate their vanilla Linux clusters, and is designed to lower the overall cost of system deployment, the idea being to bring these still-exotic systems into the mainstream.

• Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University’s Research Computing Center in 2004. With the peak speed of 420TFLOPS, it is still ranked 12th in the Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers.

Kernel Space

• Intel is well known for its open source love, so it’s no surprise the firm has started to roll out its Sandy Bridge GPU support on Linux.

• Nvidia is making quite a lot of Linux gamers happy with the latest update to its display drivers for *NIX platforms (Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris). Nvidia 195.36.08 adds support for a few of the latest graphics adapters from the chip maker, specifically Quadro FX 880M, GeForce GTS 350M and GeForce GTS 360M. On Linux, the latest Nvidia 195.36.08 driver also adds support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo with Quadro GPUs. It also comes with a lot of updates and changes for the VDPAU API Nvidia developed to offload video processing and decoding to the graphics unit.

Applications

• gFTP is typical of most Linux-based software. It does not have to suffer code bloat to be a powerful program. Much like a file management tool, gFTP makes it easy to manage files at either end of the connection. Sure, there are other file transfer apps available to Linux users, but I found that gFTP is among the smallest and easiest packages to use.

Instructionals

• “vpsBible offers Linux noobs and seasoned webmasters alike the easy-read copy-paste guides they need to build a first rate web server at minimal cost.”

Games

• TransGaming makes software that allows video games to be deployed across different operating systems without the need for redevelopment. For instance, using the company’s software, games developed for the Windows operating system can be used on Mac and Linux operating systems.

Distributions

New Releases

• The SystemRescueCd developers have announced the availability of version 1.4.0 of their recovery tool for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. The SystemRescueCd is based on the Gentoo LiveCD and supports a wide variety of file systems including Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.

• Tiny Core 2.9, the latest update to the frugal Linux distribution, has now been made available to all users in its final form. The distro comes with a number of upgraded packages and components under the hood, but also fixes several bugs and adds a few new features. Some of the changes to the very light Linux distribution also make Tiny Core 2.9 compatible with more hardware platforms.

Ubuntu

• Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple

Devices/Embedded

• ARM will showcase this week at the Embedded World conference in Germany a software development tool for Linux and Android native applications running on ARM processor-based systems.

• Gala WiFi Linux Based Photo Frame available at ThinkGeek for $239.99.

• The 3100 is a 1U, four-bay, rack-mount device that can come equipped with 4 TB or 8 TB of storage. The 4200 is a 2U, 12-bay, rack-mount product that’s available with either 12 TB or 24 TB of storage and two redundant drives. Both products are VMware-ready and are unified storage systems powered by the Linux-based ReadyNAS RAIDiator operating system.

• Embedded World (Germany) — Arium (Tustin, CA) and ADI Engineering (Charlottesville, VA) today announced at the Embedded World Conference that Arium’s AE Linux has been ported onto ADI Engineering’s Intel Atom-based Cinnamon Bay Single Board Computer (SBC) platform. Arium’s AE Linux distribution is targeted for headless designs requiring a small file system and kernel footprint. The Cinnamon Bay platform is targeted at OEMs and embedded device developers who desire high-performance, highly-integrated computing platforms where they can directly boot AE Linux from a microSD card, making for a very compact and low-cost solution.

• The Enea Hypervisor is based on OSE micro kernel technology and runs Enea OSE applications at native processor speeds without compromising any real-time critical properties, and takes as guests Linux Operating System and optionally semiconductor specific executive environments for bare-metal speed packet processing.

• In the past few years, the use of Linux in embedded devices has skyrocketed. Televisions, phones, cars, ATMs: you name it, it probably has Linux running in it. At the recent Mobile World Congress, Linux dominated virtually every product announcement: Samsung’s Bada, many new Android phones, the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project, Palm, and many more. Embedded Linux today has been nearly as disruptive as Linux was in the data center in the 90s and 2000s as it displaced proprietary Unix OSes.

• Korenix is proud to announce that its JetOS95 Embedded Linux Based operating system has been approved for IPv6 Ready Silver Mark – a certification led by China Telecom Group. This indicates that Korenix JetBox 9500 / 9400 and 5400 series Embedded Networking and Computing Platforms, which are running on JetOS95 software, include the IPv6 mandatory core protocols and can interoperate with other IPv6 equipments.

• MontaVista(R) Software, LLC, the leader in embedded Linux(R) commercialization, announced today they have been selected from hundreds of nominations as a finalist in two categories for this year’s EDN Innovation Awards. Instituted in 1990, the Innovation Awards honor the people, products, and technologies that have shaped the semiconductor industry over the past year. MontaVista is a finalist for Innovator of the Year and the Embedded/Software Tools categories. EDN’s worldwide audience of electronic engineers and engineering managers select the ultimate winners from among the finalists along with EDN’s editorial staff. Visit www.EDN.com/innovation20 to review each of the nominees and cast your vote.

• Impressed by the 7 second boot time of Chrome OS? Then this will blow you away!

• The great thing about Linux is that due to its open source nature, it can be pushed to further limits than a closed source OS. It can be designed to work with extremely constrained resources, and its modular nature means that you can get away with removing a lot of features without affecting its working. It can be pushed to work in mere kilobytes of RAM, or on computers of a mere 20MHz, and now it has been shown to boot in under a second.

Phones

• The two consortiums, wireless Linux group LiMo and application alliance WAC, offer operators alternatives to the software and services of Apple, Google or Nokia as they can brand and customize their software.

• The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a telco-led organisation announced at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, is to co-operate more closely with mobile Linux group LiMo, according to a Reuters report released today.

Orange/Meego

• Orange has given its thumbs-up to the Intel-Nokia Linux venture Meego, the OS formerly known as Maemo and Moblin.

• Mobile operator Orange got behind the Nokia-Intel founded Linux initiative MeeGo on Wednesday, anticipating the creation of a new channel for the delivery of consumer multimedia services.

Nokia

• Perfect for Linux developers with deep pockets, but despite great performance and an intuitive OS, it’s not suitable for consumers who want a wide selection of apps and easy updates.

• Nokia has announced its Linux-based smartphone, the N900, will be available in Australia through retailers in April, but stopped short of announcing any agreements with carriers.

• MVTec claims that tests have proven that image-processing applications based on HALCON can be successfully built for the Nokia N900. Applications are first developed with HALCON running on a PC. The exported code is then compiled for the Nokia N900 to allow the application to run on this mobile platform and access the full functionality of HALCON.

Android

• Can Google Android phones compete with the Apple iPhone? A few weeks ago, Google loaned me a Nexus One smartphone for experimentation, and I’ve spent the time since downloading applications and writing my own code. The good news is that the platform is not only competitive but is often a better choice than the iPhone for many programmers and the enterprises that employ them.

• We reviewed Motorola’s and Europe’s first Android 2.0 smartphone back in January. At the time Motorola had an exclusive deal with the online retailer Expansys but the company has now signed a deal with Carphone Warehouse to flog its handset to the UK.

Sub-notebooks

• At this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, Linpus Technologies has announced version 1.3 of their Linpus Linux Lite distribution specifically aimed at Original Equipment and Original Design manufacturers of low-cost hardware, such as netbooks. Linpus Lite is based on the Fedora operating system and supports resolutions as low as 640 by 480 (VGA).

• It is available with either Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system.

Free Software/Open Source

• On Sunday at SCALE 8x, Inkscape developer Jon Cruz presented a talk entitled “Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You,” putting the need for color management into real-world terms for the average Linux user, outlining current development work on the subject at the application and toolkit levels, and giving example color-managed workflows for print and web production. Color management is sometimes unfairly characterized as a topic of interest only to print shops and video editors, but as Cruz explained at the top of his talk, anyone who shares digital content wants it to look correct, and everyone who uses more than one device knows how tricky that can be.

• However, if you want to manage your iPod, look no further than Floola. Both Songbird and Floola run on Windows, Macs and the open-source Linux operating system. It will sync your music, your podcasts, your photos and your calendar, just as iTunes does. Although Floola has a basic interface, it does have some bells and whistles that you won’t find in iTunes. iTunes can sync with iCal, the built-in calendar app on the Mac, but Floola can sync with your Google calendar too. It can also copy web videos to your iPod just by adding the web address of the video, repair your iPod and download missing artwork.

Openness

• The Federal Communications Commission outlined more details of the comprehensive broadband plan it plans to deliver to Congress later this month, laying out a series of recommendations for using Web-based technology to drive civic engagement with the government.

• The commission will call on all branches of government to continue the early efforts underway in the executive branch to bring more data online, and urge government officials to accelerate the use of social media tools to engage the public, Eugene Huang, the director of government operations at the FCC’s broadband task force said on Monday.

Leftovers

• SEARCH GIANT Google wants the US to take its Chinese battles through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), according to a Business Week report.

• This will no doubt further fuel the antagonistic relations between Google, the US and China.

Security

• The Terry Childs trial has dragged on for eight weeks now, and the defense hasn’t even started presenting its case. I’m nowhere near the courtroom — I’m on the other side of the country, in fact — but I’ve talked to several folks who were there. Each one volunteered that jurors seemed bored to tears; some in the jury box may even have been sleeping. Seems my comments last year about the potential problems of seating a jury for this trial [1] had some foundation after all.

• We already have iris and fingerprint scanning but noses could be an even better method of identification, says a study from the University of Bath, UK.

• The researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.

• Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance.

• The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people.

• I have been a resident of the UK since 2005, having emigrated here from the USA – my home country. At first I was a graduate student, then -according to the Home Office – a highly-skilled migrant worker. Recently I married a UK citizen and I had to renew my visa for the fourth time in 4 years. This time, the situation is different. No longer do I have a ‘vignette’ sticker in my passport. Instead, I have been compelled to have a UK ID card which holds my biometrics and visa. I have to carry both my passport and my ID when I travel in and out of the country.

• An old man who has chosen to spend his retirement presiding over the most intrusive and expensive system allowing our government to control its population ever conceived in Britain.

Environment

• Climate scientists increasingly report that they have become targets of cyber-bullying, saying threats and hatred pour into their email inboxes whenever they appear in the press or media. The emailers call the scientists cheaters, frauds, scumbags and worse. Australian academic Clive Hamilton speculated in a news column that purpose of this cyber-bullying is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate. Most of the e-mails seem to be the work of frustrated individuals who simply want to rant, but some appears to be coming from coordinated campaigns. Scientists say people appear to be taking cues from influential anti-climate change advocates like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Web site ClimateDepot.com.

Finance

• The reckless behavior of big Wall Street banks, credit card companies, and mortgage lenders caused a financial crisis that cost us millions of lost homes and jobs, billions in tax-payer funded bailouts and trillions in lost college and retirement savings.

• This week, the Senate will take up financial reform legislation that will set the shape of economy for the next 50 years. This is a critical time to call or email your Senator and tell them American families can no longer afford a “boom and bail” economy and it’s past time that they cracked down on the abuses that caused the financial crisis.

• A federal district judge ruled [1] Friday that a list of private planes whose flights are blocked from the public view should be released under the Freedom of Information Act.

• We at ProPublica have been seeking [2] the list since December 2008 after the CEOs of the Big 3 automakers flew to Washington, D.C., on corporate jets to ask Congress for financial help.

• JP Morgan Chase is one of the largest banks in America, and played a critical role in the 2008 financial crisis. It received $25 billion in bailout funds in 2008, enabling the company to get back on its feet and pay eye-popping bonuses to top executives in 2009.

• Sound familiar? In 2002, the same firm created a similar index that allowed investors to bet on the likelihood of defaults in the subprime bond market. The “savvy” investors at Goldman made a fortune off the collapse of the market. It’s a sure bet that they will do so again if Greece goes down.

• Markets are wonderful mechanisms, but only up to a point. Greed is not self-correcting. The lessons of corruption never seem to be learned beyond a generation or two. After a cycle of manipulation and corruption, reforms and regulations are enacted. But then everyday Americans forget the lessons, vote for politicians preaching “free markets” and “deregulation” and the cycle repeats itself. Deregulation was the watchword during the Clinton and Bush years. And see what it gave us. Bernie Madoff. Who stole billions while the Securities and Exchange Commission turned a blind, deregulated eye?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Three California officials who oversee billions of dollars in Medi-Cal prescription drug spending have failed to disclose free flights, hotel rooms and meals paid for by nonprofit groups funded by drug makers, records and interviews show.

• The conservative blogosphere is busy charging that the United States Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) new logo looks suspicious … like a combination of the Muslim crescent moon and Barack Obama’s campaign logo. Some even say they detect a similarity to the logo of Iran’s Space Agency. Right wing blogger Frank Gaffney, a former senior official at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, says something “nefarious is afoot” about the new logo.

• Utility giant Progress Energy is the latest in a stream of companies to abandon the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), the scandal-ridden coal-industry front group that has dirtied the debate on climate legislation.

• Progress Energy is the latest in a growing number of energy companies abandoning the pro-coal industry front group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). ACCCE opposes President Obama’s clean energy reform agenda, and was the group that ran ads at Christmas time, 2008 featuring animated lumps of coal called the “Clean Coal Carolers” cheerfully singing Christmas Carols like “Frosty the Snowman” with the lyrics changed to deliver pro-coal propaganda (“Frosty the Coalman is a jolly happy soul. He’s abundant here in America, and he helps our economy roll. Frosty the Coalman’s getting cleaner every day. He’s affordable and adorable and helps workers keep their pay.”)

• Of course, Conyers knows all about Payola. Back in 2002, he was the one who called for payola hearings on Capitol Hill. So how is it that he suddenly thinks that money not going the other way is somehow “no avenue for compensation”? He’s being blatantly intellectually dishonest here. Is it worth mentioning that in the last election the two largest contributors to his campaign were lawyers and the Music/Movie/TV industry?

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• A proposal that would broaden the power of the Attorney General’s Office to demand Internet and cell phone companies turn over information about customers won broad approval Tuesday from a Utah House committee.

• Lib Dem peers are seeking to amend the Digital Economy Bill to allow site blocking for copyright infringement. This could lead to unwanted blocking of sites accused of copyright infringement, including sites like Youtube, and a massive chilling effect as any site with user generated content could easily fall foul of provisions like this.

• In a victory for privacy advocates, Germany’s highest court on Tuesday knocked down an anti-terrorism law that allows authorities to store all phone and internet records of private citizens.

• “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, called on NBC Universal on Friday to explain why it has limited access to some Internet video from the Vancouver Games to subscribers of the cable, satellite and telephone companies that have Olympic deals with NBC.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• First, this is hogwash. Most newspapers and magazines make the majority of their money from advertisements anyway, so putting their content out there for free is hardly taking away serious revenue. Newspaper subscription fees don’t even cover the printing and delivery costs. Magazine subscriptions are just as cheap. You know all those “deals” that give you magazine subscriptions for next to nothing? That’s because subscription revenue is meaningless. Ad revenue is what matters.

• Lots of folks have been sending in the “news” about news consumption from a new Pew study. A lot of the attention being paid to the study focuses on how more people are using the internet for news than newspapers, but that was an obvious trend. What I find a bit surprising is how few people seem to be talking about one of the other findings: that so many people are actively involved in “shared news.” That is, they either share news links or get news links from others on a regular basis.

• In appealing the settlement, it was noted that many of the freelancers had not registered their copyrights. Now, as you hopefully know, you automatically get copyright on any new content as soon as it’s set in tangible form, but if you decide to register it, it gives you additional privileges and remedies against infringement.

• This is pretty disappointing. Last year, I actually bought a bunch of CDs (yes, physical CDs) from an indie label in Spain that I only heard about after a friend sent me some MP3s suggesting I might like a couple of the bands on the label. After checking out their websites (and being able to listen to some of the songs) I ended up ordering a bunch of CDs from the label. Just last week, I bought two more albums (downloads, via CDBaby) from the same label. Yet, according to these labels (and I can’t tell if the label whose CDs I purchased is part of the lawsuit), they would have been better off suing my friend. Indie labels should be leading the way here: focusing on giving fans real reasons to buy, rather than suing the government for not putting up more protectionist barriers to pretend it can hold back what the technology allows.

• Hmmm…think it would make a lot of difference to the world if they lost the $1.6 million from the albums? Without copyright they’d only make $22.8 million from touring…You might almost think it would be worth it to them to give the recorded music away for free to promote their concerts…

ACTA

• Here the article again. The quote from Lambrinidis sounds rather harsh and shrill to me but it is all true. Yes, the misuse of FTA for policy laundry is a problem for our emerging European democracy. David pointed that out. I wrote an article a while ago to try out the Salon.com blog titled What laws and bananas have in common about the same issue.

• What is often not understood, the planned ACTA is negotiated among a coalition of the willing. It is not primarily targeted at the nations which sit at the negotiations table but it aims at third nations, in particular emerging nations and BRIC. TRIPS included IPR ‘minimum standards’ under the premise of their misuse as a barrier to trade. The current ACTA negotiations leave that premise totally out of sight, negotiators are not aware of the difference or argue that is was just enforcement, not substantive provisions. The actual usefulness of ACTA lies in its applications beyond its original members.

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