● 03.07.10

● Links 7/3/2010: Deutsche Börse and Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• More than a year ago, I posted three articles listing a few dozen Linux discussion forums. I suppose it is time to republish the list, now in one article. Furthermore, I added a few more discussion forums just in order to have a nice title with exactly 50 discussion forums dedicated to Linux and other free Unix like operating systems.

Desktop

• North Korea has been discovered developing its own Linux distro named Red Star OS. To make it even more interesting, it is said to be commissioned by the infamous Kim Jong-il.

• A Russian student of Kim Il-sung University at Pyongyang bought the distro for $5 USD at an information centre, and then shared his discovery through his blog.

• Places like this sometimes have computers, and a reasonable amount of use for one, but they’re way outside the normal network connected sphere of influence you see in the regular world. That then begs the question, how do we get Linux into areas like that?

• The One Laptop Per Child project and others like that are working to solve that problem for many of us. However, what do you do about the people who already have computers and either have never heard about Linux, or have no way to get it (ie, no internet, or limited connectivity). What can we do to bring Linux to them? Has anyone even thought about this?

• This past week we were inundated by PCs with viruses. Either people were bringing their infected machines to the office or calling us to come and get them. It was a madhouse. What was really crazy was to see how many machines had either zero protection or just standard free versions of anti-virus tools (or, gasp, Nortons or McCafee). Now I will admit that even free antivirus is better than none. But recently the infected PCs have become trickier to disinfect. I came across a nice little boot sector virus last week that laughed at combofix, ccleaner, AVG, and Avast. It wasn’t until I pulled out all the stops, with the help of my good old friend Linux, that I was able to finally say goodbye to those infections. But how? Let me explain this simple method.

• What you will need

• * You will need a Linux machine with ClamAV (and all the trimmings – including ClamTK if you want a GUI). * An adapter that will allow you to connect the removed hard drive to your Linux machine. * A little patience.

Graphics Stack

• The GLU3 code-base has moved to a new FreeDesktop.org Git repository, there is now a project mailing list, and he expects to finally release GLU3 1.0 within one month or so. There is some other functionality he hopes to push into GLU3, but that should be complete over the coming days.

• While X Server 1.8 should be out later this month, enough bug-fixes have come along since X Server 1.7.5 (the last scheduled maintenance release) to warrant a new version. Peter Hutterer pushed out the first release candidate for X Server 1.7.6. With X Server 1.7.6 there will be many bug-fixes atop 1.7.5, including this being the first 1.7.x release where the server’s RECORD extension is actually working. There’s also about a dozen other fixes to the DIX, xselinux, and other areas of the server stack.

• The latest patches clean up the HDMI audio support and makes it compatible with a greater range of ATI hardware, and new bits for DCE 3.2 GPUs.

• The NVIDIA ION platform boasts a GeForce 9400M (MCP79) graphics processor and it was not until today’s commit that the PCI IDs were added along with some slight G80 hardware initialization changes.

• As mentioned in the e-mail announcing the 7.8 branching, Ian Romanick shares he plans to have the first release candidate out on the 12th of March, a second release candidate on the 19th of March, and then the final release on the 26th of March.

Applications

• The other thing I wanted to mention about my brief interlude with Arch a day ago, was my surprise at using wicd. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother messing with utilities or daemons that manage network connections. I rarely see the need when I can hand-edit the rc.conf file more quickly and easily than working my way through a GUI.

• Wine 1.1.40 is now available with a variety of improvements.

Microblogging

• If you thought microblogging using Twitter and Identica was as simple as tapping out 140 characters once a day describing what kind of food you just ate, you’d be wrong. In fact, there’s a huge amount of functionality to help you follow and be followed online, and if you’re a Linux user you’re spoiled for choice.

Instructionals

• OS9, OS X, Linux or Windows – what do you want to run today?

• You don’t need a PhD in computer science and years of experience to hack the kernel. Sure, they help, but the nature of Linux development means that it’s open to all by default. All you have to do is get stuck in. You use the Linux kernel in whatever shape or form every day; wouldn’t you feel just the tiniest swell of pride if you’d helped work on it, no matter in how small a way?

• We asked prolific kernel hacker (and Linux Format reader!) Greg Kroah-Hartman to tell us what it takes for newbies to patch the Linux kernel – here’s what he had to say…

Games

• Which essentially stands for “Roast Meat” is an FPS and has been written in C++. This game has been built using the rendering engine Cube 2 and runs on the main operating systems (windows, Mac and Linux). Gamers who have been thorough with the Tremulous will recognize the main distinction with Sauerbraten as the latter’s ability to edit the geometry of the map ingame. Sauerbraten supports both single-user and multiplayer modes and the latter mode offers three gameplays: Capture, Last Man Standing and Deathmatch. For the single-player mode, there is plenty to keep the user hooked on which is a welcome change from its predecessor Tremulous. Phoronix, which is a purely Linux-orientated hardware and software reviews gave Sauerbraten a positive rating due to “several improvements made to its underlying “Cube 2″ engine”.

• The FREE GPLed Arena FPS game Nexuiz from Alientrap has going trough some major changes …and it doesn’t seems good.

• Today Basilisk Games the developers of the cRPG Eschalon: Book I which I’ve interviewed a few months ago, are now accepting beta testers for their upcoming game Eschalon: Book II.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Some of you might have noticed that recently two new Kubuntu apps hit the CD for the upcoming 9.10 release.

• As all my dear groupies probably have noticed, I started working on getting Ubuntu One a KDE frontend.

• For 4.5 we plan to have an Akonadi based KMail, KOrganizer and KJots (maybe we’ll manage to get more PIM applications ported). The basic porting is already done in SVN trunk, however we still need some time to iron out all the porting bugs and make use of the new possibilities that Akonadi provides us. Next to the local address book, calendar and mail store we’ll have support for the Kolab and Open-Xchange groupware servers and all other groupware servers that support the CalDAV or GroupDAV protocols. My personal plans are to bring back some functionality in KAddressBook that people really missed in the 4.4 release.

Distributions

• The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

• In the March 2010 issue:

• *Flash! PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 Available For Download*

• » Secure Passwords, Made Easy » Game Zone: gbrainy » Behind The Scenes: travisn000 » KDE 4: A Brief Look at Configuring Dolphin » KDE 4: Okular Does More Than Just PDFs » KDE 4: KRunner Grows Up

• While I am surprised how many bugs we fix each day I am also shocked that each month almost 70 bugs go on top of the current pile.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Deutsche Börse Systems, the IT division of Deutsche Börse AG, is implementing Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the open Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both are designed to enable realtime transaction risk management for its financial services clients. AMQP, an open standard messaging protocol, is an integral part of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a next-generation IT infrastructure incorporating messaging, realtime and grid functionality that is well-suited for cloud computing environments.

• Red Hat, Inc. the provider of open source solutions, has announced that Deutsche Börse Systems, the IT division of Deutsche Börse AG, is implementing Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the open Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both are designed to enable realtime transaction risk management for its financial services clients. AMQP, an open standard messaging protocol, is an integral part of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, an IT infrastructure incorporating messaging, realtime and grid functionality that is well-suited for cloud computing environments.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) jumped 1.06% to $29.66. The stock has a 52-week range of $12.98-$31.76. So far in the last six months trade the stock went up over 25%.

• Matthew Szulik will remain chairman of Red Hat for another year, the Raleigh-based software company said in a filing made Thursday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• There are, of course, excellent reasons for asking folks to use the existing DoD infrastructure, but I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the doors were flung open, and the bar was lowered for participation. This isn’t to say that I’m less enthusiastic about these experiments. I’m very excited at the idea of encouraging employees — in the Army, or anywhere else — to solve their own problems. That’s a goodness in and of itself. We just can’t forget that software isn’t a product — it’s a process that requires nurturing. The best way to nurture is to build a community, and that requires transparency and a low barrier to entry for participants. The larger and more active the community, the more likely the software will be better. The more closed, prescriptive, and limited the project, I think, the less likely that it will be viable in the long-term. So these “Apps for…” competitions are instructive. Each project is building its own kind of community, and I’m eager to see how these projects fare in the months and years ahead.

Debian Family

• The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and “configurators.”

Ubuntu

• A full house of Laura Cowen, Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore bring you season three, episode two of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!

Services

• Ubuntu One Music Store – An iTunes Equivalent For Linux Users In the next version of Ubuntu – namely Lucid Lynx, you will find a well integrated Music store in the same lines as Apple’s iTunes for Mac and Windows users. With one major difference namely – Ubuntu One music store will be selling DRM free songs. Each song will use 256 kpbs (or higher) encoding which enhances the quality of the song.

Appearance/Branding

• I love this. This Plymouth theme looks really classy, clean and is tastefully done. Not that I’ll get to see it for long as my main machine has raided SSDs and boots in a few seconds!

• Anyway, here’s the short visual tour I’ve compiled with some of the new things that are coming straight to your Ubuntu machines at the end of April.

• The trend had already started with the release of Ubuntu Karmic. A number of community contributed themes started pouring in and some of them even got into the list of default themes for Ubuntu. Now, community contributed themes are gaining further traction with the release date for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 getting nearer everyday. Meanwhile, take a look at 15 Awesome Wallpapers from Ubuntu Artwork Pool.

• A fresh install of Ubuntu yields one annoyance that seems to irritate most people: the default ‘Sans’ font is set at a gigantic 10px.

• The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

• While the Ubuntu rebranding is still at the forefront of everyone’s mind, I think I’ll throw in my meager opinion: It’s great. I love it. It’s clean, it’s fresh, it’s a new direction. It’s classy, it’s simple, it’s sharp and it’s light —

Devices/Embedded

• Ever since the Palm Pre was announced for a premier on Sprint last year, speculation has raged about when this contender for the smartphone crown would show up on the technologically compatible Verizon network. With the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, announced in January, a souped up arsenal of WebOS phones finally arrive on the Big Red Carrier. Was it worth the wait?

Android

• Wednesday night, Google added gesture search for Android phones, which allows a user to “write” a gesture (such as a letter) instead of type in a character.

• It’s an alternative form of input, and one that may be of use to some. Google Gesture Search should be available in the Android Market as of Wednesday evening, although if you don’t have an Android 2.0 phone (or higher) you’re out of luck.

• The Android gaming market is still growing and evolving in many ways, but as an Android user myself, I fully realize that it’s still nowhere near the Apple store in many respects. Specifically, multiplayer games seem to be lagging behind on the Android especially given the rapid pace with which the Android market is growing.

Tablets

• One of the surprising things about the Kogan tablet is that it will probably be delivered with two operating systems. When the machine starts, the user can choose between either Android or Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• There seems to be no respite from the predations of Microsoft FUD and the machinations of Big Business. Just when it seemed safe to come out of the closet and admit to being a user of free and open source software without being accused of being a Communist, it appears that we are now criminals too—even if we are not using pirated versions of proprietary software. The culprit this time is something called “Special 301”, an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws carried out under the auspices of the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) which is an Executive Office of the President. It’s definition of criminal would make criminals of every single user of FOSS.

• Special 301 is not a specific attack on individuals users of GNU/Linux. It’s target is foreign governments with less restrictive copyright laws than the United States. You can bet your bottom dollar that it wouldn’t stop there. Private individuals would be next. Now, I have an unscientific notion that many FOSS users are of a liberal, not to say leftwing bent. I’m somewhat atypical here: anyone who knows me would probably describe me as being somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun. So, being described as some pinko subversive causes me to smile — a knowing smile. I can live with that.

• Topics for this podcast:

• *Novell gets unsolicited bid *More deals and drive for devops *Dual licensing debated *Patent and IP deals, fights involve open source

• I have written a Netbeans plugin for editing test scripts for the VCLTesttool.

• Here is a screen shot showing Netbeans where the plugin is used.

• Open source components are also used within the company. In order to support this approach, the company needed a new way to reliably share components. Intuit was looking to improve developer productivity while maintaining control over what third-party artifacts were used by the teams.

• rPath, an innovator in automating system provisioning and maintenance, today announced it is adding support for configuration management to its system automation solution. Effective immediately, rPath will support interoperation with key open source configuration management tools, including Reductive Labs’ Puppet, Cfengine, and Opscode’s Chef. During the second half of 2010, the company will introduce native support for configuration—including native implementation of a configuration management engine—to be delivered as part of its Project Javelin roadmap.

Open Core

• The main concept is: a resource is “key” if without it your company would not be able to operate; and whenever you have a key resource you should have a person that manages it with a clearly defined process.

• This is pretty cool. You can see a bump when I took over the project in 2002, but due to my limited Java skills it doesn’t grow much until 2004 when Matt Brozowski joined the project. After that the growth is pretty phenomenal. We do have a slight plateau as we are preparing for our next stable release, but nothing like the 18+ month long ones for the other projects, and the size of our code base is much, much larger.

Humour

Databases

• In the end, I think it’s great that the NoSQL movement is happening. It’s awakening people to traditional RDBMS alternatives. It’s making people understand that they don’t have to write big checks for commodity software. It’s helping people solve problems that they can’t solve, or solve efficiently, on relational technology.

• REvolution Computing, the leading commercial provider of software and support for the open source “R” statistical computing language, announced today the appointment of Zack Urlocker, a former executive at the global open source database company MySQL, to its board of directors.

CMS

• For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site — the code, the theme and data — and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

Business

BSD

• Webcamd is a small daemon that enables use of hundreds of different USB based webcam and DVB devices under the FreeBSD-8.0 and later operating system. The webcam daemon is basically an application which is a port of Video4Linux USB drivers into userspace on FreeBSD. The daemon currently depends on libc, pthreads, libusb and libcuse4bsd.

Releases

• The 0.5.1 release, however, doesn’t have anything too exciting in store for it beyond clearing up some bugs, security problems, licensing issues, and packaging problems.

• I’m proud to announce the release of GNU GRUB version 1.98.

Openness

• The idea of an open source car is just awesome, with potential benefits like better fuel-efficiency, faster innovation, and safer cars. An open design based on open standards could also lead to more interchangeable parts, which means more flexibility and choice to consumers. Even with all this, I still think there are opportunities for the automakers to compete. It might be cool to build my own car, but I don’t have the time. Do you?

Leftovers

• The consequences that this earthquake will have for the Chilean people are frightening. It is estimated that at present 2,000,0000 people have lost their homes and are literally on the streets. We’re talking of more than 10% of the total population, which gives you an idea of the daunting task of reconstruction ahead. —- I. Chile has again been hit by an earthquake of apocalyptic magnitude, like in the earthquakes of 1938, 1960 and 1985. With the precision of a Swiss watch, the centre and south of the country is hit every 25 years by a seismic movement that puts the country in a state of deep shock. The earthquake we saw on 27 February was one of the strongest recorded in history – 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale, 9 on the Mercalli scale.

• • Civil rights report shows 250% rise in ‘patriot’ groups • Economy and media conspiracy theories fuel growth

• Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.

Finance

• Little-known brokerage firm Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co has long toiled in the shadows of Wall Street, but the boutique suddenly has been thrust into the limelight because of an “ideas dinner” it sponsored last month for a group of about 18 hedge fund traders.

• Monness Crespi sponsors unscripted dinners from time to time, said people familiar with the get-togethers. They provide a chance for managers to swap trading ideas, network with their peers and meet some of Monness Crespi’s largely equity-focused analysts.

• A Feb. 8 dinner is sparking controversy because one of the nearly two dozen topics discussed during the program was how hedge funds could profit from a decline in the euro, one of the world’s most heavily traded currencies.

• The Justice Department is investigating whether hedge funds such as SAC Capital, Greenlight Capital and Soros Fund Management improperly colluded to bet against the Euro. The DOJ sounds serious, but can it build a case?

• In a letter last week, the department has asked hedge funds including SAC Capital Advisors LP, Greenlight Capital Inc., Soros Fund Management LLC and Paulson & Co. to retain trading records and emails relating to the euro, say people who have seen the letter.

• Resounding no-vote expected on deal to repay money owed to UK and Netherlands after they guaranteed deposits at failed bank Icesave

• Thanks to a trillion dollars in credit losses write-downs on mortgage-related securities in 2007 and 2008, financial companies around the world had a lot of capital to recapture. So, in the first half of 2009, they issued stock. More than half the new shares to come out worldwide in those six months were issued by banks and brokers. All this stock, of course, translated to fees for investment banks. In a strange way, consequently, the financial industry healed itself.

• The money is being held by JPMorgan, which bought Washington Mutual’s bank for $1.9 billion after it was shut by federal regulators.

• We’ve told you before that the Tribune Co. was prepping to take their five lending banks. Now it has finally happened.

• Wilmington Trust Co., the agent for bondholders owed $1.2 billion, filed a lawsuit in Delaware yesterday against JPMorgan Chase Bank, Merrill Lynch Capital Corp., Citibank NA, Bank of America NA and Morgan Stanley & Co, according to Bloomberg.

• Examiner Anton Valukas spent a year and $38 million investigating the demise of the fourth-largest investment bank, using information supplied by banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Barclays Plc. He has said he will ask a judge to make public his 2,200-page report, filed under seal last month, if he can’t persuade companies he interviewed to give up their right to confidentiality. JPMorgan and Barclays have said they waived confidentiality.

• Macroeconomic Advisers, a leading forecasting firm, calculated the storms would cost 150,000 to 220,000 jobs.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• I digress. I refer you back to my article here where I propose the Digital Economy Bill be changed as I think that this type of conflict will only become bigger and more costly as a government imposed 3 strikes policy investigates an area which in my view requires so many resources to be fair and effective that it will do more harm than good. Let’s face it, if the “experts” can find themselves referred to the SRA, what hope is there for anyone else?

• I keep repeating myself when I write about this topic and it seems always a case of one step forward two steps back. Whilst it seems to me we also have FACT basking in the glory of removing DVD sellers from the streets, the real issue, the real damage to the industry in being done online by the file-sharer. Even the price of a “pirate” DVD can’t compete with free file sharing, especially when the material is often newer and far better quality than the things you can buy at a “dodgy” market. – Food for thought that not only do the entertainment industry suffer as a result of file sharing, but also your average pirate DVD seller on the street!

• In respect of the Haiti fund, Torrentfreak may be providing an answer:

• So there you go readers, its ok to take away from the fund because (and I quote) “the music industry itself profits big from such charity singles”

• [...]

• As I have mentioned before the anti/pro file sharing argument is equally as stubborn on both sides. To coin a phrase “The unstoppable force meeting the immovable object” I think is very applicable when the RIAA uses emotive words like:

• Source: RIAA Blog

• Now really, is that required? Any reasonable person would know that piracy would take away funds from the project, afterall if I downloaded for free instead of buying, then my money (no matter what percentage) would be taken from the fund. It’s not rocket science after all. The RIAA in my view makes no friends by trying to use emotive words like “theft”, “undermining”, “humanitarian” and it was very similar to the claims made by FACT in the UK when they claimed piracy was linked to benefit fraud. The question I asked at the time was, if someone is selling copied movies at a market then that is not “legitimate employment” (and an offence) therefore if that person is claiming benefits, it’s hardly benefit fraud as they are not in gainful employment in regards to legitimacy.

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