● 03.08.10

● Links 10/3/2010: OpenShot 1.1, MeeGo for Sub-notebooks

Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Victoria’s Electoral Commission has flagged plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux software in the next state election in November this year.

• The state first started using the machines in a limited trial during the last state election in 2006. It appears as if the machines were used for voting for the vision-impaired, as well as for military personnel. News of the rollout was broken by Computerworld.

• Viruses, worms, malware, scumware, adware – these are all Windows infections. One rarely hears of Mac users experiencing these problems. I have been running Debian GNU/Linux on my workstation for nearly 10 years, I’m nothing short of a vey heavy internet user, and I have never had any kind of infection.

• According to statistics, nearly 5% of computer users worldwide use Linux as an operating system on their computers.

• The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: Tiny Core Linux 2.9, PC/OS OpenWorkstation 10.1 GNOME, Elive 2.0 and SimplyMEPIS 8.5 RC2. In other news: CodeWeavers announced the revamped CrossOver 9.0 application for Linux users; KDE cooked and delivered the first maintenance release of KDE SC 4.4; Nvidia announced the greatly improved Nvidia 195.36.08 video driver (it is no longer available due to some fan speed issue); Canonical refreshed the look of Ubuntu. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated and the development releases.

Server

• The Web appliance runs a hardened Linux kernel, with a third-party solution for its web content filtering. It has beefed up its category database from 40 categories to 76, with a keen focus on malware and phishing threats.

• The platform should be based on the industry standard technology and support any Unix-based operating system, such as Unix, AIX and Linux. As the bank’s databases are standardised on Oracle, the solution should run on Oracle 9i and above.

Kernel Space

• The development of Linux 2.6.34 has started and is causing heated discussions on the LKML. LWN.net has analysed Linux 2.6.32.9 for security fixes and found almost twenty of them. Linux-Libre removes proprietary files from the kernel, and new graphics drivers for Radeon cards offer numerous improvements.

• A day after the release of Linux 2.6.33 in the last week of February, Linus Torvalds started merging the most important changes for Linux 2.6.34. By last Friday, he had integrated almost five thousand commits, which has added almost two hundred thousand lines of code to the kernel. Among the new additions to the kernel are the drivers for Apple’s Magic Mouse, a Python scripting engine for the tracing subsystem, and the vhost_net Virtio server designed to reduce overheads when exchanging data with guest systems via Virtio.

• Canonical’s kernel manager, Pete Graner, spoke at UbuCon—held just prior to SCALE 8x—on the “Ubuntu Kernel Development Process”. In the talk, he looked at how Ubuntu decides what goes into the kernel and how that kernel gets built and tested. It provided an interesting look inside the process that results in a new kernel getting released for each new Ubuntu version, which comes along every six months.

Graphics Stack

• The new code written in OpenCL and Direct Compute will be contributed as open source.

Applications

• Two months after the release of OpenShot 1.0, the OpenShot developers have announced the availability of version 1.10 of their open source video editor for Linux. In addition to the usual bug fixes and updates, the latest release includes new features and a number of enhancements.

• Version 1.1 brings with it a buffet of new features, speed improvements and general all round greatness that we’ve come to expect from the fast-paced development of the OpenShot team.

• The GStreamer team is proud to announce a new release in the 0.10.x stable series of the core of the GStreamer streaming media framework.

• The 0.10.x series is a stable series targeted at end users. It is not API or ABI compatible with the stable 0.8.x series. It is, however, parallel installable with the 0.8.x series.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

• Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments are often referenced as being lighter-eight Linux desktop environments than KDE and GNOME, but what are the measurable performance differences between them? Curious how much of a quantitative impact the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops have on netbook systems, we carried out a small set of tests to look at the differences in memory usage, battery power consumption, and thermal performance.

• KPlato is one of those tools that could easily get overlooked – but certainly shouldn’t. KPlato is project management tool that offers more features that many similar tools costing significantly more money (since KPlato is free – that’s fairly easy to figure out). KPlato was created with the intention of managing moderate to large projects using multiple resources, time constraints, and dependencies. KPlato features various GANTT charts, and tasks can be organized in different ways. Simply put, if you are looking for an outstanding project management tool, KPlato might be the perfect match.

• [...]

• There are tons of features offered by KPlato – many of which will only be appreciated by those deeply familiar with project management tools. But even those without a deep understanding of such tools can take advantage of KPlato. It’s an outstanding tool that can give a business (or home) a solid project management tool without having to spend any of your fiscal resources to implement.

• Now, our big question, what should be the colour? seems to be solved. But I still think that people hardly care about what ergonomics says. Common! we are linuxers, we are always curious to find new and better things. Although, I think that gnome devs probably knew that someday, someone will raise a finger on this issue, and so they made the terminal theming highly customizable.

Distributions

• DIFFERENT is good. Different is refreshing, interesting, challenging.

• Elive 2.0 is different, but that does not necessarily mean that you are going to be happy with it. Why? Well, let me explain.

• Elive 2.0 is the newest stable version of a Linux distribution – based on Debian and using the Enlightenment 17 window manager/desktop shell – which bucks the general trend in the Free/Open Source Software world.

• You have to pay for it.

• [...]

• So, Elive 2.0 ‘Topaz’ comes very highly recommended. Just don’t say you weren’t warned about the payment thing.

• So SCALE 8x went okay.

• I was interviewed by the SCALE Public Relations team; you can see the video here.

Red Hat Family

• This reminds me of earlier trends in which many of these same suppliers created open systems (read UNIX) business units, Linux business units, client/server computing business units, object oriented development units and the like.

Ubuntu

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #183 for the week February 28 – March 6th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: “Light” the new look of Ubuntu, Announcing the 10.10 Ubuntu Developer Summit, UI Freeze in place for Lucid, Developer Membership Board meeting, International Women’s Day Vote, Getting Patches Upstream, The Grand App Writing Challenge Submissions, Server Bug Zapping results, Ubuntu Classroom Team presents “ClassBot”, February 2010 Team Reports, and much, much more!

• The new font, which will be simply called “ubuntu” has been designed with cooperation between Canonical designers and a world class design agency. At the time I saw the proposed versions the full alphabet wasn’t yet complete, and I became aware of the huge attention to detail that these committed people were working towards. One thing that particularly caught my eye was the discussion on things such as how the edge of the letter ‘C’ should finish, “Should it be sharp and flush or slightly angled”. The wider masses would never be aware how much effort had been put into this.

• Canonical wants Ubuntu Linux to run on a range of devices — from mobile Internet devices all the way up to high-end servers and cloud systems. But there are two markets where Canonical has no plans to push Ubuntu.

• One of the features expected with the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release is the Ubuntu One Music Store (UOMS). The UOMS is a mechanism by which Ubuntu users can purchase songs in the MP3 format, with some of the revenue going to support Canonical. These songs are evidently compressed at a relatively high bit rate and lack any sort of DRM or watermarks. Support for the UOMS has been integrated into the Rhythmbox music player, with support for other players expected in the future. Discussion of this new feature has been relatively subdued thus far, but developers elsewhere are beginning to take notice and ask some questions about the extent to which the UOMS should be supported.

• The upcoming version of Ubuntu, named Lucid Lynx, or 10.04, packs all the punches needed to knock out any Windows from your PC. Mark Shuttleworth personally took the challenge of polishing Ubuntu to an extent that even Mac users feel envy. He is heading in the right direction. Lucid Lynx is till date the most polished, sophisticated, resource efficient, and user-friendly operating system ever built.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has announced that the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) will be take place from the 10th to the 14th of May, 2010 at the Dolce La Hulpe Hotel and Resort in Brussels, Belgium. According to Bacon, the 10.10 Ubuntu Developer Summit is “one of the most important events in the Ubuntu calendar and at it we discuss, debate and design the next version of Ubuntu”.

• Ubuntu Linux’s next release includes built-in social networking and iPhone support

• Lucid Lynx, the next version of Ubuntu Linux, is scheduled for release next month but as the alpha versions show there are a number of interesting changes to be included in this latest release.

Devices/Embedded

• The contest is open to individuals with an interest in network technology, from students to design contractors. There is no limit to the number of entries and Lantronix will be awarding prizes of $6000 and $3000 to the top two entries – with a separate prize of $3000 for the best student Linux design.

• Just released by Undo Software is UndoDB 3.0, an updated version of the company’s reversible debugger for Linux.

• It runs on the Linux operating system.

MeeGo

• MeeGo is the new Linux-based operating system borne out of the ashes merger of Moblin and Maemo. While the two groups merged just last month, the folks at SlashPhone are reporting that the first version of MeeGo will be available by the end of March.

• The open sourced Symbian OS is the biggest mobile operating system on the planet – a position largely explained by its support of Nokia, the world’s number one handset seller.

• Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia and leading chip maker Intel announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they merged their Maemo and Mobling mobile operating systems into a new platform, called MeeGo, which comes with support for smartphones and other mobile devices. The first handsets powered by the new OS are still many months away, yet the two companies are already working on the transition from Moblin and Maemo, and say they expect for the MeeGo repository to be opened by the end of March.

• As indicated earlier that Nokia and Intel entered in to an alliance to launch the Linux-based software Meego. And it is expected that at the end of this month Nokia N900 will be the first to vibrate with the Meego. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences.

• It’s a phone. It’s a computer. Chat with regular voice calls, internet calls, instant messages and SMS. Share your location, mood and status. Email on the go with rich HTML and full keyboard.

• Telecom Italia and Intel have partnered to deploy internet and online TV services based on the open source software platform Meego. The collaboration between the two groups aims to make simpler and advance the distribution and use of multimedia content, such as web TV, VoD and other online services over IP networks, enriching the offer for home entertainment and mobile devices. Meego is the new Linux-based platform formed by the merger of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo projects.

Android

• The Linux New Media awards 2010 were given out at CeBIT. The winners were announced at the “CeBIT Open Source” forum. This year, the jury included editors, journalists, the open source community and industry experts.

• Android’s strength is its open-source nature. Tweaking code to fine tune its capabilities becomes easy as a network of developers can work simultaneously to provide massive amounts of input, changes etc. Android’s development cycles have been magnificent. Version releases have been really quick.

• Adobe’s Photoshop.com has mobile apps for both iPhone and Android. Each platform features a similar set of features.

Sub-notebooks

• One of the reasons I’m personally committed to doing this goes back to my One Laptop per Child experience and girls in a poor rural part of Nigeria who helped us test the early beta-laptop builds. In their school they had slanted desks bolted to benches with 4-5 kids per desk/bench combo. When any kid fidgeted or bumped all the laptops would fall on the concrete floors. The laptops were designed to be rugged and didn’t break usually, but in this early build one of the cables to the touchpad/keyboard was 1mm too short and could become “unseated”. This meant the keyboard and the touchpad would no longer work unless something was done.

• Jolicloud has announced that its final ‘Robby’ build will be released to the public by the end of the month. It has also announced that it will be automatically switching its web application platform to Google Chrome from Mozilla Prism that it has been using currently.

Tablets

• The tablet also has an HDMI output. Kogan tells APC Magazine that the demo unit can run Android, Ubuntu Linux, or Windows — although I’m assuming he means Windows CE, since you can’t run the desktop version of Windows on an ARM-based processor.

• After playing with the tablet I hope he also crams in some extra RAM, as it felt sluggish running a UMPC-friendly version of Ubuntu (although I’m now told the that tablet may have only had 256MB of RAM in it). The tablet felt far more responsive booted into Android 1.6, which also seemed better suited to the 800×480 resolution display. Ruslan says the tablet will ship with Android 2.1, which combined with a capacitive touchscreen and an accelerometer should offer an impressive user experience.

• At its heart, Android is “just” Linux. Sony’s no stranger to Linux—the PlayStation 2 and 3 both have dabbled with Linux support. But Android is Linux-as-platform, a trusted and understood consumer branding. (Or, you know, that’s the goal.) It is, as far as operating systems go, as good or better than anything Sony has ever cooked up themselves. Rather than spending years on disparate software platforms for each device, Sony’s software engineers could spend their time building easy-to-use and beautiful user experiences on top of a unified platform. (Remind me again why the Sony Dash doesn’t use Android?)

Free Software/Open Source

• Last year proved to be a watershed year for OSS in SA and many other parts of the world. Tough economic conditions prompted many organisations to look at alternatives to proprietary software for the first time. Others that already had positive experiences with Linux and with open source Web server platforms are expanding their use of OSS.

• Even though a move is beginning into more positive economic territory in the early part of 2010, I’m expecting to see growth of OSS follow the trajectory it did in 2009. Many organisations have realised there are open source solutions that can do the same job as expensive proprietary solutions at a lower cost and with no compromise to reliability or performance.

• 2. Open source virtualisation solutions begin to blossom

• Today, many enterprises are looking towards major commercial software vendors such as Microsoft for server virtualisation solutions. But in reality, many of these solutions have at least some open source technology under their bonnets.

• It’s an interesting question, which applies to many other areas that have hitherto depended on security by obscurity. Once you bring in free software, that won’t work, at least not in the way it has. So the issue then becomes: how can these two aspects be squared?

• Zarafa’s messaging software is offered to more than 1000 BluePex customers, 300 Bluepex partners

• Airline services business Swissport has switched from commercially licensed business intelligence software to open source.

• Just about a month after acquiring the popular iPhone email client reMail, Google and the reMail team have decided to open source the application’s code. While current reMail users were able to use the app, Google decided to pull the application from the App Store after the acquisition. Given that the reMail team was joining Google to work on projects unrelated to reMail, this looks like a smart move. The source code is already available on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License.

• This was one reason that ONC developed CONNECT, open-source software that enables exchange of health information across providers regardless of size. CONNECT is one tool being used to build the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), and was demonstrated at HIMSS10’s Interoperability Showcase.

• The Federal Health Architecture, an E-Government initiative managed by the Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, has set up an online resource, projectpophealth.org, which offers an open source tool to enable health care providers and electronic health record (EHR) vendors to create summary quality measures on a patient population.

India

• Best of breed open source apps to manage your data center, backup data, build a SAN, manage bandwidth, and more. Plus: A neasy guide to recovering lost data and countering hack attacks, with software on this month’s DVD.

• Sun’s OpenDS which is based on Sun directory server focuses on shifting extranet directory scalability from hundreds of millions of user entries to billions. The goal of OpenDS which was released under the Open Source Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) was to attract a community of developers to build the next generation directory service software. OpenDS supports different operating system platforms consisting of Windows, Red Hat, Ubuntu Solaris, Open Solaris, etc.

• Dot Com Infoway, a leading offshore software and web development company from India, is currently participating in CeBIT trade fair held at Hannover, Germany. The company has vast experience in all major web development and Open Source development platforms and is backed by 300+ experienced and qualified professionals. In this year’s CeBIT, DCI focuses on development projects in PHP,

Mozilla

• In Mozilla’s world, the Firefox Web browser is but a mere battle in a larger war, one that’s aimed at punching holes through closed, proprietary Web platforms of all kinds. What’s on the horizon? According to Mozilla executive director Mark Surman, the future of Mozilla’s involvement in the Web is perhaps best exemplified by its new Drumbeat initiative.

• The Mozilla developers have released a second Firefox 4.0 preview, labelled “3.7 alpha 2″, which includes out-of-process plug-in support on Windows and Linux for more reliable browsing.

Databases

• The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

CMS

• “PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster,” explained WordPress’s Joseph Scott in a March 3 blog post.

• Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

• A full list of the changes, bug fixes and minor features is available in the change log and the GNU Affero GPL licensed source code is available to download.

Library

• ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, celebrated their one year anniversary for providing quality implementation and support services for open source ILS’s such as Koha and Evergreen

• KOHA, the first and most advanced Open Source Integrated Library System (ILS) in the world, was launched at BRAC University Ayesha Abed Library recently.

BSD

• While on the topic of other operating systems, it’s hard for me, as a long-time Linux user, not to constantly compare PC-BSD to the penguin. Usually, these comparisons turn out favourably for PC-BSD. For example, PC-BSD runs faster on my systems than most of the full-sized Linux distributions and it generally used less memory. My notebook has an Intel video card and it’s a card that has tripped up some of the more popular distros, but PC-BSD handled it without any problems. Likewise, sound worked on both of my machines without any tweaking, a feat Linux isn’t always able to match. Some people might not like the PBI self-contained packaging approach, but the OS supports more traditional forms of package management, ensuring PBI files do not have to be used.

Government

• Federal CIO Vivek Kundra flew to San Francisco for the launch in support of the city’s accomplishments. Kundra said he planned to spend his time in the area collecting ideas from the private sector on ways federal agencies could operate more efficiently.

Openness

• Manos says the Open Source Data Center Initiative is the right vehicle for making data center best practices more widely available, and can accelerate adoption of new ideas more effectively than membership-based industry consortiums.

• A new industry group is trying to apply open-source principles to the design and construction of data centers, which it says could accelerate the use of new technologies and increase competition in the industry.

• Psion today announced ‘Open Source Mobility’ (OSM), a substantial evolution of its business model, with the objective of dramatically reducing customers total cost of ownership, creating the best possible fit with customer requirements, creating new business opportunities for developers, resellers and partners, and enhancing Psion’s ability to grow and develop its business.

Programming

• A serious step in DVCS’ development took place after the quarrel between Linux developers and BitKeeper’s management, after BitKeeper accused one of the Linux developers of reverse engineering one of their commercially licensed features. Soon after, Linux programmers led by Linus Torvalds himself released Git as an improved open source solution to BitKeeper’s soft. Besides Git, Mercurial and Bazaar were also very successful alternatives to SVN, sharing many of Git’s features, but lagging in performance.

Standards/Consortia

• HTML4 has served us for more than 10 years now and there hasn’t been any major update in it, there is XHTML that has done a little more by making code more strict, if at all you are concerned with HTML compliance. Work on HTML5 was started in 2004 by a group called WHATWG founded by Apple, Mozilla and Opera. Most new browsers are now supporting new HTML5 tags. In this article, we will have a look at some HTML5 features which will make your web development easier and organized.

Leftovers

Finance

• Watching the devolution of the bank reform bill in the U.S. Senate has been painful. Banking Chairman Chris Dodd’s original proposal unveiled last year had numerous strengths, most significantly the removal of bank supervisory authority from the Federal Reserve. Dodd had decided that the Fed had done such a lousy job ignoring the housing bubble and failing to crack down on predatory lending in the mortgage market that it shouldn’t be given a second chance.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The idea that insurance rate hikes are driven by increases in the underlying cost of medical care has also been pushed by AHIP, the insurance industry’s top lobbying front group.

• It’s getting clearer that conservatives would rather sling around a scary, loaded old term and hope to elicit some emotional effect than come up with a new term — or use the right words — to communicate what they mean.

• The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Four of every five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right, and more than half believe it should never be regulated, according to a new survey.

• Stoll also complains at length that it is nigh on impossible to use this Internet contraption to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. The headline—THE INTERNET? BAH!—reads as if Montgomery Burns was working the NEWSWEEK copy desk that night. And so on. You get the idea.

• Well, Ubisoft’s master plan has collapsed in under 24-hours, as infamous cracker group Skid-Row has tackled the new DRM and rendered it useless, meaning the only people now suffering with this ridiculous DRM are legitimate owners.

ACTA

• Europe has become the centre of a storm over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Late last week, the Government of Sweden announced that the European Union was now uniformally seeking ACTA transparency. The announcement came just days after the Dutch leak that identified the specific countries opposed to a transparent approach. The revelations appear to have had a significant impact as all European Union countries are now said to support release of the ACTA text.

• This week the issue hits the European Parliament that includes an ACTA debate on Tuesday, followed by a landmark resolution that will be on the table on Wednesday. At the moment, there are two competing resolutions.

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