● 03.11.10

● Links 11/3/2010: Fedora 13 Frenzy, Free Software in City of Athens

Posted in News Roundup at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• After reading Electronics Manufacturers Use US Legal System to Thwart Hardware ‘Hacks’ I was all set to type a fiery response, but Linux Today readers beat me to it. In a nutshell, the tech industry is accelerating its attacks on our rights to do what we want with our own property.

• The article is full of revealing quotes from industry apologists, who all display an astonishing un-awareness of how asinine they sound. It was hard picking a winner, but I give the prize to Leander Kahney, author and editor, who says this is why Apple is so bent on micromanaging what its customers do with their own property:

• Isn’t that special. The nice people at Apple are making sure that dumb kids and senile old people, and all the rest of us don’t hurt ourselves, because we’re too stupid to make our own decisions. Last time I was in Home Depot I saw high-powered welding machines, bandsaws, nailguns, great big heavy pieces of lumber, bottles of sulfuric acid and muriatic acid, pesticides, and many other scary dangerous products that anyone could buy.

• You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and has an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

• Texas Linux Fest has announced the initial list of speakers and presentations for its inaugural event. Keynote speakers include Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier and Randal L. Schwartz, with additional presentations by Linux, free software, and open source experts such as Jon “maddog” Hall, Amber Graner, Bradley Kuhn, and Max Spevack.

• Of the many thousands of things we have Linus Torvalds to thank for, one of them is the venerable penguin, symbol of all things Linux. But what if Linus had chosen to instead use the Gnu (I know, that one was already taken, but humor me here), or a beaver, or a bear, or maybe a demon like Freebsd uses? (already, it’s technical a “daemon”, but let’s ignore the technicalities for the sake of this argument.)

Desktop

• Asus has pretty much stopped offering its netbooks and nettops with Linux preloaded. Instead, most of the company’s products come with Windows XP or Windows 7. But retailer Newegg is selling a first generation Asus Eee Box EB2020 nettop with Red Flag Linux, a Chinese Linux distribution that’s designed to look an awful lot like Windows XP.

• All the devices feature HD wide LED anti-glare display and an option for Windows [...] Linux Ubuntu operating system.

• In conclusion, I think the Lemur is a beautiful machine, and combined with what I consider a beautiful Operating System, particularly with the new fit and finish of Lucid. When running the Lemur it really feels like great design in hardware and software meeting well. I would happily recommend this machine to others.

Server

• Sample server FOSS operating systems include:

• * CentOS * FreeBSD * Red Hat

• Special Purpose Operating Systems

• There are a number of special purpose FOSS operating systems that offer bundles of pre-configured applications with graphical installer and management tools. Some of the most common special purpose operating systems are for file serving, firewalls, and rescue CDs. They’re usually based on an existing general purpose desktop or server operating system, but with the installation modified in such a way that a certain set of software is installed. Management in special purpose operating systems is usually very specific and tends to emphasize the system’s particular function. Many areas of management are not readily accessible through the default management interface. On the bright side, special purpose FOSS operating systems may provide a quick and easy way to fulfill a specific need – if you can find one that accomplishes what you require.

• Sample special purpose FOSS operating systems include:

• * Knoppix Rescue CD * FreeNas Free NAS file server * Smoothwall Firewall

• Best Linux Distro for Web Server: If you are planning to build a web hosting company or simply host your own website at home, then it is best to use Linux as your operating system. Linux servers have been known to be extremely reliable and rarely crashes so there’s less downtime. Linus Torvalds has once been quoted as saying “How do you power off this machine?” when upgrading the site “linux.cs.helsinki.fi”, and after using the machine for several months.

• Linux is an excellent choice for a server operating system, no matter what the size of business. However, it is still not very easy to administrate. Recently many distributions have launched their own interface to configure these server components (like Apache and Samba), but really failed at delivering an easy-to-use interface to configure it. That alone turns off many SMB (small and medium business) folks. eBox is trying to fix this particular issue. eBox (or eBox Platform, to give it its full name) can play multiple roles. It can act as a network gateway, an infrastructure manager, a unified threat manager, an office server, a unified communication server or a combination of any of these. eBox is delivering these functions using already popular open source software with a solid administration interface.

• At SCALE 8x, Ronald Minnich gave a presentation about the difficulties in trying to run millions of Linux kernels for simulating botnets. The idea is to be able to run a botnet “at scale” to try to determine how it behaves. But, even with all of the compute power available to researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories—where Minnich works—there are still various stumbling blocks to be overcome.

• CUDA, an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA that uses GPUs to improve the performance of some types of applications. According to Fixstars, the Yellow Dog distribution, based on the free CentOS Red Hat clone, includes “multiple versions of CUDA and can easily switch between them via a setting in a configuration file or an environment variable”. Additionally, it features Fixstars’ own Eclipse-based graphical IDE for CUDA.

Kernel Space

• Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density, always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive, worth-reading summary stating that “4 KiB logical sector support is broken in both the kernel and partitioners.” As the subsequent discussion revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that we’re not quite that badly prepared.

• And that brings about a thorny and underpublicized problem. Windows Vista, Windows 7, along with OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and versions of the Linux kernel all support hard drives with a 4KB sectors. Windows XP does not.

• Linus Torvalds has released the first RC of Linux 2.6.34 and completed the integration of the next version of the kernel’s most important changes. Improvements include graphics drivers for recent Radeon GPUs and for the graphics cores of some Intel processors that are only expected to be released early next year. Another new addition is the LogFS solid-state storage file system.

Applications

• I’m glad I did, as Dan Ellis gave a storming demonstration of the OpenShot video editor. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for: a simple iMoviesque interface without the learning-curve+complexity of an editor like Cinelerra.

• The demo was excellent, showing all the key features of OpenShot (polished interface, easily applied effects & transitions, SVG titles which can be edited in Inkscape etc.). For the record OpenShot is written using Python on top of the MLT framework. There was even footage of a donkey, and as we all know, everybody loves donkeys.

• Linux users capable of compiling programs from source are free to download the package and learn just what the early days of the web looked like circa 1993.

• According to Webmonkey, the package runs surprisingly well on modern Linux systems, and the few niggles that exist – such as poor support for PNG format graphics – are busily being patched out by GitHub community members.

• Some system utilities do a variety of things well. They come with tools to give users lots of solutions in one package. Other system apps like the Atol File Manager perform a dedicated function flawlessly without adding other specialties. Atol took a while to grow on me, but now this app is one of my most-used Linux tools.

• I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to Linux arpeggiators, and I encourage readers to check out QMidiArp for themselves. I’ll return in a short while with profiles of the Arpage and Hypercyclic arpeggiators, so be sure to check in for more arpeggiated fun. Meanwhile, stay tuned and keep making those joyful noises.

• Darktable is a new RAW converter, photo editor and image manager for Linux and MacOS. It is in early development and has some really cool features. most of them I only have partially explored, but what I saw was promising.

Instructionals

Games

• For Valve’s Steam client, CrossOver Games installs Microsoft’s DirectX rather than use Wine’s built in DirectX libraries.

• Illwinter Game Design released a patch for the turn-based strategy game Dominions 3: The Awakening this week; changes include:

• * Eliminated nations are now also shown in the graphs. * Spell AI improved regarding when to cast Arrow Fend, Gift of Flight and Legions of Steel. * Could get some kind of mine even though all site slots were full, fixed.

Desktop Environments

• Window Maker is a fast, lightweight window manager based as closely as possible on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface. (You may be familiar with NeXTStep an ancestor of Mac OSX, although the look and feel has changed a fair bit between the two.)

• So take this from somebody who has already done a lot of performance work: Benchmarks, on their own, mean almost nothing if you don’t understand them. Especially if they are seriously flawed (I mean, testing filesystem performance by doing CPU-intensive tasks? Hallo? Probably even FAT16 could provide the same results in those tests on an SSD.), but even if the results are useful numbers, it is still necessary to understand what the numbers actually say. I think I wouldn’t even have a big problem forging a “benchmark” where KDE would get better (and correct) numbers than LXDE by finding a scenario that’d be twisted enough.

• The GNOME Developer Kit is a Linux distro based on Foresight Linux. Its new release shows a somewhat reduced collection of software for GNOME developers.

• The size of the GNOME Developer Kit system image was reduced from 1.4 GBytes to under 700 MBytes. To this end, Firefox was replaced by Epiphany and multimedia codecs were excluded. The distro for developers and translators now fits on a single CD.

Distributions

• One of the things I love about software, particularly open source software, is innovation can come from anywhere. Sometimes it appears out of large tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM or Sun and other times it can come from one person writing code on a second hand computer in their college dorm. Software is really the expression of ideas and concepts, which can come from anyone. So I really enjoy seeing small open source projects try new things. Some will succeed and be adopted and some will fade away, but the amazing thing is to see people put their idea out there and present it to the world. Which is why I was thrilled when a few people directed me to Paldo and suggested it was worth a look.

• Paris, March 10th, 2010 – Mandriva, Europe’s leading Linux solutions publisher, will display its latest products at the 2010 Solutions Linux exhibition, from March 16 to 18 at the porte de Versailles Exhibition Centre – Hall 1 – Stand E 29.

• The Frugalware development team has announced the release of Frugalware 1.2, the 12th stable release of the Linux distribution. Frugalware 1.2 comes with only a number of bug fixes from the second release candidate, but there are some pretty big changes from the previous stable release, Frugalware 1.1. The biggest update is the move to KDE 4 code based on the aging KDE 3.5 one, as the software pack was deemed mature enough to make it to the stable release. There are also plenty of package updates.

• If you are looking for a Linux distro specialized for the common everyday desktop computer then PCLOS is the number one choice. Like the much advertised MacOSX, PCLOS is ready to do every fun stuff, like watch online videos, download files using torrents, do some photo editing make DVD slideshows etc., right after install. PCLOS 2010 is the first release featuring KDE 4 as default desktop. Despite using KDE 4, the PCLOS architects have managed to maintain the original and unique style of this great distro. Though KDE4 series is radically different from KDE 3, an average Joe user who installs PCLOS 2010 wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I think this would greatly help in KDE 4 adoption among more and more people. I am looking forward for the final release to install on my ASUS Nova lite mini desktop at home which is currently running PCLOS 2009.

• I have been looking at PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 because I like the rolling release concept and PCLinuxOS does keep things rolling. I have the beta installed on a system with an NVidea GeForce 220 GT and an HP HDMI 25″ wide screen flat panel display, this combination is very problematic for most distribution but has no issues of any kind in the beta. Plymouth is installed by default, it does not currently work from the Live CD but works fine in the installed system. Plymouth will work on the Live CD for the final release and this was presented as a known issue. The Plymouth issue is minor and it gave me the opportunity to see that there were no errors at start up.

New Releases

• The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.2, our twelfth stable release.

• The Open Xange Team is proud to announce the very first release of:

• * Open Xange to the x86_64 platfom * Open Xange with KDE 4.4 * Download: Open Xange 64 bits!

• The VortexBox community has been working hard on this release. We have added a lot of new features to make VortexBox the best NAS for SqueezeBox. These include adding the new SqueezeBox Server 7.4.2 and fixing some critical bugs in VortexBox Player. VortexBox Player is now the highest resolutions (192/24) player available that is compatible with SqueezeBox Server (SBS).

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 30.36, +0.15, +0.50%) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Swedish Internet company Voddler has standardized its movie service on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Voddler has also selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite as the basis for its new infrastructure, providing the company with a centralized and scalable server platform.

• Red Hat already focuses on Linux, JBoss middleware and virtualization. But there are multiple signs the open source company will make a business intelligence move soon. And Red Hat’s move could involve either Jaspersoft or EnterpriseDB — or both. Here’s some analysis, some speculation and some potential implications for Red Hat’s channel partners.

• EVP, CFO of Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Charles E Jr Peters sells 51,600 shares of RHT on 03/09/2010 at an average price of $30.45 a share.

Fedora 13

• For Enterprise users, the new Dogtag Certificate System is something that could represent an innovative approach to handling security credentials. According to Fedora’s project description, Dogtag is an enterprise-class open source Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smartcard management.

• The other item I find interesting in the Fedora 13 release cycle is the new boot.fedoraproject.org. (BFO) effort. Think of it as pxeboot on steroids for network installs.

• Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it’s the first OS deploying Nouveau’s Gallium3D driver (there’s benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

• System Rollback feature with Btrfs

• Btrfs lets you take light weight snapshots of the filesystem which can be mounted or booted into selectively. This means, before doing something crazy with your system, you can easily take a snapshot of the partition and in case something bad happens, just boot into the older snapshot.

• In Fedora 13, codenamed Goddard, if you have selected one or more partitions as btrfs, then it will automatically create new snapshots with every yum operation. You will also be allowed to select which snapshot to boot into. This is indeed an amazing addition.

• So now that Fedora 13 Alpha is out…. have you given it a try? What do you think about the wallpaper? We want to hear your feedback, because there isn’t actually that much time to update the wallpaper for beta, I think a little over a week. We haven’t gotten much feedback about it yet, so we need to hear from you now!

Ubuntu

• So long story short, halfway through the test, Linux excels in consistency and performance, not showing any signs of slowing down. OpenOffice, Firefox, Songbird… you name it, they all behave as usual, sometimes a bit quicker than I am used to!

• Note to readers from the Ubuntu Planet – this is written for people whom don’t have a clue what Ubuntu is. Hence why I describe it.

• With the global economy in a depression, most people cannot currently afford to buy a new computer. But, you don’t have to.

• [...]

• Ubuntu takes a minimal amount of technological knowledge and time to install, and you will be up and running in a few minutes.

• So those are 10 things I do with Ubuntu that I’d have a hard time doing on Windows. It’s arguable whether you’d need to be able to do some of this stuff, and that I accept.

• I realise that there are Windows-based tools that can replicate/emulate some of these tasks, or maybe Windows Vista or 7 can do some of the above tasks. I kinda stopped bothering with Windows after XP, so my knowledge may be lacking. Feel free to correct me in the comments, or suggest what you can’t live without.

• In this post I’m going to list 16 things that I think could be improved in Lucid. I’m going to try my best to address the issues in detail and offer solutions. Of course, all of this is also a matter of opinion too. The object of this post is to make you think about ways we could improve each one. I’ll try to link to bugs where there are bugs, but a lot of these are quite new design decisions only present in 10.04 and hence don’t have bugs filed.

• With Ubuntu 10.04 being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Canonical is just going to stick with Lucid Lynx being the last release where Intel user-space mode-setting is supported, albeit for most Intel users you will still be greeted by a KMS experience, just with an older driver and many back-ported patches. This decision was shared on the ubuntu-x mailing list.

• Did you ever get annoyed by the restart/logout/shutdown countdown timers that presented themselves in previous Ubuntu releases?

• [...]

• All three main ‘session’ dialogues have been reworded thus allowing the user to make an informed choice as to whether the action selected it the one they want.

Devices/Embedded

• The chips support Linux at the 2.6.26 kernel level and an open source stack that includes Apache, PHP and MySQL, as well as the GNU GCC compilers and the C/C++ compilers that Tilera has licensed from Silicon Graphics. (This is what leads everyone to believe that the Tilera chips are variants of the MIPS architecture once controlled by SGI.)

• LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from March 15th – 17th, 2010.

• Applicants must have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, three or more years experience in Java, familiarity in Web standards, experience working with browser engines and experience working with embedded devices on Linux.

• Access subsidiary IP Infusion announced a new Linux-ready “stateless tunneling” product that enables the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Based on the IETF’s “6rd” (IPv6 rapid deployment) specifications, ZebOS Rapid Deployment forwards IPv6 traffic though existing IPv4 networks, enabling carriers to more easily transition to IPv6, says IP Infusion.

Wind River (Intel)

• Wind River today announced it has integrated support for HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades into its industry-leading Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, tools and build system. Wind River Linux is the first registered CGL 4.0 solution supported on HP ProLiant server blades for HP BladeSystem, allowing customers to standardize on one common carrier-grade operating system platform to build highly reliable network elements across different hardware platforms.

• Wind River said that it has integrated support for HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades into its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, tools and build system.

Phones

Nokia

• Nokia might dominate the global phone market but its clunky old S60 operating system just doesn’t cut it anymore, taking the shine off impressive new devices such as the N97 mini. Facing serious competition on all sides, the Finnish mobile behemoth has unveiled the N900 – its first Linux-powered smartphone running the Maemo 5 mobile operating system

• Pervasip’s Chief Information Officer Mark Richards noted, “We are very excited to be a voice and data service provider for this mobile computer. The N900 uses the Linux derivative Maemo operating system, an open-source platform that enables the Maemo community to freely modify and continually develop software as part of the shared goal of bringing added value to Maemo. VoX is a Linux shop and we employ several Linux experts. We congratulate Nokia for developing such a sensational introductory Linux phone. In our opinion, there has never been a more responsive and intuitive device.”

• I put the N900 around the middle of the pack. Despite the keys being crammed up against each other they’ve a slight contour to them, so you’ll have little trouble finding the one you want. Pressing a key yields a satisfying click, but compared to my #2 keypad they’re maybe just a bit stiff.

• At the core of the Nokia 900′s Modest email client is Tinymail, a library for developing mobile apps with email features. Three years in the making, Tinymail 1.0 has made it out the door. In addition to making it past the 1.0 barrier, this release brings a bunch of improvements and new features for the project.

Palm

• On a more technical front, we’re told the PDK supports the Linux standard SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease in porting and development (Unreal for Linux runs using SDL, for instance), and that developers could even build apps like an audio processor that rely on PDK components but don’t show up in the UI at all, or OpenGL-empowered things that aren’t necessarily games or in 3D. Also, existing developers have only been able to do “full screen” games that rely on PDK components alone, but the PDK beta lets you mix and match webOS UI with PDK elements. Currently there aren’t many PDK games that use the extra Palm hardware like the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but we’re told that’s all exposed to the developer, along with any other element of webOS that Mojo SDK users have access to. One notable plugin hangup is the fact that Flash only works in the browser, and can’t be embedded into a regular webOS app, PDK or no — though we have to assume this is something that’s in the works.

• Palm has released its Plug-in Development Kit, enabling native development for those who find AJAX just can’t cut it.

• Currently available PDK developed games do not utilize additional Palm hardware elements such as the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but they are available to developers to integrate along with any other element of webOS that the Mojo SDK supports.

Android

• SMARTPHONE OS DEVELOPER Google has released its third version of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

• Google has opened the door to iPhone-like 3D games on certain Android handsets, offering support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard with its latest Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

Sub-notebooks

• The second smartbook to be announced was the HP AirLife, which weighs in at 2.2 pounds and is based on the Linux operating system. The first generation of this product is planned for Europe only, but it should make its way into the United States at some point.

• Like the netbooks for solid-state memory, smartbooks are more dependent on a broadband connection and cloud-based applications and data services. The present generation of smartbooks does not appear to be corporate-ready, but this too will change with time.

• When To Choose A Netbook Since both the solid-state memory netbooks and solid-state memory smartbooks are mostly Linux-based systems, at least initially, they cannot be easily blended into a corporate environment based on the Microsoft OS and applications.

• So, no surprises, but for a product that I might be able to use on my Netbook, not very likely. The problem is a lack of modularity and this is missing from many products today. As people start spreading out over the computer power spectrum, it would be nice to have a small VS core to which could be added libraries and functionality that could conceivable run on a Netbook.

• Linux is an example of this approach, a main core that is controlled by a small groups and a plethora of bits and pieces that can be added on as desired. Since the core is small, it can run anywhere. With products like our example VS, you will need a fairly powerful minimum spec to run it properly and this is typically about double what MS puts done as their minimum requirements especially in the memory areas.

• The launch of Apple’s iPad will pave the way for a slew of rival products this year, an ARM executive said Wednesday, predicting over 50 tablet PC devices will be launched globally.

• If predictions from Roy Chen, processor-maker ARM’s worldwide mobile computing ODM manager, come true then we’re going to see a whole lot of tablet computers in 2010. The exec said that he reckons there’ll be more than 50 launched globally this year.

Tablets

• What might the iPad have been? Apple announced it as a Magical and Revolutionary Device, defining “an entirely new category”. But it actually only addresses a small part of the yawning gap between mobile handsets and notebook computers, where there’s still a lot of defining to be done. There’s space there for dramatically different reimaginations of the iPhone, for counter-attacks from handset companies, and for diverse devices based on Google’s Android.

• Remember the Freescale Smart Tablet from CES earlier this year? Well its returned with a range of compatible operating systems which now includes Android, Chromium OS or Linux.

• It can’t touch the form factor of the iPad or some other tablet devices, but a $200 device that runs the open source Linux, Android or Chrome operating systems might just find a place in the already-crowded tablet world.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-source Java framework specialist SpringSource has unveiled a new incarnation of its Apache Tomcat-based tc Server, offering application developers and operators additional tools for building, deploying, and monitoring their software on the lightweight runtime platform.

• So, I used metrics gathered from SourceForge.net to compile this list. I think the results show some interesting things about computer users the world over. Here they are along with the total number of downloads for each one. NOTE: this list does not include open source projects outside of SourceForge. Enjoy.

• 1. eMule – 520,970,337 downloads: The most popular open source download of all time is a peer-to-peer file sharing client. What does this tell you?

• Other accusations in the same vein come from more mature people. But the line of thought is still the same: free is good, commercial is bad. Such individuals are clearly unaware of the fact that free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, can be sold for monetary gain.

• But then this is the Linux community. One has to be ready for poorly educated, illogical assertions aplenty. The problem is that such uneducated, shrill voices are often taken as the majority – in the same way that a mob follows the voice of him/her who shouts loudest – and does a lot of damage to a company which is trying to provide things free and also keep the red ink out of its books.

• The low-hanging fruit in the renewable energy business still lies with efficiency. Cutting your energy use without crimping your lifestyle gives you a faster payback than turning into Ed Begley Jr.

• It’s still good to be a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on energy use, even if your politics are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, because there’s money in saving, money you can spend on cigars or vacations. Or food.

• If you want to develop an application that incorporates information about movies, do we have a tool for you. IMDbPY is a Python package that can retrieve and manage the huge amount of data available from IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database. IMDb data is free for personal and non-commercial use; IMDbPY is free software. The tool is widely used by video collection managers, multimedia players, and media centers, says its creator, Italian developer Davide Alberani.

• No matter how smart a worker you are, there are plenty of open source tools that can make you more productive. They range from hugely useful Firefox extensions such as iMacros (which lets you record repetitive, multi-step tasks and then execute them with one click) to collaboration applications for efficient co-working. Here, you’ll find five of our best posts and collections on productivity enhancement tools. Everything found here is free.

• There’s no moss growing on StatusNet these days. The company has been busy announcing cloud service plans, an enterprise network service, and the 0.9 release of the open source StatusNet microblogging platform.

• To get a sense where all this is going, I took the chance to ask a few questions of StatusNet’s CEO, Evan Prodromou. He gives the scoop on the new stuff coming to StatusNet and provides a few thoughtful answers on where he thinks social media is heading.

• The H attended this year’s CeBIT trade show on the world’s largest fairground in Hannover, Germany and had the chance to meet up with a wide variety of people from the open source community, including free and open source software (FOSS) developers, project members and commercial open source companies.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has promoted its web extensions prototype package – Jetpack – by pushing it upstairs and readying it for production with its Firefox browser.

• Twelve years ago I spent the month of March frantically drafting version 1.0 of the Mozilla Public License. That was a public process, a part of the launch of the Mozilla project. Approximately a year later we created the 1.1 version.

• Ten years on, Mozilla has concluded that its open-source underpinnings are due for a refresh.

• The Firefox browser and Thunderbird email software are governed by the Mozilla Public License, which determines what rights and restrictions apply to programmers who want to use the software in their own projects, extend it in various ways, or just peek at the programming instructions that underlie the software.

Databases

• It seems like there’s been little but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there’s good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn’t with Oracle.

CMS

• Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city’s needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal’s multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.

• Stewart is known for his ThemeShaper blog and Thematic WordPress theme framework. The WordPress community has produced thousands of free (and paid) themes, but most are intended to be deployed as-is on other blogs. The Thematic theme is a framework that’s designed to be customized and extended, and supported a number of child themes based on the main Thematic framework.

Business

• These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3) labor market.

• Take, for example, U.S. patent and copyright protection laws and policies. They reinforce proprietary, “closed source” rights and policies. As a result of this system, many substantial U.S. companies have formed around breakthrough ideas, but incentives are in place for those companies to guard and protect their intellectual property, even if others outside the company could extend or advance it more rapidly.

BSD

• OpenSSH 5.4 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

• OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

Licensing

• I would like to announce that starting with version 6, Liferay Portal will be made available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) v2.1.

Leftovers

• With reasoning worthy of a Kafka plot, PayPal told Cryptome it couldn’t provide a reason for shutting down the account. “In accordance with our Privacy Policy, we cannot share any specific information regarding this Account with you,” Young was told.

• Online retailer NewEgg said late Monday that it has confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and that it had broken off its supply relationship with IPEX, the supplier. NewEgg also apologized.

• The fake Core i7s surfaced this weekend, and Intel confirmed them on Monday morning. At the time, reports had indicated that the fake processors were in fact so-called “demo units”.

• The government still seems to be shying away from spending too much money advertising its ID card and National ID Register schemes.

• In a commons answer yesterday ID minister Meg Hillier said that the Identity and Passport Service had spent £1.3m so far buying “buying advertising space to communicate to the business community nationally and to consumers in Greater Manchester, north west England and London” about the ID card and National ID Register schemes.

ACTA

• The European Parliament defied the EU executive today (10 March), casting a vote against an agreement between the EU, the US and other major powers on combating online piracy and threatening to take legal action at the European Court of Justice.

• A strong majority of MEPs (663 against and 13 in favour) today voted against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), arguing that it flouts agreed EU laws on counterfeiting and piracy online.

• Members of the European Parliament have raised concerns today with the European Commission on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a broad-scope agreement on counterfeiting goods, generic medicines and piracy over the internet, that raises questions of transparency and citizens’ rights since the negotiations are conducted in total secrecy. The ALDE group is asking for the Parliament to be provided with immediate and full information about the negotiations in accordance with Art. 218 TFEU before the next round of negotiations begin in New Zealand in April.

• With wide cross-party support, the European Parliament today adopted a resolution demanding transparency on the negotiations regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a plurilateral and far-reaching deal (including internet issues) that is being negotiated by the Commission on behalf of the EU. The Commission is yet to provide negotiation documents to the European Parliament, a violation of the Lisbon Treaty. (1)

• The European Parliament today voted on a resolution that demands transparency in the ACTA negotiations, and that the Commission puts all papers on the table.

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