● 04.01.10

● Links 1/4/2010: MeeGo and GNOME 2.30 Are Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Still, Linux has found multiple back doors into the small business market — without necessarily attracting much attention from small business owners.

• Small business network appliances — everything from routers to switches to security hardware — often have Linux at the core. Plus, a range of managed services and SaaS applications run atop Linux. (One prime example: N-able’s N-central software for MSPs was written on Linux.) And Google Android will surely give Linux a lift in the mobile small business market.

‘Crapware’

• Sure, there are dumb programs that can be installed in Linux. Generally, they are pretty straightforward to uninstall though. Sure, you could mess up your Linux system if you tried hard enough, but in general programs are fairly easy to sanitize or destroy. Certainly there are complexities at play with things like gconf, but they’re nothing compared to the Windows’ system registry.

• If your set two machines side by side at Dell, you’ll notice in some cases that both machines, although equal in hardware specs and feature, are different in price, with the Linux machine actually being more expensive than the equivalent Windows machine. So what gives? Why does a machine with Windows cost less than one with Linux on it? One simple word: Malware.

Server

• I could rush out to try OpenSolaris now, while it still lives, but I think GNU/Linux does what I need very well.

• Cisco announced an updated line of Linksys wireless 802/11/b/g/n routers for the home market, including a Linux model.

Kernel Space

• Another month, another kernel release. Last month saw what is hopefully the final RC (release candidate) 2.6.33 kernel, and so it should have been released by the time you read this. The latest kernel includes lots of shiny new features that have been developed over the past three months since 2.6.32, including some nice virtualisation speed-ups (detecting when virtual machine guest’s VCPUs are within spinlocks and automatically yielding), driver updates and the removal of the legacy ‘anticipatory’ IO scheduler (long since replaced in function by the CFQ or ‘Completely Fair Queuing’ one).

MeeGo

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linpus Technologies is its newest member.

• Linpus is a popular Linux distribution for the consumer PC market with a long history of shipping on notebooks and netbooks for many of the world’s largest OEMs. It is becoming a member of The Linux Foundation to play an ongoing role in the MeeGo project and other community initiatives that advance Linux’s competitive position for a new generation of computing devices.

• Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open – as we set out to do from the beginning.

• The MeeGo community has “opened the repositories” on early code for the open source mobile Linux operating system, which combines the Intel-backed Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms. Images are now publicly available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base “from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer,” says the community.

• In a statement today at the official MeeGo community Web site, Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imad Sousou announced that the MeeGo source code and first installable images are available for download. The platform itself is still incomplete and under heavy active development. The purpose of this release is to make it possible for third-party developers to begin participating in the project.

Applications

• Makagiga is a free, easy-to-use, cross-platform application for doing a variety of tasks, such as text editing, todo listing, RSS reading, and simple image viewing. Plugins are used to implement its various capabilities. It can perform file import/export, backing up files, Internet searching (Google, Wikipedia), and more.

• You may not be able to be in two places at once, but there’s no reason your e-mail can’t be. The Sync Mail Dir tools let you synchronize a pair of mailboxes in maildir format across a network over a Secure Shell (SSH) link, so you can have all your messages available in two places. It’s similar to the Maildirsync utility in design and requirements, but more efficient, and while that program hasn’t been updated in more than five years, Sync Mail Dir’s newest version was released just last week.

• Version 1.0 of lightweight image viewer Viewnior – which reached number 5 on our 12 top applications of 2009 – was released yesterday.

• It’s still easy to see why. Not only is Viewnior lightening fast and super light but still manages to pack in the features including in-app cropping and support for animated images.

• According to the peekabot project’s Web site:

• “peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Instructionals

Games

• That’s via telnet crawl.akrasiac.org, on a 120Mhz Pentium machine running Crux. As you might be able see in the lower corner, the memory and processor load are negligible, probably because the bulk of the responsibility is shifted off this machine and out into the ether. I have installed crawl directly on to this computer, but the work involved seems a bit overkill when I can just use telnet to jump into a game remotely.

Desktop Environments

• The KDE Desktop Project has hit upon the idea of having the American socialite Kim Kardashian promote its next release.

• April 1st is a very difficult day for me. Both my parents tested positive for the gullible gene. The Internet makes it…

• KDE is one of the two major desktops for Linux and most of its applications have names beginning with “K”. Kardashian manages to keep her name in the headlines all the time, most recently by releasing a sex tape which led to the calling off of her marriage to American sports personality, Reggie Bush.

• The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features.

• GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME 2.28 release from September 2009.

Distributions

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

• Built with Linux-Live scripts 6.2.9, the Debian-based PureOS 2.0 Linux distro has been recently released. This distro and live CD features the KDE 4.3.4 desktop environment, Linux kernel 2.6.33 w/ with Squashfs 3.4 and LZMA, Iceweasel 3.5.8, Icedove 2.0.0.22 with Lightning 0.9, OpenOffice 3.2.0 and many other new applications. The PureOS 2.0 release announcement shows a Full List of included packages.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is updating its flagship Linux server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to version 5.5 providing performance and feature improvements.

• The new Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) release takes advantage of the latest Intel and AMD processors as well as advancements in virtualization and Windows interoperability. The release of RHEL 5.5 comes as Red Hat is about to begin to ramp up its next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.

Ubuntu

• There is also an Ubuntu Foundation that has dedicated funds of $10 million that could keep Ubuntu going if Canonical stopped backing it. I’ve previously been critical of Canonical keeping the grasp on the trademark, and not giving the dormant Foundation greater control. With the funds Canonical has put into Ubuntu I suppose it is reasonable for it to have a pseudo-guaranteed position. Mark Shuttleworth has been a member of the ‘Community Council’ since inception and was willing to stand for election as if he was any other person of the community. This is quite telling of Canonical not enforcing a control that it legally could. At the last developer summit Mark announced that he would be passing the helm to Jane Silber allowing Mark to take a more ‘hands on’ role.

• The above icons come in all main Tango! colours as well as one awesome Ubuntu Aubergine coloured one for the brand-obsessed contingent, too. (Which, I must say, looks mighty awesome when using the Radiance theme)

• I’ve read about all of the changes online (which are below), and from what I’ve read, it’s faster, more reliable, cleaner bootup screen (which is very simplified), and a brand new theme. It always seems to be that Ubuntu always has a different theme when they release a new version!

Variants

• Quick steps:

• * Download the ISO or the torrent. * While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features in Linux Mint 8 Xfce, read the User Guide and make sure to quickly go through the known issues. * After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5 (as described in the user guide). * Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy Linux Mint 8 Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• As for Microsoft, Moorestown’s funky power management approach and non-standard PCI implementation could give Linux a healthy headstart in mobile x86 devices. But that’s a topic for another day.

• available from chinagrabber.com this is the Bphone, a hybrid netbook/cellphone which features a rotating touch screen and a keyboard…

Android

• My current Android build of choice for my Kaiser, and the second one I would like to recommend here, is Myn’s Warm Donut. Under this build I have a fully functional Android system on my Kaiser. Warm Donut is a variation of Andriod 1.6 for your device, this version is quite snappy/responsive. Which of the two builds you would like to use is up to you – personally I recommend trying them both and seeing which one you enjoy more/suits your needs.

• Google declined to comment on Engadget’s claim that Google will decouple Android components from core code releases, offering them over Android Market, says eWEEK. In other Android news on eWEEK, the Motorola Droid started receiving Android 2.1 updates, and Google denied that it’s sharing ad revenues from Android apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• A few of years ago, we saw a spate of open source name changes, including Likewise and SpringSource. The reasoning then seems to remain the case today: the positive association of open source with cost savings and the positive connotations of an open source project in the enterprise outweigh any disconnect or disassociation with the project. This seems true even though differentiation from open source projects was a key challenge among vendors we polled recently for our report on sales and marketing for open source software.

• Karlie Robinson, a Rochester local and open source entrepreneur, gave a short talk at RIT about open source and business as a part of the Computer Science House (CSH) Seminar Series. This year, CSH has hosted speakers such as Kevin Purdy, contributing editor of Lifehacker, and Charles Profitt, of the Rochester Linux User Group (LUGOR), which meets regularly at Rochester Institute of Technology in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.

• At first glance, the ecosystem in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world can seem a bit complicated. There are several ways to get software: project websites where you can download it directly, use a software management tool that your Linux distribution provides, or you may also be able to install a Linux distribution that includes everything you need right out of the box! Once you understand this ecosystem, you can find where your contributions would be most useful, and why contributing is beneficial to your organization and the FOSS community.

Fusion

• Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible, according to researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software open source.

• A University of Washington team has developed a system it says makes all software effectively open source, allowing users to add custom features to any program.

• “Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

• Most people with an interest in software freedom will turn to GNU/Linux as their operating system of choice. Few realize however, that the vast majority of GNU/Linux distros are not entirely free. Imagine migrating away from Windows, only to find that by installing GNU/Linux you are accepting a restrictive Microsoft license!

• Many distros promote the use of proprietary software, knowingly show incorrect licenses, and attempt to hide the problem under the guise of an ‘option of freedom’. When the majority of developers of a collection of software don’t care about freedom, neither will their users. Non-free distros make almost no attempts to inform their userbases of the importance of freedom, even though they wouldn’t exist without it. I will discuss how the option of freedom is an unacceptable solution, and propose some real fixes.

• The problem

• I’ve been using GNU/Linux for over 5 years, but I’ve only recently discovered just how much non-free software my distro contains. I decided to search through my system and remove everything that was non-free, and there was quite a lot that I removed.

Education

• As an advocate for open source the additional observations left me feeling good because I can assist with many of them. I currently present at educational technology conferences about FOSS and how it provides greater value to education than merely lowering costs.

• Since this needed to be a single double-sided sheet of information, it’s been edited quite judiciously! A lot of great stuff has been left out here, but I think this is a sampling of the best-of-the-best of the resources out there. So if you’re a K12 educator looking for more information on open source but overwhelmed by the amount of info out there, I’m hoping this will be a good shortlist for you to start from!

Mozilla

• Today we released the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the State of the Internet. This is the start of something new… in addition to metrics related discussions on this blog and across the broader community, we wanted to create a somewhat standardized, ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes. You should expect to see this report released at the end of each calendar quarter.

• As part of Mozilla’s ongoing security and stability update process, Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.0.19 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.2.

• And now the Mozilla graphics team have issued themselves a goal, according to a mailing list message: ship a developer preview version of Firefox with Direct2D support that will work on at least some machines by the end of the second quarter.

• The issue is caused by the fact that traditionally web browsers have displayed visited and unvisited links differently. A web application can use this information to find out what pages a user has visited. The W3C has responded to this problem by modifying the CSS 2.1 specification to allow browsers to represent all links as unvisited, or to take other measures to ensure the privacy of the user.

• On Tuesday, the open sourcers pushed out Firefox 3.0.19, which includes several security and stability updates, and in a brief blog post, Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto confirmed that this would be version 3′s final incarnation. It patches six vulnerabilities, five listed as critical.

SaaS

• JumpBox, providers of IT infrastructure solutions, announced a major upgrade to their offering, including the unveiling of their new product, which delivers open source server applications as a service. Here’s what resellers should know.

• “Open Source as a service,” as JumpBox calls it, is exactly what it says on the tin. The company now allows 55 of their namesake “JumpBoxes,” each one a virtual machine containing an open-source server application like Ruby on Rails or MySQL, to be deployed in on-premise, cloud, and hosted environments. The packages can be downloaded directly from JumpBox with a paid subscription.

Funding

• VC’s pouring more money in, record setting financials and analyst acclaim validate that open source is finding an eager market in the enterprise

• [...]

• First MuleSoft, makers of open source middle ware announced that they have just raised another 12 million dollars in a level C round. In the present money raising market, this is no small feat. MuleSoft has raised nearly 30 million dollars now from some very blue chip Silicon Valley investors. They claim 5 out of the top 10 banks in the world as their customers, 2,500 deployments and over 1.5 million downloads.

BSD

• I’ve heard on BSD Talk, which I recommend highly, that some kind of journaling is coming to the FFS/UFS in FreeBSD. I don’t know what the real-geek opinion of journaling in BSD is, but it seems to me like a good idea.

• So I’ll have a whole lot of user files (with my 3 GB+ of Thunderbird mail on an 8 GB ext3-formatted USB stick) on this FreeBSD installation, and I could very well see myself in this environment at least until Debian Squeeze’s release as a Stable distribution is imminent.

Releases

• British organization Public-i has made its ePetitions software publicly available under European Public License (EUPL) on the Forge page of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) information service.

Openness

• The primary legal materials of the United States — laws, hearings, opinions, dockets, regulations, and other writings issued by the government that govern our daily lives — are not readily available. A national conversation is taking place in 2010 at many of the top law schools in the country to help define what it would take for our government to embrace the ideas behind Law.Gov that all primary legal materials should be readily available in authenticated registries and repositories. These workshops have strong participation from the legal academy, including law librarians, professors, and deans. But, they also involve senior officials from the federal and state government as well as a strong representation from non-profits and for-profits involved in presenting legal information to the public and to the legal profession.

Standards/Consortia

• On January 4th, 2010, Microsoft published on his website a job offer for a Linux and Open Office Compete Lead. Since then the offer has been removed, but a PDF version of that page is still available here and in other places online. Reading that offer is very interesting because it proves, in case you weren’t convinced yet, what really constitutes the reason of Microsoft’s huge market “share”.

• Among other things, the job offer says that (bold fonts are mine) “the job consists of focusing on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for… Steve Ballmer… The core mission of CSI is to win share against Linux and OpenOffice.org”. Responsibilities include (last bullet on page 1) “to see where Linux Server and OpenOffice challenges arise.”

• Here is, in normal language, what Microsoft actually said with that job offer:

• 1. Operating systems which are alternative to Windows, like Linux, are a “big issue” only in the server market (the servers are the computers powering websites, databases and other centralized services: the computers on people’s desks, and by extension the software they run, are called “desktops” instead) 2. In the desktop market the real “big issue” for Microsoft are not alternatives to Windows, like Linux, but alternatives to Microsoft Office, like OpenOffice

• ODFA: Edmonton is obviously in good company among leading Canadian cities embracing open standards and interoperability, along with efforts underway in Vancouver and Toronto. Have you been working collaboratively with those cities to share insights, and do you think the Canadian Federal Government will follow the lead? What are they doing in this area, and should they be following your lead? Do you think it’s harder for a Federal Government to transition than municipal or local governments?

• Drew Jensen, a stalwart OpenOffice.org community contributor, pointed us to this worksheet describing office suite market share. It should probably be posted, too, to Major OpenOffice.org Deployments – OpenOffice.org Wiki and also to our Market Share wiki, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis

• In this sense, I am reminded how Tommy Douglas, the founder of universal medical coverage in Canada, explained why he stood by his social democratic beliefs when most of them had no chance of being widely accepted:

• In other words, sometimes you need to stand up for what you know is right, regardless of consequences, simply out of self-respect. Campaigns like Document Freedom Day give the opportunity for such self-reaffirmation, and I would support them for that reason alone, even if more practical reasons did not exist as well.

• Adobe’s Flash is still the dominant rich media platform on the Internet, but HTML5 is coming.

• Love it or hate it Adobe’s Flash technology is a key part of the Internet as it currently exists. It hasn’t always been so and it may not remain so for much longer if the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft have anything to do with it.

Leftovers

Security

• An audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General reveals that while the FBI and Justice Department have made “various efforts” to fight identity theft crimes in recent years, these initiatives have “faded as priorities” mainly because the agencies have failed to develop a coordinated plan to deal with what’s become an epidemic of cybercrimes.

• This Thursday a year will have passed since Ian Tomlinson died after a police assault at the G20 protests. No charges have been brought against the police; no one has been punished. Despite 300 official complaints about the policing of the protests on 1 April, and plenty of video and photographic evidence, no officer has faced serious disciplinary proceedings. Those who removed their identification numbers, beat up peaceful protesters and bystanders and then repeatedly lied about what had happened remain untroubled, either by the law or their superior officers. There has been no apology to Tomlinson’s family.

Environment

• MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a “culture of withholding information” among the climate change scientists whose private emails caused a furore after being leaked online in November.

• The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the “standard practice” among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee’s chair, Phil Willis MP, described as “reprehensible”. He added: “That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.”

• This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.

Finance

• The Federal Reserve for the first time released details of individual securities acquired in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos., part of the information that Bloomberg News sued the central bank for in 2008.

• The Fed, through its New York regional bank, also identified securities acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. The central bank had agreed to take on the Bear Stearns assets, including mortgage-backed securities and commercial real estate loans, to ease the investment bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

• He did lose them $616 million though. Here’s how he did it.

• 1. Lucido’s team bought a bunch of CDOs. For example, a $7 million of a mostly subprime bond. 2. They put the CDOs in a $1.5 billion fund managed by TCW (like these guys Lewis shows us were total idiots in his new book) called Davis Square Funding. 3. A few months later, TCW asked them to buy more and Lucido bought $3 million more.

• [...]

• Debt issued by California, the world’s eighth-largest economy, is outperforming Greece’s bonds as funds including Cumberland Advisors say investors are betting the lowest-rated U.S. state’s credit risk has been exaggerated. The cost to protect against California not paying its obligations is the lowest relative to Greece in at least 15 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• But Goldman seems to be proving that it will continue pushing forward in the aftermath of the financial crisis and amid a media backlash against the company. After a dismal fiscal 2008 and a systematic burying of its December 2008 results, $13.4 billion in 2009 profits makes it look like the Golden One is back to printing money from the cozy confines of its New York office.

• By reversing course, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under its activist chairman, Gary Gensler, is trying to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few large businesses. For example, a single firm, the United States Oil Fund, was able to gain the rights to nearly one-fourth of all the publicly traded crude oil scheduled for delivery during one month last spring, the fund’s head said in an interview.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Australia came under fire today from the United States for its proposed internet filtering system, which, if implemented, would be the strictest of any democracy.

• A US state department official said that it had raised concerns with Australia over the plans, which are to be voted on by its parliament.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Usenet is now looking to be the new target for those seeking civil recourse for their material being shared without authorisation.

• [...]

• So we repeat the cycle (yet again) of sucess, failure, sucess, failure (in respect of filesharing cases) and whilst both sides take their delight in their respective victories, the filesharing issue continues and damages the industry. Mark my words as we see more aggressive attacks on filesharing, we will merely see a change of technology, I don’t think the industry can keep up with the innovation nor can law have the remit to cover all facets of modern tech.

• I’ve written two controversial pieces concerning intellectual property. One with the view that if it should come to pass that the MPAA / RIAA / xyz advocating new enforcement law to monitor users of the Internet and are found to have illegal copyright material, then who should regulate it, in which I proposed that the FCC is one possible solution.

• I wrote immediately thereafter that intellectual property associations are going way overboard and border on the absurd? Just because file sharing is going over the internet, should these associations have the right to find you guilty, have multiple different mediums content distribution, many of which are free to the public while being able to sue you for infringement? They need to change their business models.

• This week, 50,000 new lawsuits have been filed against downloaders. It’s only going to get worse.

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