● 04.13.10

● Links 13/4/2010: KDE 4.5 Schedule, Fedora 13 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• 8. You shall not steal.

• Run only free, open-source software. Do not go after payware or cracks.

• One of the new additions to the Unity Linux packaging process is the introduction of the Build Server (or buildserv for short) The main purpose of the buildserv is to provide users with the ability to package content following our established procedures without being burdened by the overhead of doing so. The buildserv really consists of two parts: a backend server and a frontend web interface.

• Peter Hutterer, PhD Student Wearable Computers Lab at the University of South Australia and MPX developer, granted an interview with Gizmodo recently. Peter discussed the technology more in-depth and explained many of the features (and bugs) that exist.

• This is definitely something to keep your eye on as development progresses. It will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

• The Qubes operating system is currently in the alpha stage, according to Rutkowska, who blogged about the release on her website. The system is based on the Xen hypervisor, X, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications, according to the project website. It uses a concept that she calls security by isolation, allowing users to separate security domains into lightweight virtual machines, which she calls AppVMs. Files and clipboard items can be shared between the virtual machines (VMs).

• · Announced Distro: Calculate Linux 10.4 Now Has a GNOME Version · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 2 Has GNOME 2.30 and Revamped Installer · Announced Distro: ArchOne 2010.04 Is Available Now · Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.10 Released · Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.2 Comes with New Linux Kernels

• This is a prime example of bait and switch.

• How can Sony be allowed to do this to consumers and not face legal issues.

• This week on the show: Did IBM break their patent promise?, is SCO finally dead?, Songbird drops Linux support, Meerkats, stiffies in burqas and more…

• While hunting a cheap website hosting provider, it is a good idea to rely upon the cheap linux hosting solutions. There are different platforms for hosting a website but at present linux platform is considered

Kernel Space

• If you take a look at all the audio processing and supportive devices, you will see some very complex and useful software. Not just in audio effects that are commonly know, like reverb and delay, but also in things like spectrum analysis.

• LINUX FILE SYSTEMS are an essential operating system resource. Modern file systems and disk drive technology are robust and reliable — so, most administrators put little effort into planning or worrying about them once the operating system is configured. This makes me both smile and cringe.

Applications

• Miranda is your personal file organizer in Ubuntu. She will help you to de clutter your documents and organizes them according to some predefined rules. We can ask her to move files with certain names or date into certain folder. She will help you zip and archive old files that we do not need. She can even help you empty your rubbish bin on a regular basis. User can create a combination of rules that allow Miranda to organize your files in a fashion that the user see it fits.

• In the mood for a bit more color in your life? Check out Bashish to try out themes for your terminal.

• I installed from source due to problems with the Debian repository; if doing this, note that you’ll need to install the dialog package manually via apt-get. Once you’ve run ./configure; make; sudo make install, run bashish to get things set up properly. Then restart a terminal to get the default theme.

• If you run Linux, you have access to a number of tools to keep the information on your hard drives secure and private. One good option is eMount, a tool that can mount, encrypt, and manage disk image files and physical disk drives. eMount offers an easy-to-use interface to make data available as a user needs it, on demand, making any system more secure.

Proprietary

• The Opera browsers are now used by more than 100 million people worldwide. After reaching this milestone in March 2010, there are 50 million Opera lovers on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as well as 50 million people using Opera Mini on a wide variety of handsets each month. Year-on-year growth for Opera browser on desktop now stands at over 30 percent, measured from March 2009 to March 2010. The number of desktop users was measured during March 2010, resulting in an unprecedented 50 million unique active users.

Instructionals

Games

• Machinarium’s Jakub Dvorský clarified the situation to Joystiq: “They told us, ‘It’s not Microsoft-exclusive, we don’t want it.’ They didn’t cite the Mac and Linux versions [as reasons for the refusal] but it’s quite clear that’s the reason. It means if we want to release the game on XBLA we must throw, probably, most of the profit out of the window — to the publisher. Just because we created Mac and Linux versions.”

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Last week we finished the KDE 4.5 release schedule. The good news is that you can start organising your release party now, the expected date for KDE 4.5.0 is August 4th 2010.

• One of the remarkable features of KDE 4 is the extensibility. Developers or even regular users can contribute to the rich collection of artwork, software, widgets, and visual improvements. Ever so often, I look around for rather random add-ons that make my desktop experience more pleasant or occasionally even serve a meaningful purpose. They range from full applications to very basic widgets.

• Then I tore out the hard-coded default layout in plasma-desktop and re-wrote it using a Javascript run on first start due to being installed into share/apps/plasma-desktop/init/. This new script makes a loadLayout call to load the default panel template, and so I made such a template and set that to be installed as well. This dropped a few dozen lines of C++ and turned them into about half as many lines of Javascript.

Distributions

• Major changes: Grub2 replaces grub-legacy and firefox instead of chromium. Also slim is added.

Fedora

• What are you looking forward to get in this new version? Gnome 2.30, KDE 4.4, Better Webcam support, NetBeans 6.8, Better Bluetooth support, Enhanced NVIDIA and Radeon support, Zarafa, new Upstart version, Automatic Print Driver Installation or just a more stable system (maybe not the first month, or?).

• As some of you may know, professors at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University have been conducting a study of Fedora, and have put together an online survey based on interviews they conducted with several dozen folks from the community.

• As with Fedora 12, we’re smooshing all the graphics card Test Days into one week to save space on the schedule and make everything feel that much more momentous.

Debian Family

• The Debian project has announced the availability of a new archive snapshot service at snapshot.debian.org. With the new service, users can access older packages based on dates and version numbers.

Devices/Embedded

• Heard about the console Pandora? Made by computer geeks who want the ultimate portable gaming console. This hobby project has just begun mass-producing and the dream is becoming real.

Nokia

• MeeGo, the unification of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo, and shepherded by the Linux Foundation, is getting a lot of support from a variety of companies. From hardware developers to software houses, from games to automotive to embedded solutions providers, the recent announcement indicates an influx of potentially millions of developer-hours. Some of the new participants are no-brainers, while some are a bit surprising. Whether it’s an effort to hedge bets for or against Android, or just widening the market potential for their products, the end result is hopefully a better MeeGo, which is better for you and me.

• As reported over on Engadget, the move is an unofficial port of the Chromium sourcecode to run on the Maemo Linux platform that forms the core of Nokia’s top-end N900 smartphone.

• Nokia’s recent N900 Linux device is currently generating more excitement than its Symbian smartphones.

Android

• We’re anxious to see what Motorola has in store for Motoblur, 1.5 if anything. Judging by the picture of the phone, we expect to see widgets to allow one-touch access to turning off WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. It’s hard to picture a radically different experience this early on. Our guess is that it’s subtle add-ons a la HTC’s Sense UI update.

Sub-notebooks

• Both of Google’s mobile operating systems are Linux-based, and both could have a profound, enduring impact on the netbook landscape. Before we count Linux netbooks out of the game, we should give them a chance to perform.

Tablets

• Dell’s Android 2.0-based Mini 5 tablet is expected in the U.S. this year, while several Android models will feature Nvidia’s delayed Tegra chipset, including the Adam from Notion Ink. ViewSonic offers the VTablet 101.

• For instance, I opened an SSH session to a Linux server with iSSH to check on some things, then received a colleague’s IM, served up via push notifications. This required me to quit iSSH to return the IM, then go through the reconnection process to get back to where I was. The same thing happened with RDP sessions — not cool at all. Apple’s April 8 iPhone OS 4 event showed off multitasking features in the new OS version, but I’m going to reserve judgement until I can see it myself.

• Also, several high-profile iPad apps are simply buggy and slow. One of the apps touted at the iPad announcement was MLB at Bat 2010. It was visually impressive and offered features, such as pitch trajectories, not found in the original iPhone app. Being a baseball fan, I bought it for $14.99 on the first day I had the iPad. Since then I’ve found it lacking in many areas. It’s slow, it consistently fails to update game information, it crashed several times, and the video quality lacks luster. Oh, and there’s no sign of that pitch trajectory feature demoed at the announcement.

• Honestly, at this point I didn’t feel like there was much I didn’t already know about the WePad, the German iPad competitor with a kind of almost clever name. We already knew it would have an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 multitouch display and 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 CPU and run a custom version of Linux with a touch-friendly interface. And we knew it was based on a Taiwanese design.

Free Software/Open Source

• Accounting for roughly 30% of the total Web browser market, Firefox has gone from being a niche player a few years ago to a present-day browsing powerhouse. Firefox has seen three major releases and a bevy of smaller but still important updates along the way. Firefox 3.6 was released back in January, and like after all major Firefox updates, the Firefox-tweaking ecosystem has been revamped to accommodate the new code.

• Karen Padir, a key software leader at Sun Microsystems, has joined Oracle’s competition, open source EnterpriseDB.

• So Schroeder and Ibáñez have worked with some OSS communities to develop lists of “junior jobs” on any given project — jobs that a student, a newcomer to OSS can come in an do with little oversight and in a relatively short period of time. It will give the students much-needed exposure to the community and provide the community labor to do some small tasks and concentrate more on the larger issues at hand.

• “We’re working in collaboration with people we know … [to] create a system where you can rapidly absorb the students,” Ibáñez said.

• Problem is, he said, college really is too late to start teaching many of these things. In fact, kindergarten wouldn’t be too early to start instilling the basic tenets of open source:Share everything and play fair. But the standardized assessments in every state make it difficult to weave new aspects into the curriculum in middle or high school.

Releases

• Radio TrayIt is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Radio Tray 0.5.1!

• The VirtualBox hypervisor now under the control of Oracle – if any open source software project can be said to be under control of any corporation – has been updated with a 3.1.6 release.

Leftovers

Finance

• Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist who was among the doomsayers, still isn’t willing to declare victory, and he probably never will.

• “I think this is disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people,” Mr. Stiglitz, the author of “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy,” said of the latest claims.

• Mr. Stiglitz, who has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty, said we’re looking at the numbers wrong. Even if we get our money back, he says, that doesn’t tell the full story. To calculate the real cost, he insists, we need to add in the lost interest on the money spent.

• “Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?” he asked almost rhetorically, before answering his own question. “Clearly the answer is no.”

• Major Wall Street banks are using accounting techniques similar to those utilised by Lehman Brothers in its final days to mask the size of their balance sheets at the end of reporting periods.

• On his way to the Free Library of Philadelphia on Thursday to plug his best seller, Lewis told me his book tour shows America as a different country, compared to 1989.

• “The popular anger is unbelievable,” Lewis said. “It’s orders of magnitude different from what I saw with Liars’ Poker, in the attitude, in the tone of the crowd, in the level of interest in the details that people have. This is a political force that will not be denied.”

• The derivatives unit of American International Group Inc. has unwound most of its soured mortgage trades with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. still left after the insurer was bailed out by the U.S. government in 2008, according to people familiar with the matter.

• American International Group Inc., the insurer rescued to prevent losses at bank counterparties, has retired most of its mortgage-linked trades with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said a person with knowledge of the matter.

• Yet Lloyd Blankfein and his estimable employees are surely there to help you when you decide to gamble in the Goldman Sachs casino. In fact, they love to take you into their confidence so that they can bet against you as you foolishly entrust your hard-earned wealth to their trusted care.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Akio Asuke, its chairman for Japan, will step down on June 30. He will become an adviser to the company, Goldman Sachs said in a statement.

• Some senior officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York apparently weren’t happy when their board chairman purchased stock in Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and they had “misgivings” about granting a waiver that allowed him to keep it, according to a congressional panel.

Copyrights

• The Valley Morning Star in Harlingen, Texas, which was a test-bed for Freedom Communications’ plans to potentially charge users for online access to its papers, returned to a free site last week less than a year after beginning to charge for online content. The paper is a small daily (circulation 23,000) but when it instituted its paywall in July 2009, it said it had been “selected to be the first newspaper in a Freedom Communications’ initiative to use its online edition to boost readers’ subscription values.” At the time, publisher Tyler Patton said, “The days of giving content away, which costs money to create and for which we charge our print subscribers, I think, are just over” and added that other Freedom papers would likely follow his paper’s lead.

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