● 04.17.10

● Links 17/4/2010: ClearOS 5.1 Reviewed; Stefano Zacchiroli the Leader of Debian

Posted in News Roundup at 2:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Naturally, the perfect Linux is different for every user. I want something that Terry can use without having vexing little problems cropping up all the time. It is enough work learning to use applications like Audacity, Ardour, Digikam, and OpenOffice without also having to babysit a colicky Linux. It seems to me that the “noob-friendly” distros like Ubuntu, Mandriva, and openSUSE start out great, but the more you use them the more weird little glitches they exhibit. I want something with a reasonable degree of sanity, and something I can fix without having to untangle mare’s nests of distro-specific “improvements.”

• These are my criteria for the perfect desktop Linux distro:

• * Rolling releases and continual upgrades. I think fresh installs with new releases are silly and should be done only when it’s absolutely necessary, like a system that is hopelessly messed-up. A good Linux gets better with age, it’s not like Windows which runs down like a cheap wind-up clock. * Reasonably fresh package versions * Stable * Easy to maintain * Active dev team and community

• If the old guard wish to remain relevant they must innovate and/or reduce prices. Both Dell and HP have obvious GNU/Linux expertise. There is a lot of room to innovate there. They could reduce unit prices $100 or more by switching to GNU/Linux. From what I have seen of Debian GNU/Linux, Squeeze (my recent bug has been fixed by an update), once the bugs are out in a few months, they could put out products as smooth as “7″ and much cheaper. Further, they could put ARM into mainstream products and cut prices another $100 or so. ARM+GNU/Linux would permit HP and Dell to put out units at about half their current price.

• Six hours of fiddling instead of a 20 minute installation of GNU/Linux… Was it worth it? I do not know. Certainly the student is very aware of the high cost of maintaining that other OS. At my usual rate of pay, six hours would be worth roughly the value/price of the netbook so it could have been scrapped and replaced for the cost of “fixing” it until next time. His family is also aware that that other OS cost the boy an evening at home with family. I will write up an advertisement to send home with students promoting our “InstallFest” to be held next week. Such costs will figure prominently.

• This installfest is for fund-raising for various projects like graduation expenses. At the last bazaar, I ran hockey target-shooting. This could be more fun and more profitable, I hope. By parallel processing I should be able to do 20 machines easily, about double the take on the last bazaar.

Server

• OSNews: Which brand of Linux is the company looking to implement and why?

• ZA: Most of the servers I have built for are being shared by multiple applications so I require a hearty and stable operating system. With that in mind, I have decided on 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel version 2.6.18). The servers usually have 2x CPUs and have around 8GB of RAM. I try to get away with 50 GB of disk space. I have jobs that run, which regulate any of the disks from filling up with logs, by archiving them. I will usually build a web application server on these boxes with either Tomcat 6.x for simple Java applications, or for more of a heavier load of applications containing EJB or Cluster requirements, with Weblogic 10gR3. When Oracle bought out BEA, costs for the use of Weblogic in production environments rose quite high, so I only use it when I feel it is necessary to, and not as our primary application server.

• While I wish they had not tried to do this in the first place, I do want to be sure to give kudos to Dell for listening to reason. Matt Simmons is reporting that Dell is reversing its position on 3rd party drives.

Audiocasts

• This week on the show: Dan rants on the Digital Economy Bill, we discuss the question if IBM is really evil, Mo Duffy’s paper on F/OSS design, Microsoft now uses Launchpad and Apple throws a spanner in the works of developers once again…

Google

• The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer – how well it plays with the printer.

• With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor.

• The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.

Kernel Space

• As the first update in 2010, ALSA 1.0.23 has been released this morning to replace ALSA 1.0.22 that was released last December. Like usual, this update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture brings mostly individual driver fixes but there is also support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and a few ALSA core fixes.

Applications

• Netlive is a slightly unusual distribution developed in Italy: a live version of Linux that makes available on demand any other live version of Linux chosen by its administrators to all the computers of its local network. Its developers, Ezio Da Rin and Marco Clocchiatti, call Netlive “a very efficient way to build portable ICT labs for schools, alternative to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)”.

Proprietary

• The Wine development release 1.1.43 is now available.

• What’s new in this release:

• * A number of new icons. * Improved support for alpha channel in bitmaps. * Many Direct3D fixes and optimizations. * More complete msvcr80/90 implementations. * A wide range of 64-bit fixes. * Various bug fixes.

Instructionals

Games

• About a month ago I’ve posted that Hemispheregames were looking for someone to port their game Osmos to GNU/Linux.

• Out of the Park Baseball has recently been developed with support for Linux in mind. This program is not available free of charge and is sold for 39.00 per download.The lack of games available for Linux is a factor that have kept some from making the switch from Windows to Linux. At least this is one less game that is not compatible with Linux. Actually though there are numerous games available for Linux.

• The Bethesda blog (as Bethesda and id Software now share a parent company) has posted interviews with two Doom 3 mod developers: Bryan Henderson of Zombie Slayer (mod site) and Gareth Ward of Classic Doom 3 (mod site). Both discuss their background and how their projects came about; it’s interesting to see them revisited now, and I think I’ll give cdoom3 another spin shortly myself.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• ClearOSClearOS is a network and gateway server distribution derived from RedHat and CentOS. Formerly known as Clark Connect, it is developed and maintained by the Clear Foundation, an IT solutions provider based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Fedora

• One of the benefits of Btrfs besides offering competitive performance against other Linux file-systems and SSD optimizations is its support for sub-volumes and writable snapshots. While Btrfs is still in development and is not yet used as a default file-system by any Linux distribution, Red Hat has been looking to capitalize upon the capabilities of Btrfs by introducing support for system rollbacks into Fedora. The Btrfs-based system rollback support has been a feature for Fedora 13 so with the release of the Fedora 13 Beta earlier this week we decided to further investigate this feature.

• Simple scan is also a tool to make scanning fast and simple. This tool is like Deja-Dup maintained in the launchpad.net community, and if you want to use an newer version of the program just add the PPA. I will add a list of PPA´s that will be good to have when we got the release of Fedora 13.

• But looking through the list of changes in Fedora 13, I’m really excited to try out Déjà Dup. It’s a new backup tool that should make life a lot easier. With it, you can do local or remote backups, including to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Everything is encrypted and compressed, and backups are such that you can restore from any particular snapshot.

Debian Family

• Senior developer Stefano Zacchiroli has been elected the leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project for 2010-11, having defeated the other three candidates in the race.

Ubuntu

• There are more things to this version of Ubuntu, each time cleaner and smoother (I didn’t have any problems in spite I’m using the Beta version). Probably a 6 months schedule for a new version is too tight for fixing all the bugs. In the other hand the One Hundred Paper Cuts is obviously having good results and the system looks clean and professional.

• The system still doesn’t accomplishes what it promises: to work from the moment its installed. Nevertheless I discover a nice script that will make most of the task you have to do after install Ubuntu (like add repositories and install third party codecs, web browser plugins. Updates, etc.). But I think any people could use this OS without much problems (older versions of windows and even Mac use to have more problems and people still use to work with them without much problems).

• The theme of most of the baseless criticisms is that Ubuntu is unstable for everyday use. Why you ask? Because either the author plugged in a peripheral that Ubuntu did not recognize right away or because there are some bugs that have not been fixed for period of time. This has even caused some to label Ubuntu as ‘garbage salad.’ I have no problem with people expressing their views, but then certain basic facts should never be misconstrued to the unsuspecting person out there.

• [...]

• Global powers like Dell and IBM are shipping Ubuntu preloaded computers, that should go a long way to attest to the reasonable reliability of the OS. Besides, those companies have more resources at their disposal to conduct even more rigorous testing on the OS than Canonical itself can. So on what basis can someone claim that Ubuntu is so unreliable that the project needs to be scrapped? Sure Ubuntu has problems, heck everything made by man has problems, but we must learn to be fair and give praise where it is due.

• It’s especially appropriate from Ubuntu Women, as studies have shown women in open source development are even more underrepresented than in other tech fields.

• If women are going to change the future, they have to change the now. And this contest actually makes sense.

• It’s not asking for what many sneer at as a form of affirmative action, for girls.

Devices/Embedded

• Let’s face it. Most people don’t back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it’s too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.

• Watch this: a Linux powered baby dinosaur, with a arm processor heart. The robot runs Live OS. An embedded, linux based operating system which features a custom programming language, giving the possibility to interact with the robot on the programming level. It features Artificial intelligence,programmable emotions and lot’s more.

Android

• Taking a quick look at the definition of “open source” provided to us by the Open Source Initiative – who is highly regarded as the authority in what “open source” is – I have to present the question: where is Google stepping outside of any lines to call Android so? Source code is readily available, compilable, downloadable, freely distributed, properly licensed, free to be modified (for use with any field without discrimination), and it definitely isn’t an OS that is restricted to be used on anything other than phones.

• Lately, it seems as if quite a few people are concerned about the status of Android as a Linux fork. There is quite a bit of talk about re-admitting the Android Linux kernel into the vanilla Linux kernel source.

• Chris DiBona commented on many things in Android being irrelevant to the majority of Linux users, such as mobile phone chipsets. Is most of the kernel relevant to most people, or is it that we de-select the majority of device drivers when we do our kernel configs? I think that the latter is more the case, and quite often we de-select the vast majority of filesystems. For most people, NTFS, FAT, Ext2/3/4, swap, proc, and sysfs are really all that is required. A few may get into Reiser (what a killer filesystem), JFS, Squashfs, and UnionFS for particular machines. So, why is there a fuss over certain things making little difference to main stream Linux users, when most things in the Linux kernel are irrelevant to start with?

• The TV technology will run on Intel’s Atom chips, the report says, and Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project.

• Engadget scored a couple bits of Dell-related Android news today and was only happy to share with the world. First up, the Dell Aero handset is due out in early June. You know the Aero, right? It’s that other locked down AT&T handset besides the Backflip.

• This is asinine. Orange couldn’t find a better company to imitate than AT&T, seriously? As we know, AT&T has decided to lock down Android devices and limit app installation from the Android Market. Not that we support this notion, but fine. Orange is taking it one step further in stifling Android and its open nature, according to Android Community.

Free Software/Open Source

• Finding the right open source product is just as important as the decision to use an open source product to begin with. In every business software environment there are a few common components. There is the commercial product we’ve all used for years. There are the two or three popular open source alternatives, and there is a list of migration headaches we all experience that eventually becomes the list of reasons why we should stick with what worked before. Occasionally there is a product that inspires us to stay in the fight. A classic example we can all relate to is a product most of us use all day, every day: the email client.

• Late last year, getting a Google Wave invite was reminiscent of getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in 1983. It was the newest gizmo everyone just had to have. As a geek, I was one of the kids begging the loudest. Thankfully, one of our readers from across the pond (Paul Howard, thanks!) sent me an invite, and I cleared my schedule for the product that was going to change the way I communicate. Only, it didn’t.

• Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available” (John Hopkins). Exploring software alternatives like open source is critical considering all business or personal information and finances may be dictated by private software companies agendas.

Mozilla

• Since its release, I have been testing it out to see how the new security enhancements work and help in increase user browsing security. One of the exciting improvements for me was how Firefox handles SSL secured web sites while browsing the Internet. There are also many other security features that this article will look at. For example, improved plugin and addon security.

• It looks like there’s a good chance the code will make it in to Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2, so with any luck, soon your Thunderbird will be a pretty as mine.

Oracle

• So unless you can figure out how having OpenSolaris running on millions of devices everywhere ultimately translates to revenue, I doubt Oracle mgmt will be impressed. Business is only a popularity contest when people vote with dollars.

• Let’s move on to people that run Solaris on non-Sun servers: No Solaris for you, not yours! Items 1 and 6 make it clear that there is no possible way to legally run Solaris on non-Sun servers. Period. End of story.

Government

• Looking into EU funded open source initiatives I stepped into few projects, included EDOS, QualOSS and few others around FLOSS metrics and quality. Over the last 7 years a number of open source software assessment methodologies have been proposed, and FLOSSMetrics definitely achieved some interesting results in this respect, and not only.

Programming

• SourceForge.net introduced a new service this week. Until now, if you wanted to distribute your software on SourceForge’s global network, you needed to set up a complete project, which for project leaders who preferred to develop elsewhere meant generating services for collaborative software development that they didn’t need. Now you can develop your software anywhere you like, but just distribute it via SourceForge, and get the benefit of our free, global distribution network, along with the visibility of being listed on the leading open source software directory.

• Clearly, there is growing interest from employers in open source programming languages and platforms, not just from developers. I tend to agree with Asay that it will take time for these trends to lead to a seismic shift toward open source, but as long as the developers and employers, in tandem, favor open source, there is no stopping the shift.

Standards/Consortia

• The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This page, as the others that will follow on this website, is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference. Later next week I’ll also post a non-technical summary of the whole event at the Stop.

• Adobe Flash is one of those shackles which keep the ‘free’ citizens of the world tied to the chains of Slaveware (proprietary) technologies. You have to install proprietary software to watch videos and other rich content like animation.

• Apple bursted Adobe’s bubble when it refused to allow Flash on its mobile devices like iPhone and iPad. The reason Apple did that was not that it preferred Free Standard based HTML5, but because Flash would allow a lot of applications run in these devices without Apple’s permission.

Leftovers

• The House has passed the “Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010″ (PDF), which does exactly what its name would lead you to believe.

• Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ)’s Moscow offices were raided by Russian authorities Wednesday as part of a joint Russian and German bribery investigation.

• According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story, German and Russian authorities are investigating whether HP paid nearly $11 million in alleged bribes to win a lucrative government contract in Russia worth 35 million Euro, or approximately $47 million. Ironically, the contract, which HP won in 2003, was to supply computer equipment and software to Russia’s criminal prosecutor department in Moscow.

• The report states that authorities suspect HP of allegedly using a German subsidiary to win the Russian government contract and then using an assortment of shell companies throughout the globe to funnel the bribe payments to the intended parties in the Russian government.

Science

• One of the eyewitnesses commented on his You Tube account, that it was a tiny red dot with a tiny white tail traveling leisurely and then suddenly it became enormous and green and then travelled at a super fast pace.

• You may remember that his last revamping caused quite a stir, with people screaming that it would doom NASA. I disagree. Canceling Constellation still strikes me as the right thing to do, because it was becoming an albatross around NASA’s neck. Mind you, this was also the recommendation of the blue ribbon Augustine panel. You may also note that NASA astronauts are split over all this, with Buzz Aldrin, for example, supporting Obama, and Neil Armstrong and many others disagreeing.

• For those who find it tough to juggle more than a couple things at once, don’t despair. The brain is set up to manage two tasks, but not more, a new study suggests.

• That’s because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track of two tasks pretty readily, but if you throw in a third, things get a bit muddled.

Security/Aggression

• NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander tells senators the U.S. Cyber Command aims to protect the privacy of American citizens despite the uncharted legal territory in cyberspace.

• In the Big Brother Watch manifesto released yesterday, we have written that we want to see the Independent Safeguarding Authority scrapped within the first 100 days of a new government. There are several reasons for this, but the main ones are:

• 1. It encourages suspicion and fuels the paedophile-paranoia that infects our society

• 2. It is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy ,which is scarring public life and making it very difficult for adults to volunteer with children’s groups like after-school sports clubs and the scouts

• 3. It is yet another state database, affecting 9 million people who will have to surrender their personal details to an unaccountable and expensive quango

• Rather than simply phase this geriatric version out (it was at least one year old, revised to versions .95 and .96 since release, and announcements about the need to upgrade had been made for six months) the development team put to halt instances of V0.94 in production yesterday, April 15, 2010. This was to protect users from an issue that existed with the older version in terms of its inability to be updated with fresh virus signatures.

• Police say a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and change course enrollment. One of the victims was Fairfax Superintendent Jack D. Dale, according to an affidavit filed by a Fairfax detective in Fairfax Circuit Court this week.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Apparently the curfew will help “eradicate video game addiction”, and will apply only to underage users.

• A former high-ranking National Security Agency employee was indicted on 10 felony charges Thursday for his alleged role in leaking classified information to a news reporter.

• The federal indictment does not identify the reporter, but several news organizations, citing government sources, named a former national security correspondent for The Baltimore Sun as the recipient of the leaks.

• THE GOVERNMENT has had extensive private discussions on introducing internet blocking – barring access to websites or domains – according to material obtained under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

• The approach is used by some internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile network operators to block access to child pornography. But increasingly, governments and law enforcement agencies are pushing for much broader use, ranging from blocking filesharing sites to trying to tackle cybercrime and terrorism.

• Yahoo prevailed Friday over Colorado federal prosecutors in a legal battle testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.

• Saying the contested e-mail “would not be helpful to the government’s investigation,” (.pdf) the authorities withdrew demands for e-mail in a pending and sealed criminal case. For the moment, the move ends litigation over the hotly contested issue of when a warrant under the Fourth Amendment is required for Yahoo and other e-mail providers to release consumer communications to the authorities.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Note that this is apparently a trial, but it’s a very expensive one. According to the letter that’s now being sent to customers in the trial market, users (on any speed tier) who breach the 100 GB monthly threshold are being asked to suddenly pay $99.99 per month. Customers who breach 250 GB a month are being told they’ll need to pay a whopping $249.99 per month. Users who don’t respond in fifteen days to the letter get disconnected (how’s that for a business model?).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Germany-based DigiProtect has a long history of using a machine-gun approach to “fight piracy”, in which it sends out tens of thousands of letters to people it says have illegally downloaded its clients’ content, and demanding a “pre-settlement” payment to stop them from being sued.

• [...]

• These answers from Digiprotect are completely unsurprising, and it’s not clear if the BBC expected the company to have some sort of epiphany and shut down or what.

• Another article on intellectual property enforcement? Yes, since I consider this to be the most important struggle technology has to face over the coming decade. We already know that content providers don’t care one bit about hard-fought concepts like freedom and privacy, but the joint proposals by the RIAA and MPAA to the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator really blew my brains out: monitoring software installed on people’s computers, border inspections – it’s all there, and then some.

ACTA

• Negotiators will on Wednesday publish the first officially-released draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a new treaty designed to harmonise copyright enforcement around the world.

• The decision to release the consolidated draft on 21 April was made at the eighth round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) negotiations, which took place this week in Wellington, New Zealand. So far, the only publicly available information on the negotiating countries’ proposals and amendments have been leaked documents purporting to be drafts of the agreement.

Digital Economy Bill

• With the rushed passage into law of the Digital Economy Act this month, the fight over copyright enters a new phase. Previous to this, most copyfighters operated under the rubric that a negotiated peace was possible between the thrashing entertainment giants and civil society.

• But now that the BPI and its mates have won themselves the finest law that money can buy – a law that establishes an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain, a law that provides for the disconnection of entire families from the net on the say-so of an entertainment giant, a law that shuts down free Wi-Fi hotspots and makes it harder than ever to conduct your normal business on the grounds that you might be damaging theirs – the game has changed.

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