● 05.25.10

● Links 25/5/2010: KDE 3.5 Forked, Slackware 13.1 Released, Fedora 13

Posted in News Roundup at 4:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• What do Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), the U.S. Navy submarine fleet, the French Parliament, Virgin America, the Internet Archive and the ASV Roboat all have in common?

• Ha! You guessed it! They all run our favorite operating system. Not only that, but they are all on the “50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect” list that was published recently by Focus.

• Volunteer Stephen Goss worked with the village to transform a section of the Windsor Community House into the job search center. Use of a free and Linux-based computer operating system called openSUSE enables the center to operate at a “minimal cost,” he said.

Btrfs

• I’ve seen a few comments that raise the concern that Ubuntu might do to btrfs what some feel they did to PulseAudio – undermine it by introducing it to the “mainstream” before it was ready. I know I personally have a poor opinion of PulseAudio based only on initial exposure through Ubuntu. I won’t claim that’s Ubuntu’s fault – but I have certainly heard that argument put forward.

• Alone among GNU/Linux distributions, Ubuntu has managed to project the impression that it is the best first choice for someone who wants to test the Linux waters. Put this down to slick media management.

Graphics Stack

• Yesterday we reported on how VIA’s open-source Linux dreams are not materializing and then this morning reported on a new secret driver being developed (xf86-video-openvia) between VIA Technologies, some VIA “friends”, and the OpenChrome developers. However, as I said in this morning’s VIA article, the situation is still a murky mess, this new OpenVIA driver isn’t receiving much work, the DRM code with TTM/GEM memory management is still missing, and these open-source efforts by VIA are not very well organized.

Mail

• Cone harks back to the era when users read e-mail in a non-graphical application, without using menus, mouse, or buttons. Longtime Pine users will feel right at home with Cone; many keyboard commands are the same. However, Cone is not a Pine clone; developer Sam Varshavchik combined the general look and feel of Pine with modern advanced features.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• This project aims to keep the KDE3.5 computing style alive, as well as polish off any rough edges that were present as of KDE 3.5.10. Along the way, new useful features will be added to keep the environment up-to-date.

• Towards that end, significant new enhancements have already been made in areas such as display control, network connectivity, authentication, and much more!

• huzzah! I made a screencast showing the activities stuff in 4.5

GNOME Desktop

• NeWhoa’s Victory GTK+ theme offers users more than just a good looking desktop for it allows the ability to choose the sidepane and menubar colours separately – making Victory truly worthy of it’s name in the eyes of customization control-freaks everywhere!

• While LLVMpipe is able to run OpenGL games, we then tested to see if LLVMpipe could run the GNOME Shell or Compiz, which need OpenGL but are not nearly as taxing on the graphics as a normal game. If LLVMpipe could efficiently handle running GNOME Shell it would mean a lot for providing a better “out of the box” experience for systems where there is no open-source 3D driver available by default with the GNOME 3.0 desktop. However, Compiz nor the GNOME Shell had worked with LLVMpipe at that time.

• With the GNOME 2.31.2 release (an early GNOME 3.0 development snapshot) due out soon and various GNOME packages being checked-in for this milestone, the Clutter developers have made available their first post-1.2 release. Clutter 1.3 is the development series that will lead up to the Clutter 1.4 release that’s expected to be released in tandem with GNOME 3.0. The just-released Clutter 1.3.2 release is this first step forwards.

Distributions

• According to Nick Carr, marketing director of Red Hat, Linux desktop has developed very rapidly over the past few years. Even from the technology viewpoint the Linux desktop is well developed, feature rich and mature. What adds to the merit is the low cost, better security and manageability. It’s also well suited to a wide range of customer deployments. Well, coming to the Linux distributions for Desktop computing, Red Hat’s Fedora has created significant impact, but its not the only one in the market. Another remarkable Linux distribution for the desktop is on the rise, a completely free distro Ubuntu. It has been widely supported by online communities. While it would be great to include several distributions on this list, the reality is we had to filter out the best Linux distribution for desktop computing. A typical desktop Linux distribution comprises a Linux kernel, GNU tools and libraries, additional software, documentation, a window system and window manager. We delved into the Linux distributions for desktop computing and queued up a list of top 5 distros.

• Dracut is an initramfs infrastructure. Its aim is to be distribution-independent, although for now it’s supported only in RedHat, Fedora and Debian.

Red Hat Family

• It’s been said that Oracle is now the industry’s most powerful open source vendor, but don’t tell that to Red Hat executives, who say Oracle doesn’t even qualify as an open source company.

• The market for tech jobs appears to be tightening, creating increased competition for high-tech companies seeking new workers in the Triangle and other smaller metros.

• The Wall Street Journal makes that point in a story Monday that cites the example of companies such as Red Hat, which is adding 800 jobs to its 3,200-person staff and has to contend with resurgent hiring among Silicon Valley firms.

• To compete with better-known firms in tech hotspots such as California and Boston, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is retraining its recruiters to tell personal stories of opportunities and variety in tech projects to new hires. The company has retrained 50 of its 437 hiring managers, the story said.

Fedora

• Fedora 13 is shipping with X.Org Server 1.8, the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, GCC 4.4, KDE 4.4, and GNOME 2.30, among many other updated desktop and server packages.

Debian Family

• The versions 1.15.6 and 1.15.7 of dpkg introduced several important changes. Let’s skim over them:

• * The dpkg-maintscript-helper tool has been introduced in dpkg 1.15.7.2 to help packagers deal with renaming conffiles and removing obsolete conffiles. Check its manual page dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) for more details on how to use it. This shell script might be extended over time to cover other common operations. Feel free to make suggestions while it’s not too late to make changes on this new interface.

Ubuntu

• So, why did I go back to Ubuntu? Why did I not stay on PCLinuxOS? Well, because KDE and GTK apps fought over control of Audio, and it forced me to use mostly GTK apps in a KDE environment. So, I wanted to go back to a GNOME distribution that offered great PulseAudio support, and something I haven’t tried yet. So, although I’ve used previous versions of Ubuntu, I have had yet to give 10.04 a try. Not to mention Ubuntu 10.04 is normally my fall-back distribution where I normally expect everything to work.

• So anyway, to start off with, I kind of avoided using Ubuntu 10.04 for the first few weeks after release. Not because it was a new release or anything, but I wanted to give other distributions a try, and I wasn’t really agreeing with some of the things Canonical was doing, and the attitude they had towards their users when the users were showing their discontent on the changes that Ubuntu had made to the titlebar, or the fact Ubuntu was trying to look and act like Mac OS X. Also, I tried the Beta out and I wasn’t too big of a fan of it, even though I tried it in a VM. With the factors of the last time I tried 10.04 that it was in beta and that I tried it in a VM, and that I was getting a bit ticked off at PCLinuxOS KDE not wanting to properly install PulseAudio, I felt “Why not give Ubuntu 10.04 a try.”

• [...]

• So overall Ubuntu 10.04 is a very nice distribution. I did have a few issues with it here and there, but nothing too much. Some of the issues I did have with it before even using the final version were more to do with Canonical’s decisions, and the attitude towards the users that were showing their discontent towards the changes they made. Overall, I would definitely recommend it to somebody who is looking to start out with Linux – that, along with Mint, PCLinuxOS, or Mandriva. I would definitely say give this a try and tell me your thoughts on it in the comments! Thanks for reading, and if you want to, subscribe clicking on the link at the top right of my blog!

Variants

• I’ve been reviewing various Ubuntu derivatives and this week I thought it would be fun to take a look at the netbook version of Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu Netbook Edition used to be called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but Canonical changed the name once this distro became an official edition of Ubuntu.

• [...]

• Summary: Ubuntu Netbook Edition takes most of what’s great about the desktop version and wraps it up in a colorful, attractive netbook interface. Rating: 4/5

• Puppy variants include a Quirky 1.0 release intended as an experimental sandbox for new Puppy ideas.

Devices/Embedded

• Once all the electronics are in place, grab your favorite Linux flavor and install it followed by a tiny app called parcon to turn the parallel port’s data lines on and off. Follow the post’s directions for using crontab to schedule watering, and you’re good to go.

Android

• Pandigital has unveiled an e-book reader that appears to have many of the features the iPad sports. Although its screen size is smaller and its battery life is less, its price tag is could make up for those deficiencies: It will sell for a mere $199. Also, it runs on Android, which is drawing increasing interest as a developer platform.

• So, on the surface, it appears that Android 2.2 is goodness with few downsides. Of course, with the SDK only being available for ~36 hours, we may yet run into major regressions or other calamities. But Froyo went how I would expect Gingerbread and future releases to go — the core remains largely unchanged, new APIs are added you can optionally leverage, and lots of stuff gets added around and outside of app development.

• It seems that your wait for Garmin’s first T-Mobile-bound phone — the aptly-named Garminfone — might be a short one. We’d already known it was coming in June for $200, but this shot here makes it sounds like June 2 is the date you should start lining up in front of the store at four in the morning (we kid, we kid) for your shot at arguably the best turn-by-turn experience available on an Android phone today. You can get over the lack of Froyo and a 3.5mm headphone jack, right?

• Google has announced that it has released the source code for its My Tracks GPS application for Android powered devices. The My Tracks app allows users to record GPS coordinates and visualise the routes they take when, for example, hiking, running or biking. The app also features several live statistics, such as time, speed, distance and elevation, and data can be exported to other Google services like Google Spreadsheets or Google Maps. The company says that it hopes that open sourcing My Tracks will help to improve the app and attract enthusiasts, developers and third-parties.

Tablets

• Computex Taipei is coming up next week, and tech watchers should brace for the impending wave of “iPad-killer” stories. Most of the upcoming tablet offerings out of Asia will run Google’s Android operating system—not because it’s a great tablet OS, but because it’s free, available, and has a growing roster of apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• All of this because Neil said some companies like Microsoft have us believe there is no innovation with open source. But there is no proof of that, so this whole discussion goes off without a foundation. Microsoft gets a probably uncalled for black eye, the people reading this are given a false impression and worse of all, the many good deeds and good will that Microsoft has earned from the open source community recently is wasted by misunderstanding.

• My friend Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, is fond of saying, “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” I feel that way about most marketing. I’d like to see creative talent diverted from making messages about goods and services and used instead to help create truly remarkable experiences, ones so compelling that they command a fee as product.

• My answer was that Open Source is essentially a buyer market, not a vendor market. If you want to select an open source software, you can certainly find between 10 and more than 1000 open source product depending on what you are looking for (ex: a Web Server, a CMS, etc.). As a consequence, you have to define your need carefully, select one or several open source solution and then evaluate the maturity of the solution.

Events

• I though I’d post the sessions that I plan to attend. You can subscribe to my calendar using this link. Below, I’ve included some highlights. If you’re going, be sure to drop by the Open Source for America booth. Hope to see you all there!

Mozilla

• Ready for some randomness in your browsing? Personas Rotator is a simple Firefox extension that changes the active persona as frequently as you want, picking one from the category you selected. If you are logged on to getpersonas.com you can pick from your saved favorite personas.

Oracle

• The Free Software Foundation announced an alternative OpenOffice.org extensions repository, which will list only extensions released under free software licenses.

• The latest evidence, from my friend Roberto Galoppini in Rome, is word that the Free Software Foundation has felt moved to create its own list of OpenOffice.org extensions, on its LibrePlanet wiki.

• The release from Peter Brown is polite. “The FSF asked the OpenOffice.org Community Council to list only free software extensions, or to provide a second independent listing which only included free extensions, but they declined to change their policy.”

BSD

• Clang, the C/Objective-C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine, and LLVM itself have a lot to be proud of lately. LLVM 2.7 was recently released with many new features, LLVM now has its own libstdc++ replacement, and LLVM is finding itself used in many places from a JIT engine in a Flash player to providing software acceleration in Gallium3D. The latest accomplishment for Clang is that the C++ library can now build the Boost libraries.

Government

• Texas has created an enormous opportunity for states, for communities, for publishers, and for authors to use open source and mass customization to transform education, just as those savings are most needed.

Open Data

• One of the most amazing – and heartening – developments in the world of openness recently has been the emergence of the open government movement. Although still in its early stages, this will potentially have important ramifications for business, since one of the ideas at its heart is the opening up of government datasets for anyone to use and build on – including for commercial purposes (depending on the particular licences). The UK and US are leading the way in this sphere, and an important question is to what extent the experiences of these two countries can be generalised.

Leftovers

• Your code may be open-source, but what about your project?

• Is your software project’s Benevolent Dictator For Life really benevolent?

• “Yes” is a fine answer.

Security/Aggression

• Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole more than 90 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers.

• Security researchers at the University of Calgary have identified a new malware they call “Typhoid.” Typhoid impersonates the wireless router on your local network, effecting a man-in-the-middle attack that allows it to insert ads into the browsing sessions of all the other, uninfected users on the LAN.

• Researchers from the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, have developed proof-of-concept implementations of a scheme that exploits unencrypted wireless connections to blast PCs with ads.

• A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

• A controversial remote administration program that a Pennsylvania school district installed on student-issued laptops contains a security hole that put the students at risk of being spied on by people outside the school, according to a security firm that examined the software.

• A 19-year-old Pennsylvania woman sued her former high school Thursday, claiming school officials invaded her privacy and violated her free-speech rights when they confiscated her cell phone, found semi-nude photos stored inside and turned the phone over to authorities.

• HOSPITALS have quietly created banks of DNA from blood taken from millions of newborn babies without the proper consent of their parents, emails show.

• Freedom of information (FOI) requests to hospitals around Britain have established that the blood samples, taken in heel-prick tests to screen for serious conditions, have been privately stored by parts of the NHS since 1984.

Environment

• Responding to the massive BP oil spill, Congress is getting ready to quadruple—to 32 cents a barrel—a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

• [...]

• President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have said they expect BP to foot the bill for the cleanup.

• “Taxpayers will not pick up the tab,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday.

• At this point I’d like to segue to the Gulf of Mexico – should BP be allowed to cause damage to it’s neighbors? Think about it. The fisherman in Louisiana may loose their livelihoods because of the oil spill. Does BP have a responsibility to repair the damage caused by the oil spill? Because it is the same issue. Andrei also made a claim that

• You could read Andrei’s statement as saying that the money that the people of Louisiana could earn from having a sound ecosystem is unearned, and that they are undeserving of government protection. Or legal protection if you wish. Executive. Legislature. Judiciary. These are the three legs of government. The courts, or judiciary, are the third leg of the government stool. All three parts of the government have a fiduciary duty to the citizenry. When part of the government fails to act on a situation for which it is responsible, the damage can be profound.

Finance

• Did you know that insider trading is perfectly legal in the United States? Well, not for 99.9% of the population. It is actually only a very small percentage of the population that can legally indulge in insider trading – the members of the United States Congress. In fact, a law that would ban insider trading by members of Congress has been stalled for years on Capitol Hill. So why wouldn’t lawmakers in Washington D.C. want to apply the same rules to themselves that apply to the rest of us? After all, how are we supposed to respect the integrity of those “serving” in Congress when they are playing by an entirely different set of rules? The American people aren’t stupid. They can see what is going on. The truth is that there is a reason why approval ratings for Congress are at an all-time low.

• With House-Senate negotiations on the bill expected to conclude next month, the talks provide an opening for a last lobbying thrust before the legislation reaches the president for his signature.

• That assessment of the Senate’s recently approved financial legislation came from Harvey R. Miller, the éminence grise of the bankruptcy bar and a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

• I would add that Obama is also a political pragmatist with a strong belief that getting something done is better than nothing. I think that on health care he and the administration probably did the best they could. Remember, they barely got a majority in the House, then barely got sixty votes in the Senate, then barely got a majority in the House again (to pass the revised bill), and public opinion was very divided.

• But on financial reform I think they could have gotten more done. First of all, public opinion wanted more; and second, the administration lobbied against some of the most far-reaching changes, such as Kaufman-Brown and Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives spinout provision, and Merkley-Levin never got a vote. The whole theater of the administration trying to put the bill into stone before it got much stronger should have been embarrassing to them, but they decided they could take the hit.

• House and Senate lawmakers overhauling Wall Street are clashing over whether brokers and insurance agents should have a fiduciary duty to their clients.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Pennsylvania prosecutors are dropping their grand jury subpoena to Twitter demanding the identity of two account holders who used the microblogging service to criticize Attorney General Tom Corbett, a spokesman said Friday.

• The authorities have identified a new threat to political stability in the restive region of Tibet: photocopiers. Fearful that Tibetans might mass-copy incendiary material, public security officials intend to more tightly control printing and photocopying shops, according to reports from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Others have not backed off, though. The Federal Communications Commission has been working diligently to find a way to act on the same control impulses that Sunstein had in mind, with something called “net neutrality.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• It seems the left hand doesn’t always know what the right hand is doing on the diplomatic front, apparently. Late last week, the US and Chinese patent offices signed an agreement promising cooperation, including sharing information and best practices between the two. At the same time, however, it appears the Chinese government is pretty steamed about being included in the USTR’s silly special 301 report (which is basically mocked by everyone outside of the the USTR and the entertainment or pharma industries).

• [...]

• While it’s difficult to take the word of Chinese officials on this matter seriously, we again have to wonder if US politicians (and industry reps) have any idea what they’re setting themselves up for. As we noted recently, under pressure from US companies and politicians, China has begun cracking down on infringement, but has done so almost exclusively against foreign companies. Ticking off China even more on this issue doesn’t seem like a particularly wise strategy.

• Justice Stevens proves to be the go-to Justice once again when it comes to IP issues on the Supreme Court.

• It just released a unanimous decision that he authored, holding that the NFL can be sued for anti-trust violations for trying to give exclusive manufacturing licenses for producing trademarked clothing with NFL logos on them.

• The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the National Football League over its exclusive contract with an apparel maker in one of the most important sports law cases in decades.

• Property rights provide incentives to create information but they also provide incentives to hoard it prior to the award of protection. All-or-nothing rights, in particular, limit prior sharing. An unintended consequence is to slow, not hasten, forward progress when innovation hinges on combining disparately owned private ideas. In response, we propose a solution, based on a reward defnition of “fairness,” that unblocks innovation by increasing willingness to share private knowledge.

• We present four arguments. First, we show that fairness can increase the rate of innovation. Welfare can improve both in the absolute sense of enabling new projects and in the relative sense of reordering the social sort order of which projects individuals prefer to undertake. Second, in contrast to models of “other regarding” preferences, we show how self-interest alone is suffcient to justify fairness in a one-time encounter. Third, we show how this problem is more acute for information than for tangible goods. Fourth, we argue that liability rather than property rules can be more conducive to innovation based on information reuse and recombination.

Copyrights

• With the assistance of the Svea Court of Appeals, the main Hollywood movie studios have landed a triple blow on OpenBitTorrent, The Pirate Bay and site founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The Court handed out three injunctions yesterday, one of which took the OpenBitTorrent tracker offline.

• Yet another company has failed in its attempt to discredit and have the business model of the leading global one-click-filehost, RapidShare AG, declared illegal.

• An American judge, concerned about the “staggering volume of infringement” taking place at BitTorrent search site isoHunt, has issued a permanent injunction against the site and its owner, Canadian Gary Fung.

• 1. VCR’s Will Kill Television! 2. Phonographs and Player Pianos Will Kill Music! 3. Pirated BASIC Will Kill Software Development! 4. The Cassette Will Kill Music! Again! 5. The Printing Press Will Kill Literature!

• I love the wording here: “assert a fair value.” As if implying that everyone else in the business is not asserting a fair value. But, again, we can see what the market thinks of his notion of “fair value,” but I warn him that the market tends to price things not on “fair value” (a made up concept) but on supply and demand. I’d like to see how his notion of “fair value” stands up to the notion of “widespread free competition.”

• Earlier this week a Swedish appeals court upheld the ruling of a district court and ordered an ISP to hand over the details of a torrent site operator. Faced with a potential $96,500 fine for non-compliance, TeliaSonera has announced it will take an appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to balance pre-existing privacy obligations with those under IPRED.

• Well, this is fun. A tech company in Germany is claiming that movie studio Warner Bros. has “pirated” its “anti-piracy” technology.

• While that is not how I would describe the outcome of the consultation – fair copyright is not the same as “go-easy” – Martin’s report is wholly consistent with my earlier reporting that the PMO has sided with the out-of-touch Moore, who has emerged as a staunch advocate for a Canadian DMCA. While the bill will undoubtedly include some elements designed to garner support from consumer and education groups, the U.S.-style approach to digital locks will effectively undermine the current fair dealing provision and any additional user-oriented reforms that find their way into the bill.

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