● 06.03.10

● Links 3/6/2010: GNU/Linux on 94.6% of Top500, Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring RC2

Posted in News Roundup at 3:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• · Announced Distro: Slackware 13.1 · Announced Distro: Fedora 13 · Announced Distro: StressLinux 0.5.113 · Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7 · Announced Distro: SME Server 7.5 · Announced Distro: Zenwalk Linux 6.4

Desktop

• So don’t look to Google to drive Linux (or Mac) “desktop’ adoption. Google likely can’t change calcified opinions of “what a desktop OS should look like” (i.e., Windows), but it is actively defining the future of that desktop with two open-source initiatives:Google Android for mobile and Google Chrome for Web browsing.

• In the previous article this blog discussed the value of PC gaming in bringing Linux to the mainstream home user, and in particular the importance of stable drivers as an enabler of this revolution, but what about the other technologies that will underpin a truly first-class linux user experience? In many cases the mainstream user won’t be aware of the technologies that provide this user experience, and even if they did they really wouldn’t care, because the limit of their interest is that the computer and it software environment work seamlessly to meet their user needs. This does mean however that those technologies, and their progress towards maturity, are not of interest to those with a nerdier bent.

• [...]

• Other technologies of note include:

• 1. Btrfs, a new filesystem under development that is designed (among other goals) to be able to leverage the capabilities of solid state drives which are now entering the consumer market for computer hardware. Its first use is likely to be on MeeGo driven nokia smartphones as well as the Ubuntu 10:10, but its adoption will spread rapidly in 2011 as its development matures.

• 2. Multi Pointer X which along with X Input 2 will allow truly multi-touch friendly GUI’s capable of working with many unmodified X windows applications. This much delayed feature will hopefully come of age now that there are a myriad of touch-screen devices and computers demanding the attention of consumers.

• 3. Packagekit is a front end for various package management systems being adopted by many linux distributions as it provides a consistent and reliable application installation/management/removal experience regardless of the desktop environment used.

• There you have it. The rankings are as follows:

• Ubuntu 21 points

• PCLOS 20 points

• Linux Mint 20 points

• Kubuntu 12 points

• Windows 7 6 points

• So, now, I will back up this as an image and wipe the hard drive to Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze to make it useful. Six hours of work were needed just to bring that other OS into a very basic form from which my successor may want to start. With no budget, I wish him well (it’s a long story…).

Server

• Try as I might I could find no evidence that any of them run Windows Vista. In fact, not many of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run anything other than Linux. 473 of the fastest 500 Supercomputers in the world run Linux. That is 94.6%.

• South Africa’s Tsessebe supercomputer, based at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, was listed at position 461.

Ballnux

• If you need reminding, Samsung’s Bada OS is based on the Linux Kernel by the Koreans, meaning it also has its own application store as well. We should be seeing many more phones running this platform in the near future as Samsung looks to create a whole new range of affordable smartphones.

Kernel Space

• Linux 2.6.35 will deliver better network throughput, support the Turbo Core functionality offered by the latest AMD processors and de-fragment memory as required. On LKML, a discussion on merging several patches developed by Google for Android is generating large volumes of email.

• Two weeks on from the release of Linux 2.6.34, on Sunday night Linus Torvalds released the first pre-release version of Linux 2.6.35 to concluding the merge of the major changes for the next kernel version, expected to be released in about ten weeks. The merge window has once again stretched to around 14 days, after its abbreviation in Linux 2.6.34 caused confusion among some subsystem maintainers.

Instructionals

Games

• The Pandora team is currently building a batch of some 4,000 handhelds, and completed ones are already being shipped. One of their forum mods, x68000, received the first mass-produced model, which he showed off with some unboxing pictures.

• Gish source code is available from GitHub and is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

• Great computers games are like love at first sight. The moment you power on the game, you know it’s something different and you know you’re going to love it. This is what happened to me with Live For Speed. While reading about VDrift, a cross-platform racing simulator, on Wikipedia I noticed a reference to Live for Speed (LFS). The game had a free demo available, so I downloaded it.

Distributions

Reviews

• The release of Linux Pardus 2009.2 is near so I wanted to give the Beta a run and see what’s new before I actually get my hands on the final release a few days/weeks from now. Unfortunately, the link to the beta from DISTROWATCH was broken. In all fairness, that link is broken on the Pardus official WEBSITE as well. I kept looking and was lucky enough to find a link to the Release Candidate, which actually makes more sense for a fair preview article. In fact, this RC is so complete that this almost feels like a review!

• [...]

• Some time ago I compared Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. Back then I stated that Windows 7 made things very simple at the expense of diversity and choice. In other words, everything was intuitive because options were very limited and mostly predefined by developers. I was essentially justifying that Ubuntu’s arguably more complicated interface was the result of its great flexibility and freedom. PCLinuxOS 2010, Linux Mint 9 and specially Pardus 2009.2 have demonstrated that a much better job can be done in making the Linux desktop accessible to anyone without compromising its power.

• People sometimes ask which distribution to try if they want to learn how Linux works. Common answers are Gentoo, Arch, or Debian. However, I disagree. Each of these distros teach users their particular brand of Linux. There’s only one truly pure Linux, and that is Slackware.

• Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. In its early years, Patrick Volkerdin rolled up a kernel, init, libraries, desktop, and applications to make Linux easier for users. And that’s still what he is doing today. He doesn’t change anything, he doesn’t customize anything. Every component is exactly how the original developers intended. For example, users get a vanilla kernel and default desktop configuration.

• [...]

• So, all in all, besides the partitioning requirement and the lack of multimedia support, Slackware is just as up-to-date and easy-to-use as any Linux distribution. Like a split personality, today’s Slackware is steeped in tradition yet surprisingly modern.

New Releases

• SystemRescueCd 1.5.5 is the latest update to the Gentoo-based system rescue Linux distro. It comes with updated kernels and several other changes. The biggest new additions are new tools to make USB installs easier on both Windows and Linux host machines.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• As announced previously, here comes the last development release for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. This is essentially a bug fix release.

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

• In the June 2010 issue:

• How Can YOU Contribute To PCLinuxOS? Creating A Local PCLinuxOS Repository Xfce 4.6.1: An Overview Xfce 4.6.1: Xfce Settings Manager – Part 1 Xfce 4.6.1: Customize Your Xfce Menu OpenOffice: An Overview Ms_meme’s nook: If My Friends Could See Me Now Computer Languages A to Z: Lisp Command Line Interface Intro: Part 9 Zip-Player Plays Music Archives: Part 2 Screenshot Showcase Alternate OS: ReactOS Game Zone: Warzone 2100 Configuring USB Speakers on KDE 4 and much, much more!

Red Hat Family

• A Norwegian company that claims to be among the top providers of Internet-based services in northern Europe will begin using platform infrastructure developed by Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the Raleigh-based software maker announced Tuesday.

• Sitting at the heart of every Linux OS distribution is a Linux kernel. When it comes to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, the issue of which kernel is being used is not a cut and dried answer, however.

• RHEL 6 is currently in its first beta release, with a feature freeze now in place. Currently, the mainline Linux kernel is nearing its 2.6.34 release, while the most recent stable release is the 2.6.33 release, which came out in February. But instead of either sticking with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel or holding out for 2.6.34, Red Hat is taking a different approach.

• Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat’s CEO James Whitehurst.

Fedora

• I also like the more polished desktop look and feel. Menus are simpler and more consistent thanks to the work of the Fedora Desktop team. The Fedora Design team has also been hard at work in making the icons in the default installation match a single look and feel. I’m looking forward to trying out other desktop features in Fedora 13 including its solutions for scanning, microblogging and photo management. (Heading on vacation soon, and plan to take a lot of pics!) I’m able to rely on Fedora to just work out of the box more than ever before.

• The tests carried out included OpenArena, Warsow, World of Padman, PostgreSQL, Unpack-Linux, Bullet, C-Ray, x264, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, John The Ripper, and TTSIOD 3D Renderer. This testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• According to a posting on the Ubuntu developers mailing list, Ubuntu developers are planning to push the next release of Firefox, 3.6.4, to the current Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx 10.04, and to older versions such as Hardy (8.04LTS), Jaunty (9.04) and Karmic Koala (9.10). These older versions currently have Firefox 3.0 and xulrunner 1.9 both of which are no longer supported by Mozilla.

• Though lacking any so-called killer features, Parsix GNU/Linux 3.5 is a solid release and can be used on both home and production machines. There are some weird sound-related issues and the video driver installation process can frighten some more inexperienced users, but other than that, there aren’t really any reasons to not take a look or two at this distro.

Devices/Embedded

• In only a couple of years, millions of Australians will directly be using the open source Linux operating system in their everyday personal and professional lives.

• [...]

• “But wait!” I hear you cry out. “Linux’s desktop market share is not growing, and even the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution is failing to gain traction amongst the mainstream. How can you possibly claim that Linux will become extremely popular in Australia?”

• The answer is easy. By and large, the millions of Australians who will shortly rely on Linux will not even know it is there.

• I have written previously about the rapid encroachment of the Linux-based Android operating system into the Australian mobile phone market, a phenomenon which, I anticipate, will eventually see dozens of Android handsets flood into Australian hands and pose a strong challenge to other mobile phone vendors such as Apple, Research in Motion and others.

• At each event, attendees will be given demonstrations of the Resolve on Linux…

• The Kno, with its dual 14-inch screens and touch-based Linux operating system, is aimed at students and is slated to hit the market at the end of the year. Kno isn’t talking price just yet, but the company’s goal is for it to be well under $1,000.

• The Linux OS-powered iPlayer interface is good looking, easy to read and incredibly simple, but it’s not as fast as, say, the similar service on Virgin Media. We used a 10Mbps broadband connection, though it should work on a 2Mbps service – any slower and you’ll have to use “normal” as opposed to “high quality” settings.

Nokia/MeeGo

• Just a few months after the MeeGo Linux project was formed by the merger of the Maemo and Moblin projects, it looks like MeeGo is making some pretty serious progress in the marketplace.

• The other day we reported that it looked like Asus was going to launch devices running MeeGo in 2011, and a press release issued today pretty much confirms it. Acer officials say the company palns to beat Asus to market with a MeeGo-based netbook before the end of this year.

• What is MeeGo in the first place? As defined on its website, “MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity.” The aim is to provide a Linux-based OS for netbooks, handheld devices, televisions and set-top boxes, as well as in-vehicle computers.

• I downloaded the OS image from the site and immediately ran it on VMWare Fusion 3.1 on my Macbook Pro. Giving it 1GB of RAM and a single core to work with, the image booted up but that was it — did not display anything on the screen. I tried this three times with different configurations and nothing.

• I did install it without any problems on an Asus EeePC 1000HE, however there are a great number of existing netbooks out there and it might not work as seamlessly on other makes and models.

• The Linux-based MeeGo operating system gained traction at Computex, with prototype tablets shown by Wistron, Compal, Quanta, CZC, and others, and Acer announcing it will offer MeeGo on both netbooks and tablets. Meanwhile, Phoronix benchmarked MeeGo for Netbooks and found it to be faster than Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Fedora, and Moblin.

Android

• What does openness mean? Is a platform that is open to outside programmers open? Is a platform that has an open content store open? Is a platform that’s open source open? All those definitions are still in flux, I think.

• Victoria Fodale, an analyst at ABI Research, said Tuesday in a research note that the Scottsdale, Arizona-based marketing research firm anticipates that Linux-enabled smartphones, led by the success of Google’s Android, will comprise 33 percent of the worldwide smartphone market by 2015.

Sub-notebooks

• Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai announced that the company’s browser-centric operating system will be released this fall. Chrome OS is built on top of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but uses a completely custom user interface based on Google’s Chrome Web browser.

• Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will launch in the late autumn. Speaking to the press at this year’s Computex PC trade show in Taiwan, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said, “We will be selective on how we come to market because we want to deliver a great user experience,” adding that, “We’re thinking on both the hardware and software levels.”

• With Ubuntu she says that the screen shows up the fonts much better than other solutions due to the font rendering technology Canonical chose to use. From what we’ve seen it looks very crisp on-screen.

Tablets

• If MeeGo based devices even have a chance on the market is still a big question mark. MeeGo got created by Intel and Nokia earlier this year by merging Moblin and Maemo. MeeGo is a Linux-based software platform and so will be Google Chrome OS. And of course HP has now Palm’s webOS, which at its heart is also Linux.

• Confident with their first success, Sharp decided that it was time to go beyond the conventional “Notebook” design and to start offering a real Linux-powered handheld slate, known now as the Netwalker PC-T1.

• While several tech bloggers spotted a Wistron tablet running MeeGo tucked away behind glass at the Intel booth at Computex, the folks at Engadget got to spend some hands-on time with another MeeGo tablet. The Quanta Redvale tablet has an Intel Atom Moorestown processor and runs MeeGo Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• Android

• Android is the newcomer to the smartphone market. Android began as a mobile variant of the aforementioned open-source Linux OS, and was then acquired by Google. The Android OS is now available as an open-source platform again, and its users rave about it. Android presently (mid-2010) holds about 10 percent of the smartphone market, but is predicted to dominate the market with Symbian by 2012. Android phones are presently available from T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T.

• You might not recognize the name Geeknet, but you probably know its popular tech sites such as Sourceforge, Slashdot, Ohloh, Think Geek, Freshmeat, and the recently acquired Geek.com.

• When Geeknet opened a new data center in Chicago two years ago, the network operations team wanted to centralize management of hundreds of systems serving the Geeknet Web network.

Africa

• CAN, a Usakos-based organisation, says its objective of establishing what would be called the Namibia Open Source Software Institute (NOSSI) in Omaruru, Erongo Region, during the course of this year, is to promote the use of free and open source software, which it strongly feels would benefit the country.

• Because open source gives you equal rights with other software developers, it can be used effectively to localize software in small language groups, such as those found across Africa. And the applications can be deployed using technology that is already in place, so the results are truly independent.

Mail

• In March, the provider of business-class open source collaboration software moved to increase its U.S. sales presence by adding Behshad Behnam as vice president of sales, Americas. The former Parallels executive spearheads service provider initiatives for Open-Xchange.

Events

• Schedules at upcoming industry conferences are revealing indicators. Consider the speaker line-up at LinuxCon in mid-August:

• * Ravi Simhambhatla, Chief Information Officer at Virgin America * Chris Wright, Red Hat * Bdale Garbee, Hewlett-Packard * Tim Bird, Sony Corporation * Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle Corporation * David Rientjes, Google

Mozilla

• Firefox 3.5 is already the most widely used browser in the world. A lot of openness in the web that we enjoy today and that we take for granted is because of the open source browser, Firefox. Light the world with Firefox video is a nice depiction of Firefox through the years. But how many of you actually knew that there are a number of Firefox based browsers which are as good or oven better than Firefox? Here is a list of 5 Firefox based browsers you should know.

SaaS

Databases

• With Big Blue behind Hadoop, companies with Big Data problems may find the open source technology is available in more manageable forms.

• It remains to be seen just how much momentum Apache CouchDB can garner because most of the people using it discovered it as a result of using Linux on the desktop. While not officially supported on Windows just yet, the Apache CouchDB is POSIX compliant, so it runs on most Windows systems. Given those issues, making the rest of the world aware of Apache CouchDB will take some effort.

Open Data

• Wikipedia’s “crowdsourced knowledge” model has created a spectacular resource, but everyone knows the big caveat: if the data’s important, don’t trust the online encyclopedia without verifying it first. So how well would a similar crowdsourcing model work for a detailed street-level map of the world?

• The product is a fully-integrated, open source geospatial platform for manipulating maps and data that provides enhanced capabilities like the ability to edit vector data through a web interface, imagery delivery and customized web application development. OpenGeo will provide unlimited support and bug fixes for PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers and the rest of the open source platform to help OBIS extract intelligent data more easily from its 27 million record database and improve the ease of use for its global audience.

Open Hardware

• Hexaboard’s architecture is Open Source under “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0″ license.

• Francisco Paz (aka TheCorpora) has released new information about his open source robot Qbo. The diminutive wheeled bot stands only 456mm (18 inches) tall but is packed with sensors, including two high definition web cameras in its eyes. TheCorpora plans on using Qbo’s stereoscopic vision to let it react to people and objects in a realistic manner with face tracking, depth perception, and gesture detection. The robot will also be capable of speech recognition and synthesis. If all goes according to plan, the Qbo could serve as a versatile open source platform, allowing programmers to explore and perfect the ways in which humans and robots interact.

Standards/Consortia

• Opera is also a big fan of Google’s open source video codec VP8, and has already implemented it on its desktop browser.

• “When Google chooses to buy a company for a significant amount of money and then make the codec available freely, a lot of companies have jumped,” said von Tetzchner.

Leftovers

• Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The beautiful fish was to be the lab’s test object as they worked out some new methods.

Environment

• The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the biggest ecological disaster of all time. It’s probably also the biggest corporate PR of all time.

• A leaked letter from the United Nations’ climate chief suggests the Copenhagen climate summit failed because the presence of 130 world leaders paralysed decision-making and the Danish presidency backed the US and other western nations over the interests of the poor.

Finance

• Remember long ago in late April when people actually discussed Goldman Sachs and its criminal charges of CDO fraud? Not really? Now may be a good time to remember what some said was the biggest fraud investigation in history, because according to new developments not only is Goldman still in very hot water (Fox Business disclosed earlier that the SEC added veteran litigator David Gottesman to its group of attorney trying the Goldman case), but according to a new report by Reuters’ Matt Goldstein, the firm lied to Calpers in March, when it was seeking a consulting mandate from the pension giant, claiming it was not “the target of a formal investigation.” Calpers apparently is not too happy about this: “Calpers spokesman Brad Pacheco told Reuters the pension fund’s investment staff “will be reaching out to Goldman for an explanation on their response.” The investment staff is finalizing contracts for Calpers’ consultant pool, which will be effective July 1.” Needless to say, Goldman’s chances of taking a slice out of Leon Black’s pie are looking bad to quite bad.

• Congressional proponents of a necessary reregulation of our financial services industries received a break as the European credit crisis sent the markets on another retreat from risk; the zeitgeist is taking a break from the V-shaped recovery crowd as well. Accordingly, the Senate was able to pass an omnibus bill that was significantly more far-reaching than anything that could have emerged from the dysfunctional legislature only a few months before.

• Germany pressed ahead with its drive for tougher market regulation as the Cabinet on Wednesday approved a bill that would cement in law curbs on speculative trading practices – a move the finance minister said was aimed at speeding agreement on stronger European rules.

• By definition, the government runs a deficit when its spending exceeds its revenue. It typically finances the difference by borrowing. Of course, future governments are burdened with paying the principal and interest on the government debt created today, which is why many critics of deficit spending conclude that such deficits leave us worse off in the future.

• Seizing on a disastrous oil spill to advance a cause, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil and pass a clean-energy bill that he says would help the nation end its dependence on fossil fuels.

• In our continuing financial debate, one of the central myths – put about by big banks and also not seriously disputed by the administration – is that reigning in “too big to fail” banks is in some sense an “anti-market” approach.

• Ratings agencies came under more fire Wednesday for their role in the financial crisis as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission questioned former and current executives at the ratings firm Moody’s and Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, which is Moody’s biggest shareholder. The hearing focused on how agencies, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, wound up assigning high ratings to complex financial products packed with risky mortgages that went bad when the housing market collapsed in 2007.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A £500,000 public dialogue over GM food could be abandoned after a second member of the steering group overseeing it resigned, the government’s independent food watchdog said today.

• The Food Standards Agency, which had been commissioned by the Labour government to gauge the public mood on growing and eating the controversial foods, said that it would ask the coalition government if it should continue with the dialogue.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• To give you an example of what we see, here is a screenshot from a popular open source wireless sniffer, kismet. (We use a slightly modified version.)

• Google was trying to do the same thing that my wireless research group was doing — again, no ethical problems there. However, they claim to have “inadvertently” also listened to the content of communications. (This is called “payload” data.) Here’s the problem with the story we’re getting from Google: the word “inadvertently.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• The classic block game Tetris has frequently been the subject of legal disputes. The rights to the trademark are currently held by The Tetris Company, a corporation located in Hawaii that licenses the name to other parties. The Tetris Company, which routinely threatens legal action against clones of the popular game, has sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google, prompting the search giant to remove 35 Tetris-like games from the Android market.

• The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA’s abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA’s more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.

• Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.

• Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.

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