● 06.21.10

● Links 21/6/2010: Debian Community Poll Results

Posted in News Roundup at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you practice with a Live CD of your favorite distro, next time your Windows computer crashes, you will be ready to operate it temporarily using Linux. A colleague of mine (who happens to break his computer from time to time with the aid of the most destructive viruses I’ve ever seen) started his computer, checked his email, and browsed the Web this way for almost a month before we could restore his Windows XP. I personally don’t recommend surviving on a Live CD for so long, but it was his choice and Linux was up to the job.

Audiocasts

• Zenoss is an open source network monitoring platform designed for highly scaled and distributed IT assets.

Google

• It looks like Dell will join Acer and HP in offering netbooks based on Google’s Chrome OS sometime this fall.

• Analysis: Logitech’s Google TV box named; expect it to control your life this fall.

• When Chrome OS devices hit the stores late this year, users may have to start getting used to a web-centric mindset. Practically everything on their device will be running on the cloud. And with easily accessible Google Docs already accepting up to 1 GB storage for ANY kind of file, it would be difficult to resist storing and moving more files to the cloud as well.

Ballnux

• KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung has penned a deal with Orange to flog its latest Android handset, the Galaxy Apollo.

• The Korean company sees the extension to other devices as a second step after further development of the OS on its smartphones. The 1.0 version of Bada is available for Samsung’s smartphones and a 1.x version, still in development, is expected for the companies upcoming lines of phones, the Wave 2 and the Wave Pro. Announced this week the Wave 2 is a touchscreen handset while the Wave Pro has a slide design, but there is no date for their UK availability.

• OpenSUSE 11.3 already feels like a solid release at its current RC1 state. It provides a solid and friendly installation experience, a good KDE implementation and a carefully picked set of preinstalled applications. There are obviously some areas that could benefit from polishing, but something tells me we will probably have to wait for a future release before that happens.

Applications

• Gnote was cloned from Tomboy (to remove the Mono dependency), is used on the GNOME desktop, and uses a wiki-like interface. Gnote is simple to use and reliable. In this article I am going to introduce you to this tool so that all users of Fedora do not miss out on it’s handiness.

• There’s been sort of a bump in interest in Marave, my distraction free editor and it’s because it has been reviewed in Linux Journal!

• [...]

• On related news, marave was also reviewed in a german magazine a couple of months ago, and I have not been able to get a copy of the article. (BTW, isn’t it reasonable to send a copy of these to the author of the program you are reviewing? Neither magazine even mentioned it to me!)

• In the end, I stuck with flpsed, which ended up working pretty well for my limited needs. The most promising application that I encountered, however, was OpenOffice, which seems very capable of a variety of PDF-editing tasks as long as it’s able to import the file cleanly.

• In the future, I’d love to see edit functionality incorporated into Evince so that Ubuntu would be able to modify PDF files out-of-the-box. But I’ll be happy enough just to get the visa application that launched this blog post approved.

• You’re walking down a dark alley, late at night, when suddenly someone jumps out at you and forces you to hand over your passport, your credit cards, and the keys to your car. This is a good analogy of what using the internet is like.

• Around every corner lurks danger, and with today’s always-on connections, you may have the internet equivalent of burglars without realising. For ultimate computer security, a firewall is similar to having a big, burly bodyguard walking down the street with you, keeping you safe. Whether it be your home or office network, a firewall distribution should be able to help you.

• A remote or online backup service has become quite an important tool for those of us who travel a lot and require some of our files on the cloud for easy access anytime and any place with Internet connection. It can also be useful for users who need to sync some of their data across two or more computer machines most of the time.

• It’s time Linux stop trying to play well with Microsoft. Instead what the Linux community needs to do is focus on creating solid applications to replace every tool needed in the business and home PC realm. Don’t worry about making these tools interact with Windows. Just focus on making them work well.

Instructionals

Games

• PlaneShift team is very proud to announce a new update for our clients and servers!! The new release is called 0.5.4 and is a solid upgrade from previously available 0.5.3. Here is a detailed list of changes. Please note that you can upgrade from 0.5.3 but follow the instructions in our download page for this.

Desktop Environments

• A lot of times I run across software that I want to like a lot, but somehow doesn’t seem to work quite right. It’s not because it’s somehow faulty or misdesigned, but because I happen to like the idea in principle: It strikes me that it ought to work as well as — if not better in — real life.

• ArchBang is now Arch Linux + LXDE. We feel that LXDE is more appropriate and provides a wholesome lightweight desktop environment with much more functionalities than plain openbox.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• It’s intended that Qt on Rails gives Ruby and/or Rails developers an outlet to develop first class desktop apps using the best available framework. Rails developers often ask, “If I want to build a great cross-platform desktop app, what GUI toolkit would I use?” The answer varies and there no one headline GUI toolkit/desktop framework that currently has mindshare amongst Ruby developers and works great across multiple platforms. Given that Qt is currently so strong across the Linux desktop, commercial Windows applications, Macs and mobile platforms such as Maemo and MeeGo why shouldn’t it be the first thing you reach for when building a Ruby desktop app? Come help us build Qt on Rails!

GNOME Desktop

• We’ve seen a tonne of awesome re-designed Nautilus mock-ups, nautilus tweaks, hacks & add-ons, Nautilus critiques, rants & diatribes over the last few months. From a top-down view it could easily appear as though all of this effort is merely a band-aid on a limb that needs amputating. Seif Sallam certainly thinks so and has come up with his designs for the “perfect file manager.

Distributions

• But before I go to the core of the problem, let me try to give a brief introduction of what we’re talking about here, because jumping straight to talk about injection is going to be too much for most of my readers, I’m sure. Even though, this whole topic reconnects with multiple other smaller topics I discussed about in the past on my blog, so you’ll see a few links here and there for that.

• First of all, what the heck is RPATH? When using dynamic linking (shared libraries), the operating system need to know where to look for the libraries an executable uses; to do so, each operating system has one or more PATH variables, plus eventual configuration files, that are used to look up the libraries; on Windows, for instance, the same PATH variable that is used to find the commands is used to load the libraries; and the libraries are looked for in the same directory where the executable is first of all. On Unix, the commands and the libraries use distinct paths, by design, and the executable’s directory is not searched for; this is also because the two directories are quite distinct (/usr/bin vs /usr/lib as an example). The GNU/Linux loader (and here the name is proper, as the loader comes out of GLIBC — almost identical behaviour is expected by uClibc, FreeBSD and other OSes but I know that much for sure) differs extensively from the Sun loader; I say this because I’ll introduce the Sun system later.

• I swallowed my pride and reinstalled Mandriva, then spent the day fixing the desktop well enough that I my eyes don’t hurt when I look at it. Everything works well enough—I’ve got networking running. I’ve got Ruby 1.9, the latest version of PHP, Squeak, and Lispbox running. I’m now officially good to go. No more fiddling for me.

• It’s been fun taking a tour of Linux and FreeBSD land. Try it the next time you have a few days to spare. All of the distros are awesome in their way, but you may find, as I have, that there is one particular version that works best for you. You just have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princess, or prince, as the case may be.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project is happy to announce that it will be represented at the Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (LSM/RMLL) event in Bordeaux, France, this year. At the booth, members of the project will be available for questions and discussions and will give a preview of Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, which is expected to be released this year.

• Multiple answers are allowed for this question and that is why the values do not sum up to 100%.

• * 80.5% are using Debian on the desktop * 62.4% on the server * 56.9% on the notebook * 21.7% on the netbook * 11.6% on embedded device(s) * 3.2% on other device(s)

• Debian based distribution comes with two Desktops KDE, Xfce and this one going to review today here. most packages with Xfce version is upgraded to last version. Fully customized with xfce window manager, will show exactly how to fully customize many things on Sidux Hypnos.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In this issue we welcome New Ubuntu Members, discuss ways users and developers alike can help fix an Ubuntu bug (and process), the QA Team issues a call for Karmic Users to test Firefox and the Community Leadership Summit for 2010 is announced.

Flavours and Variants

• Element OS is a 32 bit Xubuntu based distro for HTPCs(Home Theatre PCs). It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu repositories. It uses the Advanced Packaging Tool(APT) with Element’s own custom repositories and the Ubuntu repositories. Element OS also incorporates the AllMyApps software center to allow additional applications to be downloaded.

• Stepping away from Peppermint for a minute, I’d like to say a few words about cloud-based applications in general. I don’t think running programs over the Internet is really a good fit for desktop Linux. I’m a big fan of running thin clients on a LAN and I’ve often used web-based data solutions (such as web mail or document sharing services). But I can think of very few cases where web-based applications, running on servers outside the local area network, would be useful to Linux users. The two main benefits to running cloud-based apps are having one central location for updates and having the benefit of being able to access those applications from anywhere that has an Internet connection. Linux distributions already offer these features by way of software repositories, giving the end user the ability to keep up to date or, optionally, stick with older versions of software.

• Many of the big name distributions also offer tools to install their product on Flash drives, allowing users to take their operating system with them anywhere. This combination, in my mind, is superior to cloud-based applications in speed and flexibility and it removes the need for a steady, fast network connection. I don’t have anything against making use of cloud computing where it is appropriate, but I think most desktop Linux users already have solutions in place which make web applications redundant. When your operating system receives daily updates and can fit in your pocket, is there really any reason to turn control of your programs over to other people? Judging by the interest surrounding Peppermint, some users think so and are excited by the fresh approach.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Verizon’s upcoming Droid X smartphone looks to be a multimedia behemoth, but the long-discussed device may end up drawing in business users as well.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• Over the past decade, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has been supporting the Apache community’s development of some of the most ubiquitous products in Open Source, benefiting billions of users worldwide. Its collaborative, consensus-based development process, affectionately dubbed “The Apache Way”, is one of its secrets to creating dozens of high quality, industry-leading software products that all began with a single project.

Mozilla

• It looks as though the people over at Mozilla Foundation are more than a little fed up with the fact that their software, no matter how it changes, has of late been perceived as slow, especially at start up.

Oracle

• And perhaps it is also telling that in an article posted on the Oracle website and extracted from the July/August 2010 issue of Oracle Magazine, that Ed Screven, who bears the title of chief corporate architect, never once mentioned Solaris or OpenSolaris.

• None of Oracle’s actions (or inaction) could be construed as being proactive about telling the 50,000-strong Solaris customer base – from which Oracle is trying to extract $2bn in profits – what is going on with the platform.

WordPress

• WordPress is one of the best blogging platform. Bloggers and Webmasters were waiting for the release of WordPress 3.0 and now it is available for download. Response for WordPress 3.0 is awesome as it is already downloaded 400,000 times in just less than 2 days of its release. Number is still moving in positive direction.

• WordPress custom post types are a feature that could turbocharge WordPress as a content management system — and not in the way of the now defunct Turbo mode. While this may not seem much different than a post category at first glance, this gives developers and theme designers the ability to cause certain types of posts to have a different appearance and functionality than the rest of the blog.

Business

• Some may ask, “What about those stock holders in a company? Won’t their dividends suffer in a switch that is possibly as disruptive as a switch to FOSS and Linux on the corporate desktop?” Sure, in the short term, a corporation may spend less to stay with proprietary, costly, closed source software and keep dividends up for stock holders. But anyone with the ability to think ahead and plan for long term results can see that down the road switching to in-house support using FOSS and Linux will mean significant savings for a corporation in the long term. It could also mean more dividends for stock holders, those people that Microsoft FUD mongers try to point to as blockades for moving off of Microsoft. Any company that I hold stock in should be thinking in the long term and should be switching to FOSS and Linux.

Project Releases

• Blender 2.5 is still live and in development, but the most recent builds are getting really close to a stable version that can take over for 2.49. I’ve been updating my Blender on a semi-regular basis for some time now, and so far it’s actually been a fairly stable platform, with the occasional crash, mostly in the weird corner cases people who animate with textures and physics run into.

Openness/Sharing

• Over the past couple of days I have received some comments – and some pushback – about my assertion that law is basically source code, so I’d like to explain what I mean. As it happens, explaining that is also a good way for me to start to explain the Legislative Enterprise Architecture that underpins KLISS, so here goes.

• At Google I/O, Messina talked with us about several topics related to the open web, including Facebook’s “Open” graph, which has been heavily criticized for not really being that open.

• And he also has a faith in web users and filesharers as fundamentally honest, saying: “It’s probably not been the best thing for people to brand themselves as pirates … the image we should be concentrating on is sharing” – a view that informs his opinion that the media, music and film industries need to stop regarding filesharers as thieves, and accept that trying to patch up their current models is pointless.

• One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen based on what has happened. But that clearly depends critically on your model. Improving the robustness of that model is an important aspect, and the coding practices employed obviously feed into that.

Open Access/Content

• In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. This journal, if it was published today, would be called a “libre” open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Leftovers

ICANN

• Answering accusations that the organization is ignoring its own accountability processes, that the staff and Board have insufficient checks on their work, and that he himself had overstepped the mark in comments he made to governments at the last meeting in Nairobi, Beckstrom was unapologetic.

• “Much has been made in the media of ICANN’s consideration of the application for a dot-xxx top-level domain, which the board will address this week,” he acknowledged, before repeating the assertion that caused much of the trouble: that the decision, made by an independent panel, was “non-binding” on the Board.

• [...]

• This defiance is a marked departure from the previous CEO – who is at the conference – who always tried to avoid conflict, particularly in public. It is also a risky strategy in an environment that spends much of its time trying to get people to agree with one another.

Science

• A hospital in Scotland is to become the first in the UK to use a fleet of robots to carry out day-to-day tasks.

• The robots will carry clinical waste, deliver food, clean the operating theatre and dispense drugs.

• MOBILE PHONE USERS in the UK and EU will soon be able to tell if their mobile gadget is more or less likely to be toasting their brain cells.

• A law passed in San Francisco will require mobile phone companies to post how much radiation they are pouring into your ear everytime you ring someone up to say, “I am on the train”.

Security/Aggression

• The Home Office security upgrade scheme to catch passport fraudsters through face-to-face interviews has bagged just eight potential ‘Jackals’.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office has again warned the NHS that it is not doing enough to safeguard patients’ data.

Environment

• Because if you went to The Times site to read that retraction, you would, of course, be met by the stony stare of the latter’s paywall (assuming you haven’t subscribed). Which means that I – and I imagine many people who read the first, inaccurate Times story – can’t read the retraction there. Had it not been for the fact that among the many climate change sites (on both sides) that I read, there was this one with a copy, I might never have known.

• People can’t laugh at the spreading oil in the Gulf, the soiled wildlife or the coastal residents whose livelihoods have been devastated.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Fake News

• Sky shares jumped 18 per cent this morning on news that Rupert Murdoch is seeking full control of the company.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Google is working with the US government to try to make it illegal for countries to censor the Internet by using international trade rules.

• An online celebrity sex video is giving Indonesia’s authorities an opportunity to try and restrict internet use.

• Two explicit web clips showing Jakarta rock star Ariel in action with two models/television presenters has upset yet proved strangely enticing to the population, which is mainly Muslim.

• WITH ITS PROSPECTS in the next Australian election not looking that well for the party in power, it seems that the Rudd government wants to avoid bringing in its daft Internet filtering plan.

• The Rudd government has plans to censor the Internet to make it safer for children and right wing born again Christians.

• Google’s collection of sensitive WiFi data sent over personal networks will cause the company problems for a long time if a group with a long name has its way. The Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications has filed a lawsuit in Spain.

• Access to the internet in Turkey is becoming increasingly ragged, as growing state censorship collides with retaliation by anti-censorship hackers, leading to difficulties both in viewing sites and applying key online functions.

Copyrights

• I wrote a submission to the Commerce Select Committee on the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill.

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