● 06.26.10

● Links 26/6/2010: HP and Linux, GNOME Shell 2.31.4 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Ballnux/HP

• This is the HP Mini 100e, a netbook which looks are fully customizable. There’s an option for SUSE Linux as the operating system. It’s nice to see something different in operating system options, too bad the other 2 options are windows versions (XP and 7)

• The problem, however, will remain in any case. In freeing itself from the tyranny of Windows, HP takes software and customer responsibility into its own hands. It’s something no Linux distro owner has been able to do in a consumer market.

• If HP succeeds Microsoft is in real trouble.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While Intel had only released its xf86-video-intel 2.12 release candidate ten days ago and there was only one RC, yesterday afternoon they decided to go forward and make the final release. The xf86-video-intel 2.12.0 DDX driver is now available and they have also tagged their 2010Q2 driver package.

Applications

• NetUP have released a new version of IPTV Complex, an interactive TV software bundle. It introduces new graphic interface featuring a number of improvements both in design and on technical level.

• As always, VideoLAN has come up with interesting tweaks, updates and enhancements to its all popular VLC media player with the release of version 1.1.0.

• Reinventing the wheel is sometimes viewed as a significant barrier to the development of open source software. Critics point out that if developers simply collaborated more with each other, instead of creating yet another Linux distribution or programming another text editor, this would help to simplify matters for users, and actually significantly advance the development of established open source projects.

Proprietary/Wine

• The Wine development release 1.2-rc5 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): – Many translation updates. – A lot of bug fixes.

• Wine, the project that lets Linux users run Windows apps within Linux, has released a major update that fixes a number of bugs and includes 64-bit support.

• Wine 2.1 includes a new set of icons, a number of fixes for video rendering – improving Windows gaming – and better font anti-aliasing and handling of desktop link files.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• During the conference, Radio Tux interviewed Frederik Gladhorn about the KDE Plasma Netbook interface (interview in German) and Frank Karlitschek participated in the discussion around cloud computing (also in German). Frank also did an interview with Vincent Unz and Stormy Peters from GNOME.

• Hot on the heels of the 2.2 release of KOffice — the first release we feel that users can give a try and use for real work — the KOffice developers met in Essen-Horst in Germany, in the wonderful Linux Hotel. Thanks to sponsorship by the KDE e.V. and the hard work by Alexandra Leisse and Inge Wallin, we could spend three days discussing and hacking.

GNOME Desktop

Distributions

New Releases

Debian Family

• LinuxTag 2010 is the host of a Debian miniconf; that, in turn, was where relatively new Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli delivered a relatively high-energy “state of Debian” talk. According to Stefano, Debian is doing great, but can do better yet; he has some ideas for how to make the project better.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On 16 June Project Harmony had its first official meeting in Boston, and we’re planning another in London on 1st July at Canonical’s offices. Its initial goal is to avoid proliferation in contribution agreements across FOSS software projects where those organisations chose to work with contribution agreements.

Flavours and Variants

• If you’re happy with Ubuntu Lucid, I salute you and wish I was among you. My problems at this point are my own — I don’t detect any groundswell of geeks moving away from the GNOME build of Ubuntu. And I’m glad Xubuntu is here to provide a stripped-down Ubuntu experience that more closely matches my hardware and workflow.

• Yeah, I love freedom. Three cheers.

Devices/Embedded

• Mentor Graphics announced a version of its Mentor Embedded Linux development platform that supports Freescale’s PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors. The multicore-ready Mentor Embedded Linux for QorIQ and PowerQUICC includes an Embedded System Builder build engine, an Eclipse-based Mentor Embedded Edge IDE (integrated development environment), and debug tools, says the company.

• The initial TCI6485 and TCI6489 models were said to power femotcells serving between eight and 32 HSPA 3G wireless users, respectively. At the time, TI said the DSPs were offered with a Linux support package and a software reference design from TI partners Continuous Computing and MimoOn. (See farther below for more on the TCI6489.)

• ARC International announced that its ARC 700 processor cores would be available with a Linux distribution from Codito Technologies back in 2004. ARC added SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) instruction support to the ARC 700 line in 2005, and added support subscriptions for the Codito Linux tools in 2007.

Android

• And that’s my point. Surely the iPhone is the best phone for some people. However, we are a society that prefers choice because nothing is one-size-fits-all. There has to be a better phone for most than the iPhone. Sales are beginning to show this is true, as Android is quickly overtaking Apple. Yes, that has a lot to do with the proliferation of Android across 30+ mainstream devices and Apple having only one. Yet this goes to further my point: given the choice, you should go with the device that makes the most sense to you. As fans of open source, I cannot fathom how the iPhone can be an easy decision for you, the opensource.com reader.

Free Software/Open Source

• The latest episode of OTE podcast features an interview with Tectonic in which we talk about open source software in Africa.

Events

Web Browsers

• And it’s not just YouTube that uses Flash, almost all video sites do, as well as online games sites and entertainment sites. An older survey of websites by browser maker Opera found that in most countries around 30% of websites were built in or contained Flash elements. And in some countries that was as high as 40% or 50%. So it’s safe to say that as much as 30% of the web relies in some or other way on Flash.

• Mozilla says it has “no official position” on NPAPI Pepper, the revamped browser plug-in API developed by Google for use with Native Client, a plug-in that runs native code inside its Chrome browser.

SaaS

• At its Boston developer summit Red Hat is pushing the theme that every company can have its own cloud with the first in a line of Cloud Foundation tools.

Programming

• Five years into my tenure on this beat and I still read, in comments, snark about open source programmers being amateurs, coding in their parents’ basements, in their pajamas.

• This was always a false image. Not that I have anything against a good parent’s basement, or a nice comfortable pair of jammies. And when open source was being born, at the bottom of the dot-bomb, there was high unemployment in the code-o-sphere.

• But the coders and the coding were always professional. There have always been a lot of people in open source who knew how to make the coding train run on time.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Security/Aggression

• For John Catt, protest has never been about chaining himself to a railing or blocking a road in an act of civil disobedience. The 85-year-old peace campaigner’s far milder form of dissent typically involves turning up at a demonstration with his daughter, Linda, taking out his sketch pad and drawing the scene.

• The President would gain the power to unilaterally declare a national cyber-emergency and order operators of “critical infrastructure” to immediately implement “response plans” as provided for by the act. Those who fail to do so would be subject to fines, while those who comply would be protected from civil liability for any damages they might cause in doing so — government speak for “you can break people’s stuff and they’re just out of luck.”

Environment

• Together, crowdsourcing and open source are a potent combination especially during possible emergencies. In this case, the Ushahidi based Oil Crisis Map has helped share data across communities and has openly presented the magnitude of the oil spill. Also, it has enabled people on the ground to actively participate in solving this crisis using current and accurate information.

• Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony”) itself emerged from another emergency – monitoring a disputed Kenyan election in 2007 with a mash-up of eyewitness reports onto a Google map. Today Ushahidi has developers from Kenya (where it started), Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands and the US. Ushahidi was also used in Project Vote Report India for India’s 2009 general elections to track election irregularities.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Reporters Without Borders today launched the world’s first “Anti-Censorship Shelter” in Paris for use by foreign journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are refugees or just passing through as a place where they can learn how to circumvent Internet censorship, protect their electronic communications and maintain their anonymity online.

Copyrights

• Yesterday, we reported that ASCAP said that organizations like Creative Commons were undermining their copyrights. Today, we’ve received an official response from Creative Commons with regards to the letter writing campaign.

• In the same article, we discussed how Creative Commons was, contrary to what ASCAP said, not about undermining anyone elses copyrighted material, but rather, giving artists an option that was not the Public Domain (no rights reserved) nor Copyright (all rights reserved).

• Eric Steuer, a Creative Commons spokesperson, thanked ZeroPaid for the earlier posting as being well-thought out and was happy to respond to ASCAPs letter

Clip of the DayCLUG Talk 25 August 2009 – Experiences as a Novice Linux User (2009) Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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