● 07.06.10

● Links 6/7/2010: Linux 2.6.35 RC4, Wine 1.2 RC6 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This press release is to announce that for the month of July 2010 ERA Computers & Consulting (ERACC) is following the idiomatic phrase, “Put your money where your mouth is!” when it comes to our Linux PC sales. What do we mean? Read on.

• For every PC purchased from us in July 2010 with any Linux distribution preinstalled ERACC will donate 5% of the sale to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project of your choice. As with most such offers there are caveats. These are:

• * The PC must be ordered and paid for within the month of July 2010. * The PC must be configured with at least the minimal configuration to have a working PC (case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram, hard drive, video adapter and operating system). You can choose to use your existing monitor and input devices.

• When it comes to GNU/Linux, even though I was a late adopter amongst geeks, I am still an early adopter compared to many. I found another article describing the experiences of a non-geek with GNU/Linux. The important points I get from stories like these:

• * non-geeks can use GNU/Linux well * they do appreciate some of the many advantages of GNU/Linux * they do appreciate some help from family, friends or whoever sold the PC * if we all helped our friends migrate to GNU/Linux, the share of GNU/Linux would be pretty decent

Desktop

• The first step was booting Ubuntu 10.04 from an USB hard disk to check the Linux support. Using Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box, including stuff like HDMI audio support or output switching. An exception may be the DVD drive, which only works if you set the SATA mode to compatibility. Non-DVD media also works in AHCI mode, but only if you start with a disc inserted in the drive. Playing DVDs requires setting a region code using setregion(8) [otherwise they do not work at all] and SATA compatibility mode [otherwise they only work partially].

• LXDE is desktop environtment like KDE and Gnome. But it’s lighter than KDE and Gnome. But it’s still need middle spec computer like pentium 3/4 and with Minimum Ram 128-256 MB Ram. LXDE is simple, but for newbie user like me it’s still little hard. LXDE support compiz fusion for eyecandy your desktop. My First LXDE Linux distribution was PCLinuxOS 2009.1 KDE. I install PCLinuxOS 2009.1 then install task-lxde, then remove kde 3.5.10.

Server

• The new virtual server service uses the KVM – Kernel-based Virtual Machine software from The Linux Foundation, based on the Canonical Ubuntu Server.

Audiocasts

Kernel Space

• Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan “icculus” Gordon.

• So go out and test -rc4. It fixes a number of regressions, a couple of them harking back to from before 2.6.34. Networking, cfq, i915 and radeo. And filesystem writeback performance issues, etc. It’s all good.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of several stable kernels: 2.6.27.48, 2.6.31.14, 2.6.32.16, 2.6.33.6, and 2.6.34.1.

Applications

• A flashcard stores information on a set of cards, with the information being typically portrayed as words and numbers. The purpose of flashcards is to enable individuals to store verbal and visual information, often as a learning drill by way of spaced repetition. The Leitner system is a popular method of studying with flashcards using spaced repetition.

• But now Kupfer 201 has been released featuring loads of new plugins but also some important bugfixes. An important bug fixed in Kupfer 201 is the one I was telling you about above, so the Twitter, PicasaWeb and Gmail plugins finally work – just make sure you give it some time to authentificate after entering your credentials. Unfortunately this bug is only partially fixed.

• Text editors on Linux. Few things conjure up more images and memories of heated flame wars. Sure, you have the classic KDE vs. GNOME, and today’s Firefox vs. Chrome, but those battles pale in comparison to the mother of them all: the Emacs vs. vi wars. Who won? We all did.

• If you are a movie junkie like me, chances are you have quite a number of movies on your computer that would be nice watching on your DVD player or home theater system, mobile phone or portable multimedia device.

• Me TV is a digital television viewer for GNOME. Me TV was developed for the modern digital lounge room with a PC for a media centre that is capable of normal PC tasks (web surfing, word processing and watching TV). It is not designed to be a full-blown media centre, such as MythTV, but will integrate well with an existing GNOME desktop.

Proprietary

• In other changes, Bing finally makes it onto Opera’s default search options list, and Opera has tweaked the “O” logo menu that debuted in Opera 10.5 by adding the word “menu” to clarify what it’s for. The Windows changelog, Mac changelog and Linux changelog are available at the Opera website.

• The Wine development release 1.2-rc6 is now available.

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

Instructionals

• In this tutorial our aim will be much lower. All we are going to look at is how to use Javascript with the help of Jetpack to create a Firefox “hello world” addon. We are not going to be generating a complete UI but adding to the existing Firefox UI.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• After a successful first day of talks and the Akademy party, hundreds of KDE contributors returned to the University of Tampere for the second day of the conference. Already, the slides and videos are starting to be uploaded on the Akademy website, for those of you who couldn’t make it to Akademy or are here but couldn’t attend two presentations at once.

• This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters, is also taking place today during the event. The annual Akademy KDE world summit is taking place in Tampere, Finland. It began on July 3rd and runs until the 10th of July. All of the latest files are available to download from the Conference Program page.

• KDE SC and Plasma:why?

• We still hear again and again that KDE is to heavy and too bloated to run on any modest hardware. Of course technically the situation can be improved and it will, for instance the platform profiles that are being cooked right now will be able to provide a law fat (as in Kevin words you will find information about that in the upcoming future on the planet.

• n the other hand, complaints are often not completely true, we need better communication about what the advantages of a KDE based solution are, and where the problems are: we pushes the edges of what all the layers of our platform can do, Being Qt, X, or graphics drivers, due to our hard beating the quality of the whole stack is really increasing (and this funningly enough is benefiting non KDE users as well).

• Top Kubuntu developer Aurélien Gâteau (agateau) has been honoured with an Akademy Award for 2010. The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE Akademy conference; the jury being formed of previous prize-winners.

• Aurélien won the award for his work on Gwenview, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu. He was also commended at Akademy for his work in getting the KDE Status Notifier specifications adopted by the Ubuntu project, where they are known under the name Application Indicators along with necessary DBusMenu additions.

GNOME Desktop

Distributions

• The Slackware-based Absolute Linux 13.1.2 was release yesterday. Absolute Linux features the IceWM window manager which is very fast and lightweight. This version of Absolute has opted for the popular Chrome web browser where previous versions included Firefox as the default. Numerous other features, enhancements, and security fixes can be viewed on the Absolute news page.

• I will point out though that almost all of the distributions have done a good job of lowering memory usage with system updates, which is very commendable. Also it’s important to note that even though RAM and disk space increase with updates so might performance so it’s all about which metric you hold as most important.

New Releases

• · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 KDE RC · Announced Distro: Dreamlinux 4.0 Beta 6 · Announced Distro: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2 · Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.7 · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2 · Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC2 · Announced Distro: Absolute Linux 13.1.2

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva has confirmed that the next major release of its Linux distribution, originally expected to arrive on the 3rd of June, has once again been delayed. In early June, the French Linux distributor surprisingly issued a second release candidate (RC2) and postponed the release date for the distribution indefinitely. According to a post on the Cooker mailing list by Mandriva Director of Engineering Anne Nicholas, the delay was caused by “internal organisation and some hardware problems”.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.

• As the 10.10 development cycle rolls along various user-created themes are submitted for potential inclusion in the ‘Community Themes’ package.

Flavours and Variants

• EeeBuntu Linux has been one of the most popular independent Linux distributions for netbooks for the last few years. And when I say independent, as the name makes clear Eeebuntu started out as a modified version of Ubuntu Linux — which is maintained by a nice big institution called Canonical. But Eeebuntu releases typically pack a number of customizations that make Ubuntu run better on low power netbooks with small displays. The latest release wasn’t even based on Ubuntu anymore, instead using Debian Linux as its base (Ubuntu is also Debian-based).

Devices/Embedded

• Open-source software has also been maturing for the last decade, and now has passed Microsoft in keeping up with usage trends, according to Michael Kress, senior director at Canonical Ltd., a provider of support, engineering services and hardware and software certification for the Linux-variant Ubuntu.

• “We are taking the best of all the open source software available today and bringing it together into a single platform. Linux continues to evolve, coming out with a new version every six months, unlike Microsoft which is much slower to respond,” said Kress. “We think that Linux is the one—with Android, Amigo and Ubuntu leading the smart devices revolution.”

Android

• One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we’ll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.

• Google plans to push its Android mobile software in India and China and is exploring ways for developers to make more money from applications, stepping up competition with Apple and Nokia.

• That’s right. The HTC HD2 can now run Android as well as Ubuntu with the official XDA Developers blog confirming that early builds of the OSes are working fine on HD2s.

Sub-notebooks

• Yes, we are getting to it. It is in the world of open source that most of the operating systems, that are tailor-made for netbooks, have emerged. While Ubuntu had always been in the lead, with the Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) Netbook Remix, Intel is also inching forward with its much celebrated Moblin (recently out of beta and now launched as v2.1). Th en there is one of the most interesting distributions we have come across—JoliCloud, developed by Tariq Krim ( founder of Netvibes), and based upon Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Tablets

• The table computer trend continues with the announcement of Cisco’s Cius Android-powered tablet. The device is targeted at business users providing them access to a wide range of Cisco mobile communication and collaboration tools that include HD video streaming, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, web browsing, and creating, editing and sharing content or files stored locally and in the cloud.

Free Software/Open Source

• There are so many off-the-shelf web solutions out there, many website owners are asking: Why should I bother building it myself? When thinking about their eCommerce platform, a site owner faces three key choices: the Software as a Service hosted solution, download and install an open source or purchased solution, or just build it yourself.

Events

• Ubuntu has released the schedule of this year’s Ubuntu Developer Week. The event will take place from July 12, 2010 to July 16 2010 and will cover several aspects of Ubuntu development, from crash-courses in getting started with working on Ubuntu to more advanced topics.

SaaS

• Cloud computing represents the rise of the Internet of services. As digital technologies are increasingly penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy and society in general, we are seeing an explosion in the volume and variety of cloud-based services flowing through the Internet. Consequently, the cloud computing model requires a highly disciplined approach to the management, delivery and consumption of services for individuals and companies.

Oracle

• With entering the timeline for the new feature release OOo 3.3, a new master workspace (MWS) was created: OOO330. In HG (Mercurial) the OOO330 branch can be found here: hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/OOO330. It was branched off from DEV300 m84 and will help to stabilize the new milestones towards 3.3. The first milestone is scheduled soon.

Business

Project Releases

Licensing

• From Version 0.8.18 (the next release) on Denemo is going to be GPL v3 (or later) instead of GPL v2.

Openness/Sharing

• Using these tools, any number of geographically distributed users can collaborate simultaneously on scientific projects, using the same virtual machine, the same analytic tool, the same data.

Open Data

• Also, dear NMBS/SNCB, please provide us with an API. Clearly, I’m not the only one interested in open data and APIs. This would make small projects like this quite a bit easier and would greatly increase the end quality. Data scraping just doesn’t fit web2.0.

Web

• The Overbite Project is an open-source effort to produce browser plugins and client applications that enable support for Gopher, an early network protocol that preceded HTML and the contemporary World Wide Web. The lead developer behind the project is retrocomputing enthusiast Cameron Kaiser, one of the few remaining champions of gopherspace. His latest undertaking is a mobile Gopher client for Google’s Android operating system.

• There was a moment, sometime near the end of the last century, when it rather suddenly became clear that Apache’s web server was going to cement its position as the dominant webserver — what the Web ran on. This meant that a loose nonprofit affiliation of moonlighting, largely unpaid volunteers had just massacred the giants of Silicon Valley — Sun, Netscape, Microsoft — on their own turf, on their central battleground, a space on which those corporate giants (I knew from reading their annual reports) had focussed their full attention and hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Global web server usage: The Apache server leads by some 55 percent share serving 112,663,533 web sites.

Leftovers

• A new donation pool has been created to raise funds for development of the Ripple project, with an initial contribution of $500.00. The final amount will be donated to the Ripple project to support the development of a standalone Ripple server to provide open decentralized payment through the Ripplepay site as well as other services using Ripple. All content created will be released under an open license.

• At least $9m (£6m) was corruptly paid during the “endgame” in Iraq and Indonesia, simultaneous court hearings in London and Washington were told in March. According to court documents, Octel bribed at every turn. Brown envelopes with £1,000 “pocket-money” were slipped to various officials visiting London. Octel even agreed to pay $13,000, purportedly for a top Iraq oil ministry official to honeymoon in Thailand in 2006.

• Figures released by the National Population and Family Planning Commission have estimated China’s population will reach 1.39 billion by the end of 2015, with those aged 60 or over topping 200 million people. Over the next five years, China’s urban population will also surpass its rural counterpart, with city dwellers expected to exceed 700 million.

• On the other hand, there are no real technical flaws or an absurd selection of workloads that the Intel crew, under captain Victor W. Lee, could be accused of. The fourteen benchmarks they used are classics, mostly taken from the scientific sector: SGEMM, FFT, Lattice Boltzmann (LBM), Ray Casting (RC), Search & Sort, Collision Detection (GJK), Constraint Solver (Solv) and so on.

Environment

• In criticising Dr Richard North, below, for not having checked [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html] whether there was a reference to the claim that up to “40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” in the WWF Report, I was unaware of, and therefore omitted to mention, that Dr North had himself later spotted that there was a reference to the 40% figure in the WWF report. His initial mistake had been corrected on another page [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html ] (before the Sunday Times article had been written) and he had added a cross-link to the original page, which I failed to note. Apologies.

• River currents could be harnessed at four bridges across the capital

• Reintroduction of species that Charles Darwin saw raises conservation hopes for other wildlife

• Environmental groups are nevertheless saying the Wabash River discovery creates a new threat to Lake Erie’s fishing and tourism industry and that safeguards must be put in place to keep the carp out of Ohio.

BP

• Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted areas devoid of life near BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two independent scientists

• Are environmentalists putting the Louisiana fishing industry in peril by overstating the potential disastrous consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill? That might seem like a crazy question to ask on the same day that the Associated Press reports that the BP disaster may have just passed the 1979 Ixtoc gusher as the worst oil spill in Gulf history. But that’s the message conveyed in a Financial Times article this morning, claiming that while the fish will surely come back to the Gulf, the fishing industry may be permanently damaged.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Farmers markets are hot right now — so hot that big supermarkets want in on the act. But attempts by local Safeway stores to host so–called farmers markets have created an uproar.

• On May 13, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appointed a task force to address flagging tourism amid the backlash created by Arizona’s strict new law on immigration enforcement. The task force recommended that Arizona undertake a public relations campaign to reassure potential visitors that Arizona is “a safe and welcoming destination” and promote the idea that boycotts against the state hurt “the most vulnerable employees.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• media law promulgated on 25 June 2010 will further restrict media freedom in Fiji and perpetuate violations of people’s right to freedom of expression, warns Amnesty International.

• Developing countries should be able to adopt a ‘polluter pays’ principle for ecological disasters – just like the US has with BP

• Iran’s ministry of culture has released a catalog of government-approved hair styles, in an effort to eliminate the menace of “decadent Western cuts.” According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, forbidden ‘dos include ponytails, mullets and spiky hair. But styles resembling those of Elvis Presley, Simon Cowell, or eighties-era floppy fringes are totally fine. Also, hair gel in moderation is acceptable. With the exception of goatees, facial hair is frowned upon.

• Lisan Jutras was on the streets of Toronto this weekend taking in the events and watching the many demonstrations. In the end, she was one of the citizens held at Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue on Sunday night, only to be released just before 10 p.m. Lisan works at The Globe and Mail and although she wasn’t accredited for the summits or on assignment, globeandmail.com was using some of her tweets in our live coverage.

Finance

• And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at the weekend’s deeply discouraging G20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

• In 2008 and 2009 it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike past governments that tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

• It was billed by Barack Obama as the toughest crackdown on Wall Street since the great depression. But top US banks could be given until 2022 to comply with the so-called Volcker rule, which is supposed to restrict financial institutions’ risker trading activities.

• Were A.I.G.’s credit-default swaps — which were supposed to be insuring billions of dollars worth of AAA subprime securities — fatally flawed? Did the collateralized debt obligations — those infamous C.D.O.’s — that Goldman was creating and A.I.G. was insuring offer anything of value to the larger society, or were they simply a means by which Wall Street made giant, useless, bets? Given that the taxpayers have put out $185 billion to prop up A.I.G., these are certainly questions worth asking.

• Banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest derivatives dealer, have provided estimates to investors. The top five U.S. commercial banks, including Goldman Sachs, generated an estimated $28 billion in revenue from privately negotiated derivatives in 2009, according to company reports collected by the Federal Reserve and people familiar with banks’ income sources.

• A federal commission questioned whether the investment bank deliberately discounted prices to push markets lower because it had bet on a decline in the value of subprime mortgage-backed debt.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A report that attempts to force the hand of the European Parliament on IPR enforcement – including a possible weakening of the Telecoms Package outcome – has been temporarily stalled.

• The Gallo report dealing with copyright and IPR enforcement has been stalled following a vote today in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The Parliament voted 140 to 135 in favour of postponing it until September, which will allow more time for scrutiny of the text.

Copyrights

• Despite a pending lawsuit against 5,000 Hurt Locker downloaders and the promises from its makers to sue even more, the film is still being downloaded by thousands of people every day. Interestingly, the makers do not seem to be sending takedown notices to torrent sites, most likely because that would ruin their business plan.

• In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.

• Men At Work have been ordered to pay 5 per cent of royalties for plagiarising part of their 1980s hit Down Under.

• In February the Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band plagiarised part of the song, which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later.

• Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.

• Pint-sized popstar Prince will be giving his latest album away for free in a UK newspaper this week. Declaring the Internet “completely over”, iTunes nor any other online store will get access to his music. “Computers and digital gadgets are no good,” he declared in an interview, just as millions of file-sharers line up to use their hopeless number crunchers to suck his latest offering down the pipes.

ACTA

• A round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) just finished last week in Luzern, Switzerland. While the negotiators expressed their will not to release any further draft of the text, the European Parliament has now a unique opportunity to oppose both the process and the content of ACTA. There is just a few days left to collect 110 signatures from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Written Declaration 12. Will you spend 5 minutes to help defeat ACTA?

• The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)

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