● 07.14.10

● Links 14/7/2010: GNU/Linux Market Surge

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• According to the publication “Kommersant”, the state enterprise “Russian Technologies” has almost completed the acquisition of shares LLC Alt Linux. This Russian company is developing software based on Linux. Interestingly, at the same time the Russian investment fund NGI acquired stake in Mandriva, the initiative is approved by the adviser to the Russian president Leonid Reiman. According to Kommersant, the result of both of these projects could be the creation of an operating system focused on the Russian public sector.

• Gujarat government is gearing up to use Linux operating system in schools in the state, but a city-based foundation has been teaching use of this system to students in Karjan for the last one year now. Schools in this block of Vadodara district were given computers with Linux by the state government, but they did not have teachers acquainted with it. That’s when Cosmo Foundation (CF) extended a helping hand by providing teachers as well as teaching materials to schools in Karjan block.

• Presently, the foundation is working with six schools in Karjan to help students gain expertise in using Linux. They plan to extend the help to other schools in the block.

• “We were working in the block for the last two years with the aim to strengthen education in government grant-in-aid schools. When state government donated computers and Linux system to schools in Karjan in September most of the schools could not make use of it as they did not have computer teachers,” said programme co-ordinator Mamta Baxi from CF.

• The W3S stats for last month (June) show the Linux market share at 4.8%. Sure, it’s not 100% accurate but it’s nevertheless impressive. The stats only include internet-connected computers (desktops only – servers are not included in these stats) but since there is a fairly big number of computer using Linux which are not connected to the internet, the number may actually be pretty close to the actual Linux market share.

• At home, my setup consists of three machines – a laptop, a PC, and an XBOX 360. The latter two share a set of speakers, but I hate having to climb under the desk to switch the cables around, and wanted a better way to switch them back and forth. My good friend Tyler B suggested that I run the line out from the XBOX into the line-in on my sound card, and just let my computer handle the audio in the same way that it handles music and movies. In theory, this works great. In practice, I had one hell of a time figuring out how to force the GNOME sound manager applet into doing my bidding.

• Since you don’t really have to buy Linux, the heading can be misleading. But we’ve all heard of the statement that somebody might want to “try” something, before they “buy” it. This is where Linux excels over other operating systems like Windows. When have you ever been able to try out Windows, before you decide whether you want to upgrade or keep it?

• Most Linux distributions today have a “Live CD”, which is a complete running version of the distribution that can run from a CD. This means, you can take a PC currently running Windows, stick in a Live CD of any Linux distribution (Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu), boot to the CD and see how it runs on your system. This also gives you the opportunity to open up some of the applications bundled with the distribution, and should even give you access to your Windows partitions (since Linux can open partitions of many different types). It’s a great way to test drive everything, if you are considering installing Linux on your PC.

• And, once you get hit, well, that’s the end of the show. Recovery can be painful and you have a lot to lose. Your valuable information gets compromised because, if they stumble, technicians (at least in my country) will always end up formatting your HD… Thus, you pay them for destroying your data! I’m pretty sure that some of them know that Linux can solve your problems but, obviously, they won’t tell you.

• [...]

• Do you want a real solution for those problems? Then go to this page and read carefully. Yes, Portable Linux IS the answer.

Server

• Windows is still the server platform of choice in India but enterprises, especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs), are increasingly favoring the Linux operating system, according to a new report Monday by Springboard Research.

• The University of Warwick is tendering for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing facility for its research Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC).

• A “significant” share of the new facility will be used for research in the field of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD – the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids such as plasma and metal liquids), to support the computational requirements of the UK MHD research community. The facility will also be used to support research from other disciplines at the university.

• The centre is looking for a facility that is a Linux cluster comprised of multi-core nodes interconnected at high-bandwidth and low-latency. It will also have an attached high-performance storage and parallel file system.

• The use of Linux as a server operating system in India is growing, with SMEs leading the way. But Windows – specifically Windows Server 2003 – still holds the lion’s share of the market.

Audiocasts

Ballnux

• Anyone can become openSUSE member after showing continued and substantial contribution to the project of any kind (bugs, support in forums, wiki edits, code contribution etc.). For those who don’t know what openSUSE Membership is or how to become a member I suggest to read this wiki article or older blogpost by Andreas.

Graphics Stack

• Upgrading to xorg-server with USE=-hal appeared to make things run a tad faster. However, some really strange behavior with keypress events started to occur. I tried several different variants for keyboard layout, setting special keys etc but I still got stuff like “right ctrl is return” or “arrow down inserts a space and line down”.

Applications

• If you like mplayer, you will love SMPlayer and Gnome-Mplayer. Both SMplayer and Gnome-Mplayer are really good MPlayer front-ends and they do work great. SMplayer has long been my favorite multimedia player in Ubuntu and we have even featured SMplayer among the most wanted multimedia apps for Ubuntu.

• Build apps for your mobile phone from your browser with Google’s creation suite.

• But what are these? All the applications mentioned above serve only one purpose: to change the color temperature of your screen by the time of day, making it easy for your eyes. This is achieved by entering your location and then Redshift (in the case of this post: RedshiftGUI) takes care of the rest.

• Back in 2003, Minnesota developer Brian Langenberger began creating a set of labor-saving audio tools to convert FLAC files to MP3 files, MP3 files to WAV files, and other simple operations that were tiresome to do by hand. “They were for my own personal use, and limited in scope for a long time,” he recalls. But in 2006 Langenberger discovered the Construct Python library, which makes parsing and building binary files simple. “As my tools started to get more capable, I started to feel they were something other people might get some use out of.” In July 2007 he released the first public version of Python Audio Tools.

• If you have a camera – be it digital stills or digital video – then you know that importing and renaming files is a chore; Camera’s aren’t able to name photos taken at Sally-Sue’s wedding any different than that 30sec video clip of your best drunken Cher impression.

• MOC (Music On Console) is a full-screen player designed to be powerful and easy to use.

• Supported file formats are: MP3, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, WAVE, SPEEX, Musepack (MPC), AIFF, AU, WMA (and other less popular formats supported by libsndfile). New formats support is under development.

Proprietary

• I’ve blogged about Opera before, and at the time (version 9.5), I didn’t like it at all. It felt too clunky and too difficult to configure to keep it around, and at the time I switched back to Firefox. I semi-regularly kept trying the new versions, and each time came to the same conclusions.

Wine

• The Wine development release 1.2-rc7 is now available. Barring any last minute problems, this should be the last release candidate before the final 1.2. Please give it a good testing.

• A couple days back I was looking for a tool to create a sitemap of our sites so I could send the sitemap to Google and Yahoo to help improve our site listings and page rank. After allot of waisted time trying to create a decent sitemap with the free online SiteMap Generators. Most if not all of free online Sitemap Generators are fronts to serve ads or in the end try to sell you what they advertise as free! Most of the free online SiteMap Generators only create 500 links, and if you have a large site this is not acceptable. And if you find a Generator that does upto 5,000 links at the end of the process they then ask for a payment before they hand over the “what was suppose to be free” data.

Instructionals

• Server features that stand out for Apache are it’s speed, configuration options , stability and feature set. Apache is known for rock solid stability that comes from a source code that has been available for a long time and many have reviewed it. Also the wide usage has helped to facilitate bug fixes quickly. Ubuntu training provides an in depth analysis of the Apache web server as it applies to real work use of Apache.

• Ever since I sow the oscon presentation of reconnoiter I wanted to check it out and play with it. Yesterday, I finally had some time to do this and thought it would be a good idea to document it as a short howto. Most of the infos I used are from the readme (BUILDING), the wiki and the excellent writeup of Thomas Dudziak on how to install reconnoiter on ubuntu.

• If you just received a package with .rar extension from your friend and you cannot open it,this quick tip may help you.

Games

• Earlier this month the developers behind the Unigine Engine shared their latest update on this advanced 3D engine that’s fully supported under Linux. With the latest work on this game engine, there are significant performance optimizations to UnigineScript (the developers say these optimizations are “HUGE”), volumetric light shafts, optimized rendering of meshes in non-instanced mode, optimizations of the Unigine math library, and a note there is a new terrain system on the way, among other changes. Unigine Corp also dropped their first public confirmation of a new strategy game they are developing.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• KDE e.V. is the legal body which holds our finances and represents the project in a range of issues. Our Quarterly Reports have restarted with a special bumper issue covering 2009 Q2 to 2010 Q1. It covers the many sprints which e.V. organises for our contributors to get together in person with their KDE teams. It also covers events e.V. has helped KDE to attend and the working groups it oversees.

• On Thursday, we enjoyed another of those great Akademy traditions – the day trip. For those who don’t know, each year Akademy visitors are taken by the local team on a trip for some relaxation and a taste of local culture. This year two buses took us 15 kilometers outside of Tampere – to a place in the woods. After a little walk, we ended up at a beautiful lake where we found a chalet with a few volunteers cooking food for us. A second chalet housed a traditional wood-fired sauna. There was also a camp fire so we could prepare our own food.

• Popular Linux and BSD distribution tracking website DistroWatch has a report on Nokia’s keynote presentation at this year’s Akademy conference. The report covers the views of Valtteri Halla (Nokia’s Director of MeeGo Software) on how MeeGo will succeed by working with communities such as KDE. It also reports on how KDE’s Plasma framework shares many goals with MeeGo, particularly the use of a single codeset across many applications and has news of early ports of KDE software to mobile devices.

• Using open source software? Then we have something for you. In collaboration with the open source community, we’ve designed some classy stickers you can use to spice up your notebook or netbook and show the world your support for open source software. The stickers are based on some original designs, so you won’t find them anywhere else.

GNOME Desktop

• In preparation for the latest GNOME 3.0 development snapshot due to arrive on Wednesday (tagged as GNOME 2.31.5), a wealth of GNOME packages are being checked-in for this unstable milestone. Among the packages to have been checked-in for this milestone are new releases of GTK+ 3.0, GNOME Shell, and Mutter.

Distributions

• Kongoni GNU/Linux is a Slackware-based, desktop-oriented GNU/Linux distribution and live CD. Its main features include a graphical installer, a Kongoni Integrated Setup System (KISS), and an easy-to-use Ports Installation GUI (PIG). The distribution’s package management borrows its main concepts from BSD ports, with an intuitive graphical package installer that compiles and installs programs from source code on the user’s system. Kongoni, which means gnu (also known as wildebeest) in Shona, includes only software that complies with Free Software Foundation’s definition of software freedom.

• The Zencafe Community proudly announced last evening, July 12th, the immediate availability for download of the new and improved Zencafe 2.2 operating system designed to be used in Internet Cafes. Being based on the newly released Zenwalk 6.4 Linux distribution, Zencafe is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.33.4 and includes some popular bleeding-edge applications, such as Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6 or Pidgin 2.7.1. For Yahoo! fans, Zencafe also includes the GYachE Improved instant messenger, which offers webcam support for the Yahoo Messenger protocol. The minimum requirements for Zencafe are a Pentium III class processor, 128 MB of system RAM and at least 4 GB hard drive free space.

• A quick little guide on helping and getting involved with the future releases of Sabayon. I know and see people asking what they can do to be more involved in Sabayon. If you have some experience, time and capabilities, you can help test the weekly iso images or add the entropy limbo repository and test packages. I wouldn’t recommend this for or on your production system. You can and will run into broken stuff, but that is the fun in testing! I like to use rsync as it saves on bandwidth of having to re-download the entire ISO. With rsync you only download the changes. So how does one do this you may ask. It’s pretty easy, find a mirror on our download page that supports rsync.

Reviews

New Releases

• Team Tiny Core announced the first release candidate for version 3.0 of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distribution. Tiny Core Linux 3.0 RC1 advances to Linux 2.6.33.3, and offers improved compressed swap in RAM, a 64-bit version, enhanced virtualization, and the Ext4 file-system, says the project.

• The Unity Linux project is pleased to announce the final 2010 release. Check the Downloads page to get the 32 bit and 64 bit LiveCDs.

• This Zencafe version utilizes the latest Zenwalk distro and kernel 2.6.33.4. Mainly design to use for Internet Cafe desktop, Zencafe polished in many ways and easy enough to operated, even for no technical background user. Included autorecovery and internet cafe management software, Zencafe is the best and the first Linux solution that suitable for your internet cafe.

• A security consultant has released a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution specifically designed to help analyze and re-engineer malware. Lenny Zeltser on Thursday released REMnux on Sourceforge and it has already been downloaded nearly 2,000 times.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS 2010.07 has been released in several different flavors. KDE, GNOME, LXDE, and XFCE flavors are now available for download or purchase. I have reviewed and taken screenshots of each new PCLinuxOS 2010.07 flavor and will be releasing them here over the next four days. Today is the default KDE flavor but first, here are some standout features that all flavors have in common. PCLinuxOS 2010.07 Standout Features: The Linux Kernel 2.6.33.5, Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support, multimedia support, Addlocale providing support for over 60 languages, easy OpenOffice installation and MyLiveCD which lets you take a snapshot and burn to CD. For a complete list of features visit the official release announcement.

• Mandriva 2010 Spring KDE4 – Very good.

Red Hat Family

• CentOS is a well known Linux distribution with a strong focus on server machines rather than on desktop PCs. For the first time, CentOS is now leading the Linux distribution statistics on web servers with almost 30% of all Linux servers.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Are you desperately searching for ways to finally reach that elusive 10 second boot time? You certainly heard that Ubuntu 10.04 has the capability of doing just that right? It can…but you have to help it along. One of the ways you can help your boot time is removing unnecessary services and drivers that are loaded at boot time. Fortunately, this isn’t something you have to manually do. How is this? There is a tool that can help the Grub boot loader learn what it is you need at start up. This tool is called profile.

Flavours and Variants

• A security expert has released a stripped-down Ubuntu distribution designed specifically for reverse-engineering malware. The OS, called REMnux, includes a slew of popular malware-analysis, network monitoring and memory forensics tools the comprise a very powerful environment for taking apart malicious code.

Devices/Embedded

• Emerson Network Power is shipping what it claims are the first COM Express modules based on Freescale Semiconductor’s multicore, PowerPC-based QorIQ processors. The COMX-P2020 and COMX-P4080 employ dual-core QorIQ P2020 and eight-core QorIQ P4080 system-on-chips, respectively, offering both a wide variety of interfaces and Linux BSPs, says the company.

• Blue Water Embedded announced a royalty-free graphical user interface (GUI) development framework for embedded devices, including those running Linux. The Prism Runtime Framework is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that incorporates Prism Micro, a GUI toolkit for constrained color-depth targets, and Prism Insight, a Linux-compatible desktop GUI design and resource editing tool, says the company.

• E-con Systems has announced a five-megapixel camera add-on designed to work with Linux and the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP35x evaluation module (EVM). The e-CAM50_OMAP35x snaps onto the EVM board and connects to the OMAP35x’s high-speed CMOS sensor interface, providing 720p video capture as well as stills, the company says.

• At the time of writing, NetGear had yet to respond to our request for information on the embedded operating system running on its new ReadyNAS Ultra systems. However, previous ReadyNAS devices, such as the ReadyNAS Pro, have run on embedded Linux.

• Netgear acquired the ReadyNAS line in 2007 when it bought Infrant for $60 million. ReadyNAS devices have previously run an Infrant-developed Linux distribution called RAIDiator.

Wind River

• A specialized, hardened version of Wind River Linux, Wind River Linux Secure is expected to be available in the first half of 2011, pending certification completion, says the Intel subsidiary. Once certified for EAL4+, Wind River Linux Secure would conform to NIAP’s General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile, says the company. Atsec Information Security has been chosen by Wind River as its Common Criteria Test Lab to conduct the independent evaluation of Wind River Linux Secure, says the company.

• Wind River FAST provides thousands of Wind River-authored automated tests designed to evaluate an open-source-based device, says Wind River. The framework appears to be based in part on the Linux-ready Wind River Test Management (WRTM) software.

Tablets

• All of a sudden, tablet computers are all the rage, with Apple’s iPad stoking the fire. But Apple is hardly going to compete unchallenged in the tablet space. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claims that his company is “hardcore” about tablets, and is working with Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony before the end of the year. Ballmer demonstrated an HP slate at the Consumer Electronics Show in January as well. One has to wonder if the real opportunity in tablets lies on the open source front, though.

Free Software/Open Source

• A recent study conducted by market research firm Accenture found open sourcetechnology has become the preferred method of website development and software for most companies. In fact, 40 percent of organizations surveyed plan to increase their use of open source technology by moving away from traditional software in the next 12 months.

• The health care sector is set for a technology-driven transformation as the federal government pushes adoption of electronic health records and pursues national health information exchange. Hardly surprising, the Open Source Convention (OSCON) has a health care track that will focus on open EHR/EMR software and the government’s standards-based Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) among other topics. What’s in it for VARs? Here are some clues.

• Venture capital funding for open source software-related vendors increased 11.5% in the second quarter, the third consecutive quarter of positive growth following a 6% rise in 4Q09 and a 38% increase in 1Q10.

• In my last post, I discussed reasons why an open source government would be a good thing. Now I will tell you my plan for how an OSG would operate (using the USA in the model). It is essential to understand that this is not a left vs right issue. The idea here is simply to empower the people of any given country, and allow those people to rule their own lives. Using the same methodology we use in open source software development (slightly modified), we can achieve that one simple goal.

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