● 07.25.10

● Links 25/7/2010: Russian Government and GNU/Linux, Old OpenBSD Interview (Video)

Posted in News Roundup at 2:46 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The government is hoping to launch the first version of a “national operating system” for its computers as early as next year, a senior Communications and Press Ministry official said Thursday.

• The operating system, for use on the computer systems of government agencies and state-run companies, will be 90 percent based on the open-source Linux operating system, Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh said.

• Infinitely Virtual is pleased to announce a new partnership with Turnkey Linux–an open source project that develops a free virtual appliance library, featuring the best server-oriented open source software. Infinitely Virtual looks forward to announcing the benefits and the exciting new products the partnership between Turnkey Linux and Infinitely Virtual will bring to current and future virtual server clients.

• Tester will be tasked with providing senior consultancy to customers, helping them to integrate their business and technology functions. Dionisakos will focus on growing the Netsolutions Linux support offering.

• Prior to joining the company, Tester worked as an independent consultant, helping companies improve operational performance through developing and implementing training programs and procedures.

• He has more than 15 years consulting experience and has held a number of senior roles at PMP Print.

• Dionisakos previously worked for Goldman Sachs, where he was Linux lead engineer.

• Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux computing, today announced the preview release of Userful Linux MultiSeat 2010™ – a complete Linux-based classroom software solution on a single install DVD. Userful’s flagship product, Userful Multiplier™, turns 1 computer into 10, and is the foundation of this new product release. This evaluation software provides a sneak preview of some of the major feature enhancements that will be included in the commercial release of Userful Multiplier V.4.0 and Userful Linux MultiSeat 2010™, in Q4 2010.

• Maxconsole is reporting that the various lawsuits aimed at Sony after they removed the option to keep a Linux installation on your PS3 if you chose to upgrade your firmware have been combined into one mega-sized super-powered Über lawsuit.

• Quest vWorkspace manages, secures and provisions virtual desktop environments, brokers connections, and delivers virtual applications and desktops from multiple hypervisors, Remote Desktop Session Hosts (Terminal Servers) and blade PCs through a single user access point and management center. The Quest vWorkspace Connector for Linux offers features for an enhanced end user experience on Linux workstations and thin clients, including multi-monitor support, Flash redirection and bi-directional audio.

Server

• Cloud Linux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, announced recently that its CloudLinux’s SecureLVE security solution will be supported by Parallels Panel products by Q4 2010. Parallels Plesk Panel is the number one control panel in the world with thousands of applications that deliver the easiest, most profitable and most complete service for virtual, dedicated, and shared hosting providers. Integrating SecureLVE into the control panel will give hosting providers new security controls previously unavailable.

• The hardware box runs Linux and is powered by open-source tools. So theoretically, you could put together software with the same features for free. But the product’s interface is its real strength.

• Typical host OSes are bare bones Linux installations for which you have to manually set up Secure Shell (SSH). This means the host OS is very secure since it runs few, if any, standard network services.

Kernel Space

• Another week (and a couple of days), another -rc.

• The Linux Plumbers conference planning committee[1] is announcing an extension to the call for papers deadline by one week to July 26th, 2010. We’re also taking this opportunity to clarify the difference between presentation[2] and micro-conference[3] proposals. There has been some confusion, and we want to make sure that everyone is happy with their submissions.

Applications

• The VideoLAN project, known for such developments as the popular VLC media player have developed a free library for Blu-ray playback. The main task for libbluray is navigation, menu control and the support of the BD Java (BD-J) used on Blu-ray discs.

Wine

• Wine is announcing the second stable release since hitting the 1.0 mark, with the launch of Wine 1.2. The major version adds support for 64-bit applications and boasts new graphics. It has been in development for two years and comes with a significant amount of changes under the hood.

Distributions

• Damn Vulnerable Linux is a security distro, which can be an excellent learning tool. The distro includes older version of popular software like Apache web server, MySQL, PHP and others. The objective to create such a distro is to let users try out known hacks and vulnerabilities on these technologies and hone their skills.

• I will be installing a lightweight linux on my mobile classroom of Dated Dells, as I am noticing quite a lag using the GNOME desktop, lovely though it is.

Reviews

• Lucid Puppy Linux 5.0 was released back in May of 2010, but as one of my favorite distros, I have been playing with it heavily since then. I have been so impressed with the new version that I wanted to take a moment and write a quick review of this release.

New Releases

• · Announced Distro: Zencafe 2.2 · Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 · Announced Distro: T2 SDE 8.0 · Announced Distro: Netrunner 2 · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 LXDE · Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.3 XFCE & LXDE

• The Japanese Fixstars Corporation, which specialises in software for the Cell processor line, has announced the release of version 6.2.1 of its Yellow Dog Linux for CUDA distribution optimised for GPU computing. CUDA, an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA that uses GPUs to improve the performance of some types of applications.

Red Hat Family

• Michael Proper from the ClearFoundation announced yesterday evening, July 21st, the immediate availability of the ClearOS Enterprise 5.2 operating system. Being based on CentOS 5.5, the new release adds some important features regarding security and overall performance, as well as various improvements and fixes. ClearOS 5.2 is a network & gateway solution, a Linux server based on the open source CentOS distribution, which is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux mammoth.

Ubuntu Flavours and Variants

• This week the developers launched Peppermint Ice, a new version which replaces Firefox and the Mozilla Prism web app installer with Google’s Chromium web browser. Chromium also allows you to install web apps as if they were desktop apps, and Peppermint Ice comes with shortcuts for facebook, Google Docs, Hulu, Pandora, and Seesmic preloaded. It also has native apps including DropBox, Transmission Bittorent client, and XChat.

• I’ve plumped for Xubuntu as it’s a very close relative of Ubuntu, and it uses the lightweight window manager Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• The Killer M1 and later the Killer K1 boasted dedicated processors that the company deemed Network Processing Units (NPUs), and were mini systems in their own right, running a version of Linux and having access to their dedicated memory.

• With an increase in the number – and quality – of chips available, a win in the netbook sector could leave ARM well positioned to make an assault on the far larger notebook market – and should Microsoft feel threatened enough by open-source Linux distributions making inroads on ARM-based netbooks to produce an ARM-compatible version of Windows 7, even industry leader Intel could have cause to worry.

• According to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, Chinese search company Baidu is working on a Linux-based mobile OS of its own to take on Google’s Android. Baidu is currently the largest search engine in China, with a search share of a whopping 70 percent versus Google’s 27.8 percent, and it makes sense that with over 800 million mobile phone users in China, Baidu would want a piece of the mobile operating system pie on which to put a scoop of its own search engine sorbet.

Phones

• Android is an open source operating system/platform intended for mobile devices and sponsored by Google. It features applications written in Java with security precautions designed to allow a variety of different applications to live on the same device without exposing user information. Android is also notable for being designed to support an ever increasing variety of hardware functions. The operating system presents a very favorable environment for both hardware and application developers because it is open source and Android’s low level kernel is based on Linux.

Tablets/Android

• With both Dell and Lenovo putting their considerable weight behind the Android operating system, the onus is now on HP to see how it can whip Palm’s WebOS into shape to be a viable competitor in a tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• C Umashankar (an IAS Officer) is a well known name in Indian FOSS community. An ardent supporter of FOSS, the Tamil Nadu bureaucrat has been instrumental in implementing FOSS solutions in several e-governance processes ranging from documentation to servers. He regaled his young audience with two inspiring talks on “Why free software is going to rule the world”.

• ● Use open-source software. Free software such as Linux is used by millions, including organisations like Google, Ticketmaster and the Canadian government. They pay no licence fees, and the mainstream systems are constantly supported by armies of volunteers around the globe. Many in the IT industry hate the concept because it undermines much of its business model, but qualified advocates are becoming more and more common.

SaaS

• Since the announcement of OpenStack crossed the wire on Monday, much of the emphasis has been on Rackspace’s decision to open source their code and what this might mean in terms of the other major (proprietary) cloud players. But there are 25 companies who’ve signed on to the OpenStack organization and the benefit of the open source project will be far-reaching beyond just the cloud service providers.

Programming

• Eclipse 3.6, which arrived on the Internet on 23 June sporting the code name Helios, comprises 39 different Eclipse projects, collectively called a release train. While all of the projects are based on the open source, Java-based Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment), the train covers so much ground that it can be difficult to digest all of its enhancements and additions.

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