● 07.29.10

● Links 29/7/2010: Linux Foundation Members, New GNOME Shell Mockups

Posted in News Roundup at 3:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The thing with operating systems, any operating system, is that they have logic errors. In other words they have bugs. Bugs are simply mis-calculations that a programmer has made in designing logic structures or the programmer fumble fingered when typing in a variable and missed an “i” or something (those are the hardest bugs to find :(). For what ever the reason an operating system or its user based programs can, do and will crash. The most important thing is how does the operating system handle this crash.

• Now lets simulate an operating system crash using analogy’s. If you have children, or are a big child yourself (I am fat, grey and balding yet still a child then you most probably know about play-doh ™. If you can grab a hold of some then take a handful and throw it at the floor as hard as you can. What happens? It goes splat, and flattens out but is still in one piece. That is what happens when Linux crashes.

• Next find a piece of glass, it could be an old window pain, a bottle (preferably empty from the beer you just finished) or a regular glass that you won’t miss. Take that glass and throw it as hard as you can against the floor. What happens? Of course it smashes into a million pieces. OK, not a million pieces but I am claiming artistic license here This is what happens when windows crashes.

Server

Kernel Space

• We are extremely lucky to have the support of so many who are individual members of the Linux Foundation. Their $99/year membership helps ensure we can continue protecting, promoting and advancing Linux and support the work of Linus Torvalds himself.

• Expanded support for USB 3.0, a new subsystem for the use of infra-red remote controls, and an EDAC driver for Nehalem processors are just a few of the many new or improved drivers.

• In the release email on the sixth beta version of Linux 2.6.35, Torvalds indicated that it could be the last beta for this kernel version, so it’s probable that the final of 2.6.35 will be released in the next few days.

Applications

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

• Likewise, installing DWM couldn’t be easier. Simply download the tarball from dwm.suckless.org and extract the contents. Then run make in the resulting directory. The result is a single executable, dwm. If you then run make install, make will install a man page and install the dwm executable in /usr/local. For testing, I simply ran dwm from my home directory.

GNOME Desktop

• A new mockup of Gnome Shell shown off at GUADEC this week gives us a hint as to what the it may look like further down the track.

• Some new GNOME Shell mockups were uploaded to GIT recently, showing a lot of similarities with Ubuntu / UNE…

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Cloud Foundations Edition One provides everything needed to help you plan, build, and manage a private cloud today. Red Hat delivers the most complete and comprehensive cloud solutions in the market, with the flexibility that comes only from the open source leader. Red Hat’s cloud vision is unlike that of any other IT vendor. We recognize that IT infrastructure is – and will continue to be – composed of pieces from many different hardware and software vendors that must work together. We recognize that customers want to grow and improve their IT systems and operations gradually and not through wrenching change.

• Vyatta, the leader in open networking and network virtualization, today announced it has signed Japanese systems integrator Entertainment Imaginers Inc. (Emaginers) as the first Authorized Vyatta Reseller in Japan and is supporting the newly formed Vyatta Japan User Group. These announcements reflect growing interest in Vyatta’s open networking solutions in Asia.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced six senior management appointments to boost its Asia Pacific management team and position the company for growth in the region. The appointments include two newly created roles focused on expanding the Red Hat partner ecosystem in Asia Pacific and accelerating the use of open source technology in enterprises in Asia

Fedora

• Ideally, anyone in Fedora ought to be able to be absent at any point in our release cycle without unduly affecting any of our release processes. The more we make it possible for any contributor to follow a process like judging against criteria, producing media and art, spinning release candidates, and so forth, the closer we get to that goal. The result is a more sustainable Fedora Project.

Debian Family

• With rock solid stability, a pretty interface, handy applications, original tools, multimedia support, proprietary driver installation, and APT — SimplyMEPIS has it all. The only two characteristics one might see as disadvantages are packages that may be a version or so behind some other cutting-edge distros and repositories are not as fully populated as some of the other larger projects. But SimplyMEPIS is compatible with Debian, so one could use packages from that project if needed. In fact, Debian repositories are already setup in APT/Synaptic. Add to that a one-CD download and easy installer one finds SimplyMEPIS is just simply wonderful.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In This Issue

• * Last call for Maverick server papercuts * Ubuntu Maverick open for translation * Native readers: extending the Beta * MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox) * An Interview With Silver Fox * Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap * Ubuntu Stats * Approval and Re Approval Process * LoCo Council July Meeting minutes * Delivering the Ubuntu Colombia Contact * Stepping Down from Ubuntu Bangladesh * Dun Laoghaire July Geeknic * Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues * Launchpad News * Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events * More cleansweep. * Discussion request: multilingual posts on Planet Ubuntu or not? * The Official Ubuntu Book – 5th Edition * This week in design – 23 July 2010 * Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is now available in Greek! * How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens * Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released * Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck * An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com * Akademy 30 second interviews, Eben Moglen, Helsinki, Prague * “Blog about what you’re doing” * Bugs vs Blueprints * In The Press * In The Blogosphere * Windows or Ubuntu? * Linux Box To Market Ubuntu * Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website… for now * Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle? * Rackspace’s Risky Open Cloud Bet * Featured Podcasts * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings * Upcoming Meetings and Events * Updates and Security * and much much more!

Flavours and Variants

• many thanks to Ofir Klinger of the Kubuntu website team for his hard work making this happen!

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• The future of smartphones is coming, and it is wide open … as in open source.

• The signs are clear that mobile app developers, and by default, designers of smart phones, are marching inexorably toward an open source world. Consider these recent developments…

Android

• There are tons of great reasons to root your Android phone, but once you do, you’ll likely be overwhelmed with all the custom ROM options out there. Here’s how to go about finding—and installing—the one that fits your needs.

• Motorola Droid X is on its way to become season’s most popular smartphone, as all the Verizon stores have exhausted the stocks till August 4 or even later and the pre-order backlog continues. Motorola needs to be careful here as the backlog might turn into a lost opportunity for the smartphone maker. According to reports, the customers who visited stores since last week have been asked to place pre-orders or order via phone delivery.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Open vSwitch Project – which is backed by network control software startup Nicira Networks – provides downloadable coding for the open source virtual switch, which is licensed under Apache 2. It currently supports Xen, XenServer, KVM and VirtualBox but can be ported to other virtualization environments.

• The makers of the popular open-source Snort intrusion detection platform today unveiled a new open-source platform — a detection framework that unites existing security tools, including IDS/IPSes.

• At the ACM SIGGRAPH conference today visual effects houses Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Sony Pictures Imageworks announced a co-developed open source project titled Alembic.

• Sourcefire, best known for its Snort intrusion-prevention technology, Tuesday is unveiling a new open source project called Razorback that’s designed to spot malware and especially zero-day exploits.

• I wanted to play with brush lines and I was thinking back to a chat I had with my good friend David about Free Software and lack of User attachment to sticking with Free products when their only desire is practicality. This of course can make a very transient user base who will leave at the first sign of trouble.

Events

• Many people argue that because open source involves a community of developers always working to improve the code, open source actually encourages more rapid innovation and improvement than does a closed, proprietary system. And while it’s taken several years to make this case, open source has seen widespread adoption in enterprise. Companies no longer balk (as much) at the thought of using tools like Apache, Linux, or Mozilla Firefox, all open source software. And while enterprise application remains much of the focus of open source development and of the OSCON conference, the event introduced a health care track, pointing to the myriad of ways in which open source technologies, along with open data, can enhance health care delivery.

SaaS

• Twitter said the new facility will provide it with “a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around [its] unique power and cooling needs,” while housing “a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications”.

CMS

Business

• Others have hit up the content management angle (there important here-and-now) and the open source angle (which is definitely interesting given Day’s involvement with Apache). I’ll go over one longer term idea of of how the commendation of existing Adobe assets (including, most importantly Omniture) and Day gets close to a new category of IT use.

• Openbravo web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for small and mid-sized businesses has now been downloaded more than 1.7 million times, making Openbravo the leading provider in its market space.

Semi-Open Source

• Open core and open foundation have different evolutionary lineages: open core is a variation on dual licensing as practiced by the likes of MySQL and Sleepycat that also borrows heavily on the value-added subscription model as practiced by Red Hat and JBoss. Meanwhile open foundation has its roots in the commercialization of BSD, which pre-dates the concepts of open source and free software, as well as Apache.

BSD

• In this Edition:

• * Letter From the President * Fundraising Update * Flattened Device Tree Project * Userland DTrace Project * FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project * Resource Containers Project * HA Storage Project * BSNMP Improvements * DAHDI FreeBSD driver port * FreeBSD Lectures Captioning Project * Upgrades to the Ports Building Cluster * AsiaBSDCon 2010 * BSDCan 2010 * BSD Toolchain Summit * MeetBSD Poland 2010 * 2010 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients * Testimonial – Building a Business on FreeBSD * Financials

Licensing

• The GPL ensures that any developer who works on a piece of software is given copyright to the portion they worked on and gives users and other developers the right to copy, distribute, and/or modify it. So, if I find a piece of open source software that I find useful, I can legally send copies of that program to all my friends and colleagues who can use it and pass it along as well. Just try this with Microsoft Vista which has strict requirements in the EULA with the number of installations allowed.

Openness/Sharing

• According to Cameron Shorter, coordinator of the OSGeo-Live project, “OGC standards underpin our geospatial Open Source applications, and hence OGC this support from the OGC will greatly enhance the Open Source documentation being developed.”

Open Data

• Despite being public property, government documents are not necessarily free or easy to obtain. Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org details his decades-long quest for open access to “America’s Operating System.”

Standards/Consortia

• Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology.

Leftovers

• Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom.

Security/Aggression

• The performance of the US-led foreign troops in the Afghan war was further undermined this week after whistleblower site Wikileaks published thousands of secret military documents unveiling that foreign armies fighting in Afghanistan indiscriminately killed civilians and tried to cover up civilian casualties.

• The British parliament’s defense committee is an influential panel whose inquiries are aimed at scrutinizing the government’s performance.

• In a world that already hosts 4chan, Pirate Bay, and a whole host of spammers, crackers, and other malefactors, it’s crazy to think that a host would not be found for secrets governments don’t want revealed.

• At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gul’s name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.

Environment

• MORE energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is available in oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines.

• Recent estimates suggest that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to produce food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted each year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin calculate that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules lost each year.

Finance

• New jobless claims fell last week for the third time in four weeks but remain elevated. The decline is a sign that the economy likely added jobs in July, although not enough to lower the nation’s high unemployment rate.

• The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists have turned gloomier in the past three months. They foresee weaker growth and higher unemployment than they did before. As a result, the economists think the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero until at least next spring.

• Amanda Keppert is convinced that she would have lost Mandy’s Korner, her hot dog stand in San Jose, Calif., if she had not received a type of loan that is more common in the third world than in the United States.

• While the economy has continued to pick up, growth has become uneven in recent weeks, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday in its latest regional report. In some regions, the Fed said, economic activity had started to slow.

• The bill would create a $30 billion government fund to help community banks increase lending to small businesses, combining it with about $12 billion in tax breaks aimed at small businesses. Democrats say banks should be able to use the lending fund to leverage up to $300 billion in loans to small businesses, helping to loosen tight credit markets.

• States are putting hundreds of thousands of people directly into jobs through programs reminiscent of the more ambitious work projects of the Great Depression.

• Households across a majority of large U.S. cities received more foreclosure warnings in the first six months of this year than in the first half of 2009, new data shows.

• The trend is the latest sign that the nation’s foreclosure crisis is worsening as homeowners battling high unemployment, slow job growth and an uneven rebound in home prices continue to fall behind on their mortgage payments.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Fans of Fairouz, the Arab world’s most famous singer, are up in arms about a bitter legal row that has stopped her performing live. From Beirut to the Gulf – and as far away as Australia – the diva’s supporters are making their voices heard to complain that she is being cruelly silenced.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Recording Industry Association of America is defending more than $17 million spent on legal fees in 2008 after bloggers claimed the organization’s aggressive pursuit of damages for illegal downloading was yielding little legal in the way of legal recoveries.

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