● 08.01.10

● Links 1/8/2010: GNU/Linux Reviews and GhostBSD 1.5 Screenshots

Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Applications

• This project is part of the work at Carnegie Mellon University’s speech group aimed at advancing the state of Speech Synthesis.

Instructionals

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• A key element of mind map is tree which layouts shapes with text. I decided tree may be usefull not only for mind mapping, but for some other things. So I started working on TreeShape plugin. Plugin makes it possible to layout any KOffice shapes in tree structure and manage it.

Distributions

• It seems as though there are as many Linux distributions as there are letters in the alphabet with which to name them. Certainly, there is a flavor to satisfy almost any palate. It wasn’t always this way, however. How did it happen? Why hasn’t the Linux world just standardized on a single distribution?

• The beginning of the Linux distribution really started with Richard Stallman and his fledgling Free Software Foundation in the early 1980s. The GNU operating system was being developed, intending to re-implement a UNIX-like operating system as free software. Although many GNU tools enjoyed wide use, the project suffered various setbacks and delays in its hunt for a kernel. There was a lack of cooperation from some at Berkeley with using the BSD kernel, and there were licensing issues with Mach (Carnegie-Mellon University’s microkernel). Before these issues were resolved and the GNU Project was able to make headway building its own kernel, Hurd (another free kernel) became available for use.

Reviews

• Sabayon on the whole is a very usable system. Not as slick as some of the bigger boys but certainly capable of handling itself in a scrap. Media support is a bit patchy but good enough and XBMC pulls it out of the bag and gives it a purpose and some edge.

• Killer Feature: Hard to find one really. Mepis is solid and the DVD runs nicely but the not wanting to boot from the hard drive aspect worries me that if it doesn’t work for me then its likely to not work somewhere else. Several nice touches like gadgets and widgets on the desktop but nothing that really stands out.

• Final verdict on Mepis is that its …OK. It works for some and not others and has made me appreciate what KDE has to offer in terms of built in software. Not blown away but it looks nice and does most tasks reasonably well.

• Arch Linux looks promising. The installation is easy, the documentation is helpful, and the package manager interface is simple.

• [...]

• In summary, the helpfulness of the Arch docs is directly proportional to the brokenness of Arch packages. To me, Arch is yet another distribution inferior to Ubuntu.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• So far it has been a smooth ride except for one annoying problem. I am not able to shut down my laptop.

• Mandriva enjoys the support of many mirrors for their repositories and the closest one to my location helped me achieve awesome speeds, beyond 10 MB/s. Sadly, there were quite a lot of times when that mirror didn’t work at all. As a simple workaround, you can always change the mirror to a more reliable one from Software Manager → Options → Media Manager → File → Add a specific media mirror.

• Verdict on Mandriva is that its the best non-Debian based system I have tried in these tests. Its got all the right ingredients to keep most people happy other than some support for DVDs or an easy way of getting them to work without hours of fiddling and downloading codecs.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth has apologised “unreservedly to all offended” for his “poor choice of language” during LinuxCon 2009 during which a comment made by the Ubuntu founder was deemed to be sexist by many members of the Linux community

• The redress, given in the comment section of his blog, states: – “I apologize unreservedly to all offended by my poor choice of language on that or other occasion.”

• That’s right, Full Circle issue 39 is out! We’ve got a review of the iRobot iPad Android tablet, talk about virtualizing Fedora, virtual memory, new interviews, and more! (Oh, and we seem to have the recurring theme of ’13′ in our articles.)

Flavours and Variants

• Over the past week I’ve been testing out a free operating system designed for netbooks called Jolicloud . I downloaded the installer from their website, went through a few prompts and within about 30 minutes it was up and running. The best part is, I was able to keep Windows on my netbook too. After installation, a prompt appears when I first turn my computer on asking me if I want to load Windows or Jolicloud. This made me feel safe, knowing that I could always go back to Windows if things didn’t work out.

• The first thing I noticed was the simplicity. There’s very little clutter on the screen. The interface is similar to what you see on an iPhone, there are pages of app icons. You can click the “Add” button in the upper left corner to find more applications to add to your netbook. It’s almost like the App Store on an iPhone. Jolicloud is based off Linux so it runs pretty smooth and there are about 700 applications available for Jolicloud. This includes office applications that support Microsoft Office files, video players, music organizers, etc.

• Kubuntu 10.10 has finally got its application menu integration ready. The application menu, also called “Global Menu” is not same as the one found in UNE 10.10, but it is using the same infrastructure.

• Pinguy OS is a remastered Ubuntu with a lot of useful default applications – great for those who don’t like to do a lot of tweaking and want an OS that “just works”. Pinguy OS doesn’t rebrand Ubuntu, so you’ll have the same Plymouth theme, the Ubuntu logo for the menu and so on.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source is at once a type of software licensing, a community model, an ideology, and a social movement. As a movement aiming not only to promote open source software within the software development community, but also to change the attitudes of commercial users, it can benefit from lessons learned by earlier social movements.

• Open source theory and practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Viewing the challenges faced by open source communities, businesses, and contributors through the lenses of different disciplines can yield novel solutions. This article reviews select lessons from the diverse fields of fashion, gaming, and scientometrics. It examines the way these other industries have addressed issues that are of relevance to the open source community and suggests ways to put these lessons to good use.

Oracle

BSD

• GhostBSD 1.5 is based on the FreeBSD live CD however because this release is a little larger it comes on as a live DVD. As of this release GhostBSD is completely installable by issuing a list of commands and pc-sysinstall. A file with instructions for installing GhostBSD appear on the desktop. Although this install method is a little bit tough to complete, Eric Turgeonhas stated “Now for the next 6 mount I gonna work on a graphic installer for 2.0.” You can find more in the official release announcement. Please keep in mind you can buy Free-BSD and PC-BSD in our cart.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Open source has been in the media for quite some time whether directly or indirectly. With ACTA leak and the ASCAP letter two big news items that affects open source, we decided to sit down with the Free Software Foundation and talk about these and other things related to the open source movement.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• It is almost “criminally irresponsible” to hoard academic knowledge in the digital age, according to a Canadian specialist in the field.

• Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, also said that open educational resources (OERs) could help to reassert the academy’s role as a “leader and guardian of free and open enquiry”.

• As a closing thought, if we think of academic journals in the OA debate as oil in the climate change debate, we are only going to have less and less access to them as time goes on. Academic libraries cannot afford to subscribe to them all, and that is only going to get worse. In the same way that in 50, 100, 150 years time (whatever it may be) we will have no oil-based fuel to put in our cars, in 10, 15, 20 years time you may be even less likely than you are now to reach your desired audience by simply relying on the subscription base of a given journal. Rather than waiting to see if this happens, why not do something about it now?

• The Times Higher ran a piece on ceviche cooking edupunk Brian Lamb’s keynote at the recent JISC OER event in London. Brian makes his usual good points, but it was some of the comments that were revealing.

• In particular, one that states “We should also have ‘open access’ at Tesco: I should just be able to take from their shelves what I want without paying.”

Programming

• Rakudo Star is a useful and usable subset of Perl 6 you can use right now. It does not implement the complete Perl 6.0 specification, and it’s by no means the final release: it contains bugs and misfeatures, and it’s had very little optimization work for speed or memory.

Leftovers

• There’s a new mystery on the web today. In an otherwise boring video about “Google Lookup in Google Docs,” the search giant appears to have inadvertently revealed a new Google Docs product called “Punch.” So what on Earth is it?

• The blog Google Operating System (which spotted the feature) has its guess: “Maybe Google Punch is a free-form document that lets you combine data from other documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms.” ReadWriteWeb expands on that a bit for a similar guess: “Perhaps a Punch is a mix of functions and content intended for collaboration, more than for posting publishing like Google Pages is.” Both sound plausible, but we have another guess.

• Arm, the UK’s largest technology company by market value, declined to raise its full-year outlook in spite of beating market expectations with its first-half results.

Science

• Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense.

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