● 08.12.10

● Links 12/8/2010: Jolicloud Reviews, OLPC Deployments in the Philippines

Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I have now changed my laptop to a linux (Ubuntu) machine and run a piece of software (Virtual Box) on it. Virtual Box is a program which pretends it is another computer – a virtual computer. On virtual box I run Windows. This is – I believe – a superior set-up and it is unlikely I will ever run a machine primarily on Microsoft again. I will explain why more fully below – but first I just wish to make a simple observation… if I take the hard drive out of my laptop and install it in my old laptop everything works just fine – the whole computer is functional. If I tried to do that with a windows operating system it would fail. This is likely to be important in the future of computing because I will be able to migrate my computer from a laptop to the cloud – or possibly onto my (linux powered) phone. It is unbelievably useful to have a hardware-independent computer.

Kernel Space

• Where exactly is the Linux kernel heading?

• Here at the LinuxCon conference, a panel of Linux kernel developers from Red Hat, Google, Novell and Oracle discussed what’s next for the ecosystem, and why not every kernel debuts with a big new feature.

Graphics Stack

• If all goes according to plan, X.Org Server 1.9 will be released in about two weeks, but after that there still is the X.Org 7.6 release “katamari” to be done. While X.Org releases themselves aren’t as important any longer with the X Server releases being done at different points and the rest of the X.Org package collection being modular, the X.Org 7.6 release is expected in October.

• Alan Coopersmith, the X.Org wrangler at Sun/Oracle, has done some X.Org 7.6 planning on the xorg-devel mailing list. On the date of the xorg-server 1.9 release, which is scheduled on the 20th of August but could potentially slip by a few days, all driver and protocol updates needed for the 1.9 release should also have been released. At this point, Alan would also like the first release candidate of Xlib 1.4.0 to be tagged.

Applications

• SANE is just the application programming interface, a collection of tools and software libraries that allow developers to write powerful software, but it isn’t really a user application itself. The XSane project has built a nice graphical user interface, based on SANE and originally using the X graphical environment used on pretty much everything that isn’t Windows. And if you want to know why “X” is the name of the graphical environment, you’ll have to ask the people at MIT who invented X and made it open source and very popular.

• Essentially all the UbuntuOne plugin for Shutter does is save the file to a specified synchronised UbuntuOne folder – which UbuntuOne notices and proceeds to upload. It’s nifty in that it means you don’t have to manually do anything – but you’ll still have to head to your UbuntuOne folder to grab a public link.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The stable release of KDE 4.5 was released yesterday and again thanks to neoclust, we have packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring since the same day !!

GNOME Desktop

• Indeed, Canonical has no need to fork GNOME and enhancements to a user interface don’t represent a fork. Look at Android. Motorola has its own MotoBlur interface that sits on top of the OS, but users are still running Android underneath.

• Recently, we reported that Red Hat is in fact the largest contributor to GNOME–an environment that the company has a stake in. It’s not surprising to see Canonical experiment with how to treat GNOME, but it would be completely surprising for the company to choose to do an actual fork. Why? GNOME is a very well-done environment that will only increase in popularity, and it’s a user interface, where having users comfortable with it is part of its attraction.

Distributions

• If you’ve ever run a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), or booted from a rescue disk, you’ve probably used a version of SYSLINUX, even if you didn’t know it at the time. SYSLINUX, the work of H. Peter Anvin, is a bootloader for Linux which can boot from an MS-DOS FAT filesystem or create a bootable floppy (very old-school!); its close cousin ISOLINUX handles booting from CDs and similar media. SYSLINUX has always been enormously useful for first-time installs, when you’re often booting from a machine that is currently running Windows, but until fairly recently, you had to switch to another bootloader post-install, since SYSLINUX doesn’t handle ext* filesystems. However, EXTLINUX, a fairly recent addition to the Syslinux Project, does handle these filesystems (see below), giving another boot option besides GRUB and LILO for Linux systems.

Red Hat Family

• Wipro has become the first Red Hat Premier Partner in India. The two companies have strengthened their strategic partnership through joint marketing and integration opportunities designed to bring open source solutions to enterprises across the subcontinent.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Making a virtual appliance is not that big a deal, but VMware faced some particular challenges in putting Zimbra in a virtual shrink wrapper to distribute it in a virtualized appliance format. For one thing, most of VMware’s customers are running Windows server operating systems, but Zimbra runs on Linux.

• In the case of the virtual appliance version of Zimbra Collaboration Suite, the Linux in question is a distribution of Ubuntu. But SMB shops that use Windows don’t want to learn Linux, and VMware didn’t want to port ZCS to Windows, either.

• The canonical-census package was created for a specific, but undisclosed, OEM customer of Canonical. It will be up to that customer as to whether or not they reveal the results of the data collection, says Spencer, and future plans for canonical-census beyond this one OEM have not been made, but if the scheme works well, it could be considered as an option at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit to provide data to the community.

• You can probably use the OS for years, and never know what a command line parameter is. Quite simply one of the easiest to use Linux distros right out of the box, Canonical has seriously upped the ante and made an OS that can be enjoyed both for its simplicity and capability by anyone, geek or average consumer.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• Here is a visual preview for you. If you have tried MeeGo on your machine, you can send us your review under our AuTIER program and get paid.

Android

• Make no mistake about it: Open source developers can be a very passionate bunch.

• At the LinuxCon conference, the topic of why Google Android code is not part of Linux was the subject of some intense discussion. One such discussion became so heated that a panelist wound up telling a combative audience member to “shut up” before asking them to leave.

• There’s no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it’s all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson — a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device — is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google’s mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we’ve got the goods on it.

Jolicloud

• The particularly interesting aspect of this OS is that the main guts of it are located on hosted servers. Almost everything is based inside the browser which is like an open source version of Google Chrome (called Chromium).

• Jolicloud 1.0 just became available as a free download. This is the very first free cloud computing-based OS. As expected, Jolicloud is based on Linux and features an HTML user interface.

• Jolicloud 1.0 is another Linux distribution that just released its first full version after several months of being in beta. What makes this different from the other Linux distributions available out there is that it integrates both native applications with web-based applications that looks like native apps. If that sounded familiar, well, it should if you tried Google’s ChromeOS or if you have use the pre-iTunes App Store iPhone and iPod Touch — where you save web-apps on the launcher and it looks like a native app.

• Installing Linux distributions has gone a long way – from dozens of 3.5” diskettes to multiple CDs and to single DVDs. And now, you simple click a few buttons and that’s it – a few minutes later, you have a brand-spanking-new Linux desktop. The same can be said of Jolicloud. However, Jolicloud differs in one aspect — post-install, you need to register at Jolicloud.com for an account.

OLPC

• Wondering what to do with your old XO laptop now that the novelty has worn off? Consider donating it to the Digital Literacy Project (DigLit) and put a computer you’re no longer using into the hands of an elementary school student in one of two schools within the Boston Public School system.

• just got a mail from adam holt, the olpc community support manager. olpc-affiliated filipino community group ekindling.org is looking for anyone with strong open source/sysadmin/teaching skills who could help on the ground deploying XOs and Sugar for an organized laptop deployment (100 XO-1.5s) beginning around september or october in the philippines.

Tablets

• Smartbook AG is shipping a seven-inch, 800 x 480 tablet computer for the German market equipped with Android 2.1. The Smartbook Surfer runs on a Telechips TTC8902 processor clocked to 720MHz, and offers 256MB of DDR2 memory, 2GB of flash, 802.11b/g, optional GPS, and a webcam, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• With its roots in Eclipse and Java, BOS 5.2 boasts broad platform support, and runs on Linux, Windows and OS X. I tested the studio application on CentOS 5.5, Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04, with good results across the board.

Oracle

• Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps

• Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a complete management, hosting and access solution for virtualized desktops hosted in the datacenter. By enabling standardized virtual desktop images, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure helps reduce administration overhead, lower total cost of ownership and increase security.

CMS

Programming

• There’s an important corollary here. Hackers, by their very nature, like playing with code, and the easiest/best/most satisfying way to do that is to play with open source code, and to share it with other hackers for feedback and kudos. As a result, many of the best hackers tend to be found either in the free software community, or at least aligned with many of its ideas.

• Graham’s argument about the centrality of hackers to any company that needs good software therefore implies that free software is something that should be deployed at least internally – not just because of its own, evident virtues, but because it will help to keep those crucial hackers happy, and to attract more of the same. It’s an approach that is certainly much cheaper than trying to bribe them to stay despite the unhackerish software they are forced to use.

Standards/Consortia

• Understanding switching costs is definitely lacking in today’s discussion. That’s why people are locked in to proprietary standards, and have to pay astronomically high prices to decrypt their very own data back to ‘raw data’, to make it suitable for input in another program. Lot’s of people don’t see proprietary standards for what it is: Encrypting your data while you don’t have the key to decrypt it. Those people fail to note those exit costs of a platform are related to their very own choice of ‘entering’ that platform to begin with, and not related to the choice of migrating to another platform.

• That’s why requiring open standards matters: It’s another way of requiring your own data not to be encrypted too much. Another way to require a supplier to enable you to retrieve your own raw data without infringing their intellectual property (monopoly? and being sued by them.

Leftovers

Security/Aggression

• A COUPLE who painted their side of a garden fence were shocked to be given a fine for criminal damage after a neighbour complained.

• Labour’s controversial child protection database has been switched off, with a minister dismissing it as a “surrogate ID card scheme”.

• Britain’s eccentrics, recluses and misanthropes, you can relax. Ignoring neighbours and keeping your curtains permanently shut to the world outside might not win you many friends, but you’re no longer likely to be denounced as a possible terrorist.

• A radio advert that urged listeners to consider calling the police’s anti-terrorist hotline if they had suspicions about local people who avoided company, kept their windows covered and eschewed bank cards for cash has been banned for potentially causing “serious offence”.

• Putting aside the cost to the taxpayer (I’d say that these councils spend money like drunken sailors, but it’s an insult to drunken sailors who are at least spending their own money), what on earth does this mean..? Does it mean that people can use public facilities to snoop on who’s using particular car parks? To conduct surveillance on their neighbours, their “friends”, their co-workers, their spouses suspected of adultery..? Does it mean that people can scope out car parks to see what vehicles are there worth nicking? Can people read the numberplates on the cars (presumably so)? The list of infuriating possibilities is endless…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Oppressive heat and waves of toxic smog in Moscow has seen the death rate reach 700 a day – twice the normal rate, a senior Russian health official said today.

• “The mortality rate has doubled,” said Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s health department. There were usually 360 to 380 deaths a day in the city, but “now that number is about 700″.

• How did the new forest law make things worse?

• The function of forest protection completely disappeared, with no human or technical resources allocated to it whatsoever. It was no longer a federal mission and central management was dropped.

• “Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive,” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet.

• The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

• “What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said.

Finance

• Government austerity measures are already plunging the British economy into reverse according to figures published today which reveal sagging high street sales and renewed falls in house prices.

• Expectations of widespread job cuts in the public sector have begun to discourage households from moving home or buying “big ticket” items such as furniture and carpets, with spending going on essential items and replacements only, said the British Retail Consortium. One of the worst-hit sectors is big-screen flat televisions, where sales have slowed markedly, but the BRC also noted year-on-year falls in items such as shoes. It said that high street sales are running 0.5% higher than last year on a like-for-like basis, with the small rise largely due to food price inflation. “Talk of public spending cuts is unsettling consumers and they are concentrating on essentials,” said the BRC director general, Stephen Robertson.

• Two more regulating bodies, the U.S.-based Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and UK-based Financial Services Authority (FSA), are still probing into the bank’s failure to disclose to its investors a Wells notice that the SEC had handed it in early 2009– an entire year before the SEC’s lawsuit in April 2010.

• Capmark Financial Group Inc.’s creditors sought court permission to sue Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. over a $1.5 billion loan made to the commercial property lender.

• Contrary to first impressions, the new financial reform law could help rather than hinder Goldman Sachs, The Los Angeles Times reported.

• One of the most talked-about changes facing Wall Street is the end to proprietary trading. A number of banks were already scaling back their proprietary trading operations because of losses incurred during the financial crisis. Citigroup and JPMorgan are said to be looking at moving employees in those operations to other trading functions, as Goldman has started to do.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Sven Juerss, the chief executive of Microdrones GmbH, a German firm which built the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), said he expects to provide “dozens” more in the future.

• However, Google has moved swiftly to deny that the purchase was for company use – Peter Barron, a spokesman for the firm’s UK office, told the Telegraph: “Google is not testing or using this technology. This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use.”

• Should companies be able to sue for libel? The recently launched Lord Lester libel reform bill includes a provision that companies would have to show substantial financial loss before being able to sue. The House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport has also called for fundamental reform of libel law in respect of corporate reputation, while many Australian states have limited actions in libel to companies with fewer than 10 employees.

• But to the conventionally minded English lawyer there is no question that companies should be able to sue for libel. After all, companies are “legal persons” – and in English law, personality goes a very long way. The view is that if “natural persons” can sue for libel then so can companies.

• When Raja Petra Kamarudin, one of Malaysia’s best-known bloggers, heard he was to be detained without trial for the third time last February, he decided to flee the country. He was already facing sedition and criminal defamation charges after publishing a string of stories that linked the prime minister Najib Razak and his wife to the gruesome murder of a beautiful Mongolian translator, Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa, in 2006.

• While Raja Petra says he was prepared to fight those charges in court, he was not willing to face detention without trial again under the country’s draconian Internal Security Act. “Under the ISA, they bypass the court process entirely,” says the blogger, whose Malaysia Today website regularly exposes the abuses of power that blight the south-east Asian nation. “If I’d let them get me a third time, I would have been a glutton for punishment.”

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