● 09.03.10

● Links 3/9/2010: GNOME 2.32 Beta 2, Android Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 1:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you’re looking for a workhorse, desktop replacement laptop it’s hard to find one more powerful than the Dell Studio 1747. Armed with an Intel Core i7, a 17″ inch display, and as much RAM as you’ll find in any laptop, the 1747 is a monster. Power aside, how does it fare as a Linux box? Almost perfect, but with one major flaw.

• [...]

• In almost every way I’m satisfied so far with the 1747. However, the lack of working wireless is really problematic for people who actually use the laptop to move around. I’ve already ordered an ExpressCard adapter that’s gotten good reviews for working with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, which set me back less than $30 on Amazon. Given that I scored a good deal on the laptop, I’m not too unhappy at having to pick up a wireless card.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There’s also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too.

Applications

• Earlier this year BitTorrent Inc. promised they would release a Linux client this summer, and today they are one step closer to achieving that goal. The company just released uTorrent Server for Linux, a daemonizable 32-bit binary of the uTorrent core, suited to those familiar with running programs from the command line. A full Linux client is expected to follow in the coming weeks.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• In this very interesting BLOG ARTICLE, Jeff Hoogland explains how he managed to get Starcraft 2 to work on his box by either using WINE 1.2 or Crossover 9.1.

• If you have never used WINE for gaming before and want to give it a go prior to actually purchasing Starcraft 2, I would encourage trying any other old game you may keep with you. I have been playing Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War for years and they both work perfectly.

• One such program is called TuxTyping. I stumbled on this program while looking for a typing tutorial in my Linux repository. I installed it and gave it a whirl. Don’t be fooled by the cartoony look of this game. It’s challenging! But it’s also fun to play and you’ll be improving your typing skills.

• I was indeed dazzled by the brilliance of this game but since I had never played Quake III Arena before, I never realized that it was almost exactly like it.

• FreeOrion, a turn-based space empire and galactic conquest game, version 0.3.15 has been released. Changes include:

• Officially there is no Steam for Linux right now and perhaps Lombardi was just leaving wiggle room for a later change of mind, but those who have chosen Linux are continuing to view Steam as they do many many other projects – with hope that someday will come.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• When the KDE 4 series was still being developed, Aaron Seigo announced in his blog that it would do away with icons on the desktop.

• He was being deliberately provocative, because what he really meant was that users would no longer be stuck with a single set of icons on the desktop. By abstracting the desktop icons into a separate feature called FolderView, KDE makes it easy to maintain and load separate sets of icons for different purposes. If you take the time to setup FolderView to suit your work habits, it reduces the number of icons on the desk at any one time, and makes finding them much easier.

• 2) Running Multiple Activities

• KDE 4.5 has been good to me so far, except the monstrosity that is Dolphin. I was already irked by the slowness and the crazy sorting behaviour, now it hangs 10 t 15 seconds when I try to do CPU-heavy tasks like no file manager was ever meant to do, oh, I don’t know, move a file. Or maybe copy one. Opening a directory. Stuff like that.

• But in KDE it’s always been easy to switch file manager. Most people in this case would use Konqueror instead, but I don’t like that one either. Thunar is my application of choice here, but up until now the Oxygen theme and Thunar didn’t play along, resulting in horrible default folder icons.

GNOME Desktop

• The second beta of the next GNOME release has arrived full of bug fixes and updates. Many of the standard packages have been updated for GNOME 2.32 Beta 2 (2.31.91) and more translation work has been done.

Distributions

• Choosing the distribution–or “distro”–that’s right for your business will depend in large part on five key factors, as I’ve already described. It’s also helpful, however, to have a basic understanding of how the major Linux distros differ.

• Well, my first blog post on this subject generated some broad agreement (and a few flames), but I think it’s necessary to be a little more specific about the three main things I want from from computers, from Linux, from whatever, as opposed to just from Fedora or any one Linux distribution. Here we go, and remember, this applies always to a “stable” release, not to the latest half baked bits that are under work, and it’s equally applicable to any Operating System you care to mention…

Reviews

• The result is a REALLY fast system, faster than anything else I am using in fact. I really like it. It is fast – I said that more than once for emphasis, but its also flexible, and it provides only what you configure, nothing more, nothing less. What I have built represents what I prefer to use in my personal computing environments.

Red Hat Family

• Goossens joins Magento from Red Hat (NYSE: RHT | PowerRating), where he was vice president EMEA of the organization’s JBoss division.

Fedora

• In fact I could be quite happy if we revised Fedora’s process completely. I can see a future where we aim to be a rolling distribution, and put out a point release only when we *have* to; when I asked people within Fedora a while back why point releases still exist, the only really valid answer was more or less ‘because sometimes changes happen that we can’t handle with an in-place update’. That’s fine, but in that case, there’s no real reason besides PR to schedule releases every six months; why not just do a release when some change means we *have* to do one? When such a change comes along we put out a set of images and give people six months to reinstall or upgrade, pushing security fixes for the previous codebase during that period, and then just declare it dead and say everyone needs to be on the new code now? Most of the objections to this kind of thing are about providing stable platforms and dependable updates and yadda yadda, but I already said, there’s no reason Fedora has to be that project. In a lot of ways I think Fedora could be a much more interesting and useful project in the long term if it wasn’t.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow. Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems). The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team. I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project. I’m really glad I did!

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Jobs’ love-hate relationship with Google became apparent when he pointed that “some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers.”

• Who are these friends — Microsoft or Google?

• Apple/Google inspired Microsoft entered this number game (do you remember when was the last time they came out with an original idea?) and announced that they are activating 10 Windows 7 per second.

• So, the jab could be at Microsoft! However, in most cases Microsoft gets free rides, Windows 7 comes pre-installed with generic PCs and most users were forced to upgrade from grandpa XP and rouge Vista.

Tablets

• -Google’s Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and now Android Developer Advocate, discussing the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, and tablet computers in general. The Galaxy Tab has a 7″ screen (almost 30% smaller than the iPad screen) and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo).

• In a recent disucssion with Reuters that took place at IFA, Samsung head of marketing for their mobile division YH Lee asserted the companies commitment to Android as its main smartphone focus. Lee said, “we are prioritizing our Android platform” due to the operating system being “very open and flexible.” He also noted high consumer demand for the platform that has quickly risen as a prime challenger against Apple’s iOS.

• Samsung may be one of the big players that Microsoft is pinning its hopes on for Windows Phone 7, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to the company at IFA. Speaking to Reuters at the show, Samsung’s head of marketing for its mobile division, YH Lee, said flatly that “we are prioritizing our Android platform,” adding that, “Android is very open and flexible, and there is a consumer demand for it.”

• Asustek is also set to launch a tablet PC, the Eee Note, and an e-book reader, the Eee Reader, in Taiwan and Europe in October. The Eee Note adopts an ARM-based Marvell processor and Linux-based operating system, designed by Asustek, for a price of US$199-299. Asustek will also launch a Wintel-based Eee Pad tablet PC in December with the model using a 10-inch panel, Nvidia Tegra processor and Android operating system, to show up in the first quarter of 2011 for a price below US$399.

Free Software/Open Source

• An enjoyable little time-waster: test your Blender 2.5 knowledge with a Blender quizz. Right now there are four quizzes to take, and more will appear in the future.

• As a member of the IKS european project Nuxeo contributes to the development of an Open Source software project named fise whose goal is to help bring new and trendy semantic features to CMS by giving developers a stack of reusable HTTP semantic services to build upon.

• [...]

• A semantic engine is a software component that extracts the meaning of a electronic document to organize it as partially structured knowledge and not just as a piece of unstructured text content.

• Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced the availability of data migration tools for users of Microsoft Outlook to easily move e-mails, contacts, appointments and tasks to Open-Xchange Server.

• [...]

• Due to PST file size limitations, PST files can be distributed amongst several workstations without a proper back-up strategy. Having all data centralized on the Open-Xchange Server enables administrators to integrate that data into their server-side backup environment and security policies. The software is available for free download at http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=OX_Outlook_Uploader

• There is no doubt that open source movement is taking over the world, 72% web sites run on open source server Apache, wordpress the open source blogging platform based on PHP/MYSQL is the #1 blogging platform in the world. Major sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google on open source software such as PHP, Python, Ruby and Java.

• FOSS stands for Free and open source software software that is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code.

• Indeed, the larger problem is that it’s very rare to see open source software really leading innovation in important, emerging software categories such as speech recognition or social networking. The problem isn’t lack of good developers in open source. In social networking, for example, developers have created good open source offerings, but they don’t lead the pack, and they certainly don’t challenge Facebook.

• Open source is home base for renegades, rebels, and out-of-the-box thinkers. It remains a conundrum why open source software doesn’t lead the way in more important, cutting-edge tech categories.

• As the desktop becomes less important, open source developer and enthusiast Dave Hall sees greater opportunities for organisations to switch to Linux-based desktop environments. In an exclusive interview, Hall talks about his contribution to FOSS and open source software and the way forward.

SaaS

Oracle

• The CUPS print system that is used on Linux and other Unix operating systems is switching its file format from PostScript to PDF. As part of this OpenOffice.org should switch its print output file format to PDF, too. This was implemented in OOo for issue 94173.

• Florian Schiessl explained what made the Munich’s conversion to OpenOffice.org work: maniac attention to detail and patience. They looked at some 21000 different templates and macros one by one and converted each of them manually, but only when they were sure they couldn’t be abandoned, eventually reducing their number of about 40%. More info is at WoLimux. They had problems when they sent ODF files to other organizations that had never seen them before, but Schiessl’s suggestion is “do talk with your partners when they refuse ODF and there will be good results and simplification for everybody, for example like using MS formats, but abandoning MS-only macros because they were not necessary in the first place”. (of course, being one of the largest cities in Europe helps a lot in this approach… single users still have less opportunities to be heard).

• This week the world-wide OpenOffice.org community comes together at the annual OpenOffice.org Conference in Budapest. Oracle, the steward of OpenOffice.org, is sponsoring the event and the Oracle Office team participates in various work groups and technical sessions. In his keynote, Michael Bemmer, General Manager of the new Oracle Office Global Business Unit, underlined the “importance of Oracle Open Office and OpenOffice.org to Oracle and its customers” (photo). The Open Document Format (ODF) is one of this year’s main topics of the conference with governments and businesses from all around the globe sharing their ODF experiences and discussing the overall benefits of open standards. Stay tuned to learn more about how the new solutions will make life easier for end users, and reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprises and public sector customers.

• In other words, Oracle seems to be saying, competitors shouldn’t be using Oracle technology in their own products, and that includes Sun’s technology. This is, quite frankly, what many observers (including SD Times) were concerned about. Oracle does not have a tradition of playing well with others.

Education

• One of the challenges of working in the space between academia and open source communities is translating the cultural and timescale differences. One approach to bridging the gap is to empower people already in the academic space–like professors–to navigate the free and open source software (FOSS) world and bring that knowledge back to the institutions they come from. The week-long POSSE Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshop, sponsored by Red Hat, aims to do just that.

Business

Project Releases

• ver­sion 0.4.4.1 of the lightspark player has been just released. It’s mainly a bug fix release, the most rel­e­vant news are:

• * Fixed a crash when using flashblock * Restore sup­port for YouTube

Openness/Sharing

• A trio of recent Harvard Business Review blog posts all center around a common theme: what does it take to be a successful business leader and manager in the 21st century? What traits and characteristics should this new generation of business leader possess?

• The posts center around three key areas: how a successful leader will handle the “new normal” of the 21st century business landscape, how the leader will exhibit the necessary people management skills, and how the leader can exponentially increase the amount of value generated by the company or organization.

Open Access/Content

• In Part 1 of this essay (published in SOAN for August 2010) I sketched some ways in which the growth of OA modified William Garvey’s 1979 observation that “in some disciplines, it is easier to repeat an experiment than it is to determine that the experiment has already been done.”

• http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-10.htm#rediscovery1

• Here I’d like to connect OA with three variations on Garvey’s theme. Garvey focused on cases in which redoing past work is undesirable but easier than looking up the original results. The problem to solve or work around is a dysfunctional access system. Sometimes, however, we positively want to redo past work. The problem is that the original results are untested or unconfirmed, not inaccessible. Sometimes we redo past work inadvertently. The problem is our near-sighted review of past literature. Sometimes redoing past work and looking it up are both undesirable. The problem is that we’ve allowed knowledge to become taboo and replaced curiosity with a defensive preference for what we already believe. Anything is easier than looking up past work or redoing it. All literature reviews are near-sighted. The problem lies in us, our fears and complacency, or in our predecessors, who might have broken the access system, burned the books, or created a culture in which inquiry is stigmatized as disloyal and harmful to party, profits, or faith.

Programming

• Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.

Leftovers

• Six current or former New Orleans police officers are the latest to be indicted in the sprawling civil rights investigation into shootings on the Danziger Bridge and a subsequent conspiracy to cover up what happened. Two people died and four were injured in the tragic incident that happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

• Twenty years after helping defeat apartheid, the eminent writer is fighting government plans to muzzle South Africa’s media

• Would you drive all the way from Maryland to California to try to get your Facebook account reinstated? That’s what Karen Beth Young did but apparently this wasn’t enough to impress the Facebook receptionist on duty. “Oh, people have driven farther than you, from Canada,” she was reportedly told, according to this Forbes story.

• When you work a lot on the computer, you come face to face with the desktop several times a day. The most important is first thing in the morning, when you start up your computer for the day, to check your email and read a few of your favorite blogs.

• There are few greater opportunities to get your mood off to a good start every day than the appearance of a really funny image or quote. With your coffee perched up to your lips, you’ll find yourself chuckling, and the entire mood of the morning has changed – you have a smile on your face before the coffee even reached your blood stream.

• A Cisco buyout for Skype makes sense for Skype as well. Skype, despite some efforts such as trying to combine VoIP with private branch exchange (PBX) and Unified Communications systems with Skype Connect, may be popular with people in general, but it’s never made much of an impact in the corporate markets. I’m sure Skype’s private equity owners would also welcome a buyout more than casting their bread on the uncertain waters of a Skype IPO in this shaky market.

Security/Aggression

• The Home Office pathologist criticised for his autopsy on the body of the newspaper seller who died at the G20 protests in London was found guilty of misconduct and “deficient professional performance” today.

• In “Tent City”, a notorious convict camp in the Arizona desert that lacks even basic air conditioning, temperatures regularly top 130 degrees, causing no end of heat-related health problems among its internees. Arpaio once boasted that he spends more feeding his police dogs than he does on feeding his prisoners: “The dogs never committed a crime and they work for a living,” he said to justify the poor quality of the food served in his jails – just a couple of reasons, perhaps, why his jail system is subject to the most lawsuits and has the highest prisoner death rates in the US. One man who has experienced Sheriff Joe’s brand of justice at first hand is Shaun Attwood.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• US politicians are coming under pressure to increase regulation of the country’s largest egg producers after a federal inspection of two companies at the centre of a salmonella scare revealed breaches of basic hygiene.

• Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspections of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, both in Iowa, found piles of chicken manure up to 2.5 metres (8ft) high beneath the hens’ cages. Employees crushed flies underfoot and live and dead maggots were seen in a manure pit.

• Ten days ago I received a letter from Cairn Energy, the British company at the centre of Greenpeace’s current direct action in the Arctic. I was told that its drilling operation is “relatively straightforward” and that the blue whales, polar bears and kittiwakes in Baffin Bay are safe, because, according to Cairn, “our programme is conventional”.

• To minimise the danger of alarmism, but without hiding from the facts, we set our parameters to assume that humanity would be on the lucky end of the spectrum of environmental risk. We were optimistic, perhaps too much so, about the speed and likelihood with which ecological dominoes might fall in a warming world. Nevertheless, what we found was startling. One hundred months on from August 2008 we were set to cross an atmospheric threshold.

Finance

• Ever heard of Commissioner Rouglas Scholtz-Tweakin of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? Neither had we.

• To go along with their new expose on banks’ self-dealing, NPR and ProPublica collaborated with “reporters” at Auto-tune the News to bring us exclusive footage of the “eleventh commissioner” at the private hearings. (Hence, the reference to commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin.)

• A new Treasury Department program to give people without bank accounts faster access to their tax refunds will help some avoid costly short-term loans. But careless consumers could end up racking up fees and padding bank profits.

• American companies experienced the largest drop in workplace productivity this spring in nearly four years and a rise in labor costs, suggesting businesses may no longer be able to squeeze more work out leaner staffs.

• Productivity dropped at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the April-to-June quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s double the 0.9 percent decline originally reported a month ago.

• Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a panel investigating the financial crisis that regulators must be ready to shutter the largest institutions if they threaten to bring down the financial system.

• “If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved,” Bernanke said Thursday while testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

• In her final speech as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer issued the clearest call any member of the administration has made for substantial new stimulus. “The only surefire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less,” she said. As is her trademark, Romer delivered her “scary descriptions and warnings” with a “perma-smile and singsong delivery.”

• If you’re looking for actual optimism, however, we’ve got some of that, too: Neil Irwin sees at least five reasons to be upbeat about the economy. Many will be glad to hear that illegal immigration has fallen by two-thirds since 2005. And Republican House chairmen will be happy to know that John Boehner plans to make them more powerful if he becomes speaker.

• U.S. regulators acting on “flawed information” denied Lehman Brothers the bailout assistance that its Wall Street competitors received, dooming the investment bank to collapse, former company chief executive Richard S. Fuld said Wednesday.

• In remarks before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by Congress, Fuld testified that Lehman gave government regulators a number of options for saving the company but that these were rejected. He said the regulators just weeks later extended similar measures to other Wall Street banks.

• The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

• Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

• After their worst August in nine years, stocks kicked off September with a big snap-back rally, following the release Wednesday of surprisingly good news about the U.S. manufacturing sector.

• Small businesses have put hiring, supply buying and real estate expansion on hold as they wait out the vote on a small-business-aid bill that stalled in the Senate earlier this summer.

• The much-debated legislation offers tax breaks and waived loan fees. But it also comes with more divisive components, such as a $30 billion fund that would help community banks give loans to small businesses. Opponents say the fund would be a mini version of the often-criticized TARP large-bank bailout program.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• They snatched Liao Meizhi on her birthday, dragging her off the street and into a dirty blue van as others held back her husband.

• It was only two months later, when a stranger knocked on the door, that her family learned where she had been taken. The man said he had just been discharged from a nearby mental hospital – and that Liao was being held there against her will. Her husband insists she has no psychiatric problems.

• …as no doubt the story of Julian Assange’s escapades in Sweden will be known once it inevitably makes its way into the hands of one of the goofier Hollywood directors – say Robert Zemeckis or Mel Brooks, or perhaps Stephen Herek of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It would do better in the hands of Andy Wachowski, where he might do for Julian Assange what he once did for Keanu Reeves.

• Who could ask for a more beautiful set-up? It’s a story fit for a tabloid, yet it might be transformed into something an intellectual could read without embarrassment. This latest adventure is the stuff of pulp fiction, and chock full of Langley spies, computer hackers, crazy feminists, flatfooted cops and sleazy rags in the female kingdom of Sweden!

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• HADOPI, meet the internautes. The French “high authority” that oversees the country’s three strikes anti-P2P file-sharing campaign is now being used by spammers and scammers who attempt to trick people out of their cash by accusing them of copyright violations.

• The e-mails have appeared in recent days, purporting to come from France’s Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (HADOPI). This is the government group that will accept file-sharing complaints from movie and music rightsholders, then issue sanctions and fines to users, with Internet disconnection and blacklisting the ultimate penalty.

• So, can a cocktail be copyrighted? In short, no. The publication of a recipe can be legally protected, but the “expression of an idea,” as the lawyers in the seminar explained, cannot. It’s the reason musicians can’t be sued for covering another band’s song in a live show. But few bartenders publish their recipes. They tend to pass them on as an oral tradition.

• A trade group representing music publishers and songwriters informed Apple on Tuesday that the company could not go ahead with a plan to extend the length of iTunes song samples without the publishers permission.

ACTA

• The Dutch Parliament moves the ACTA dossier from the Economic Affairs committee to the Foreign Affairs committee.

• The United States is behind the wall of secrecy surrounding global trade talks to combat counterfeiting, say EU policy sources, who claim that American officials are refusing to let their European counterparts publish the draft agreement online.

• Transparency? Not around the USTR, apparently. They’ve been using transparency as a negotiating ploy, and when they don’t get what they want, they refuse to let the document be released. Of course, in being so childish, all the US has really done is draw more scrutiny, and pretty much guarantee that a draft (including the markup that the one and only official release left out) get leaked.

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