● 10.03.10

● Links 3/10/2010: Economist.com on Drupal, GIMP 2.6.11

Posted in News Roundup at 10:09 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• One picture is worth a thousand words…

• For these beginner Linux users, Linux represents an all-mighty fortress that stands impenetrable. Consequently, they engage in all sorts of risky on line behavior. While it is a fact that Linux is more secure than Windows is, the hubris of these tragic heroes gradually leads them to their destruction…or to the bitter realization that a great many of the attacks a computer can suffer are fostered by a careless user.

• Fanboys always wage wars based on prejudice. Regardless of the OS you like, an open mind will help you fly over the clouds of ignorance and, eventually, you can make a conscious choice about whether or not your OS satisfies your needs or if a migration is the solution to your computer woes or the beginning of them.

• Without further delay, here are some impressive Linux desktop customization screenshots…

Applications

• Starting a new application series will show you many alternative applications for Microsoft windows in Linux platform. For example today I will try to find many possible applications to be alternative for Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator work In Linux Platform.

• I have a few applications that I have tinkered with, but didn’t make a big enough impression to warrant a full post. Just in the interest of safekeeping the notes I made about them, I’m going to leave a list here, for the future.

• There are more than thousands of Linux Operating Systems and checking out all of em is simply impossible .

• Better late than never, so I am entering into this fever called Twitter. And as a Linux Guru wannabe I like to use the command line for a lot of task, including tweeting.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Ubuntu Gamer reader Boni Boy Blue recommended an open-source MMORPG. Planeshift is a fully immersive 3D world which is based on the Crystal Space 3D engine with no limitations on class, weapons and armour so there is no need for micro purchases that seem to plague a lot of free MMORPGs. The game is also multi-platform so you can play with your friends who run Windows or Mac.

• Turned out the entire system was running Linux.

• Frictional Games may be a small Swedish indie studio, but the outfit has a flair for atmosphere and production values which make its horror titles stand out as much as any heavyweight developer. We were impressed with the earlier Penumbra series of games, and found them genuinely chilling, although Amnesia: The Dark Descent takes everything up a notch again. Or down a notch, perhaps, given the descending theme. Amnesia is a first-person horror survival game with adventure style and physics puzzles, alongside stealth elements.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kopete ex-maintainer and all around Basket case, Matt Rogers.

• I guess Sabayon 5.4 hasn’t really changed much from version 5.3, which had many of the same bugs that I experienced today. I simultaneously love it for its vast collection of applications included out-of-the-box and hate it for its stability issues, which still haven’t been resolved despite using the extremely stable KDE 4.5. I guess this is going to get a solid “meh” from me. (That said, don’t be surprised to see me testing the next version of Sabayon when it comes out.)

• From time to time we hear the question, what actually is KDE e.V., what’s its role in the KDE community? Let me try to answer this question here.

• In short, KDE e.V. is the organization, which represents, supports, and provides governance to the KDE community. It gives the community a legal body so it can participate in activities which require a legal representation, somebody handling money, or a way to legitimize individuals to speak and act for the community.

GNOME Desktop

• For some strange reasons, I am not able to enable clutterview in my Ubuntu Maverick. When I press F4, it just shows a black screen. Hence the ammonkey’s screenshot above. Another important feature worth mentioning is the integration for zeitgeist search engine. Take a look at the awesome video by ammonkey himself demonstrating zeitgeist search engine.

• Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today’s release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME’s tool-kit is complete.

Distributions

• And then of course there is Debian. I think about half the servers we have deployed are Debian based and indeed I like it very much. Desktop however is another story, many of our test runs have miserably failed due to unsupported graphic cards, malfunctioning wireless support and so on.

Red Hat Family

• Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $41.75 with the current price action closing at just $41.00 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

Fedora

• The Board agreed to move forward with the last statement, and will be voting on whether or not to finalize the statement at this coming Monday’s Board meeting.

Debian Family

• Megatotoro was kind enough to remove Gloria and install Mepis for me, after which, as in the Sioux hanblecchia, I was left alone on the hilltop…or, more accurately, inside the Mepis pyramids. This is the beginning of my challenge: For the next week, I will only use Mepis on my netbook to feel the differences. Remember, since I am not a computer guru, all I have is my limited empiric access to this fascinating world.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• * Ubuntu One was greatly improved with lots of bug fixes with focus on stability and better nautilus integration. Users can now create account with out a need to visit a browser. The web interface was improved and feels more intuitive. * An Android application was released for Ubuntu One and a new feature introduced where Ubuntu One will stream music to phones.

• Toshiba’s AC100 is certainly an interesting notebook on the face of it: Tegra 2 processor, full QWERTY and plenty of battery life, but the Android OS does mean it’s definitely a companion device and not your sole ultraportable. That could all change, however, now a hack for loading Ubuntu onto the AC100 has been developed; Carrypad pulled together the instructions and files from tosh-ac100.wetpaint.org, ac100.gudinna.com and the official Toshiba forums and managed to get his AC100 up and running with Ubuntu 10.10.

• Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, will be released in just a couple of weeks. That got me reflecting on the fact that I have been a happy user of Ubuntu for what must be over 5 years now. That’s a long time!

• The GNU/Linux variants are the only OSes I’ve used where I really have the flexibility to define my own workflow (example). So they are a pleasure to use (ok, most of the time). I use a computer for many, many hours a day nearly every day. And the time spent customizing software and learning it is a drop in the bucket when it’s amortized over the months and years I’m going to spend using it. Sure, Windows and Mac OS are a bit more learnable and easier to get started with— but they are much less usable. And for me, and most other people who sit at a computer for a living, that is precisely the wrong optimization to make.

Flavours and Variants

• The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I’ve done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS. wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name). The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a “light” version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I’ve heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation.

• [...]

• Overall, I think wattOS is a great distribution that is highly customizable and is a great way to revive an old computer with modern software. I do still feel slightly cheated by the absence of the power management tools. I highly recommend anyone to try it out. (See? I did include the download link this time!)

• Overall it works great – just as well as Crunchbang, but with update to date software. The only thing I didn’t like was that there was no update gui – I needed to run apt-get to find out stuff is ready for update – this also annoyed me with CrunchBang. Come on guys, every major distro (including Ubuntu, upon which it’s based) has some way of letting the user know there are updates to be installed. The user shouldn’t have to go manually checking every few days.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

• In a head-on comparison, Firefox 4 wins over its Microsoft arch-enemy. But that does not mean Internet Explorer 9 is bad. Far from it. Furthermore, the fact the browser scene has another new player, a good one with big teeth and a decent punch, should make you really excited. As the end user, you will benefit from even more attention and better and cheaper products. This is what fierce competition is all about. You.

• Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are going to be great browsers once released. If you’re a Firefox user, no need to abandon your favorite product. It’s still the good ole stuff that made the difference and broke the monopoly. If you’re an Internet Explorer user, now you truly have a good browser, which you can use and be proud of.

• And that would be all.

• I hope you enjoyed the article. If not, feel free to point out where I might be wrong.

• Firefox is my default web browser, which can be mainly attributed to its amazing add-on support and customizability. But other browsers have emerged (Chrome) or improved to a point, that Firefox feels old fashioned in certain categories. Especially speed and performance wise. If you ever experienced how fast Chrome or Opera are opening the most complex websites, and then compared that to Firefox, you know that something is amiss there.

CMS

• The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces. The Economist will be adding lots of social tools to its site over time, and doing so on its existing platform was too slow/inefficient.

Business

• Recent surveys have found that small and medium-size businesses are increasingly willing to consider open source tools. Not surprisingly, small businesses and large enterprises are predisposed to different categories of open source software. Survey data suggest that ERP is one category where small businesses are more likely to adopt open source than their large enterprise peers.

• Several open source ERP vendors are vying for a share of the action. Small-business owners and/or their IT department heads should consider whether an open source ERP package could meet their business needs as their companies grow.

Project Releases

• I have spent the last few weeks working on setting up nightly tarball builds of GIMP, GEGL and babl. Today I am glad to announce that this is up and running.

• Introduction

• BIND 9.7.2-P2 is a maintenance release for BIND 9.7.

• This document summarizes changes from BIND 9.7.1 to BIND 9.7.2-P2. Please see the CHANGES file in the source code release for a complete list of all changes.

Government

• The National Archives is today launching a new Open Government Licence, which makes it faster and easier than ever before to re-use public sector information.

• The UK Open Government Licence is a key element of the Government’s commitment to greater transparency. It provides a single set of terms and conditions for anyone wishing to use or license government information and removes some of the existing barriers to re-use.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• At the moment, due to limitations in the GCC compiler only 128k of flash are immediately useable but we’re very close to unlocking the whole memory space.

Programming

• I’ve finished writing and editing Modern Perl: The Book, and it’s gone into production, which means that Onyx Neon is preparing a print-ready PDF to give to the printers. The book should be available in print by the end of October, if not sooner.

Leftovers

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• To recap, what I am offering is to think of CC as an enterprise operating on three separate spheres, each with its distinct, although definitely not independent, value contribution. The first is the contribution to transactions between actors in the creative fields, the second is the institutional contribution and the third is the contribution in the normative field.

• The idea is that this can serve as the baseline for analysis, a fundamental categorization which lends itself to further sub-categorization, by field, by activity, by actor and by CC tool, but that doesn’t lose track of the way all of these tie into the one primary goal.

• Technically the video is impressive, it shows the software advancements and the grown experience of the team, it had good music and voices and it slightly longer. Still… I think it will be a smaller success compared with its predecessor, Big Buck Bunny.

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