● 10.04.10

● Links 4/10/2010: DebConf10 Report, ODF is Green

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I powered up SLED 11 SP1, plugged in her USB thumbdrive and opened up her Chinese poetry presentation in OpenOffice v3.2.1. Next, I showed her how to use SCIM for Chinese character input (toggle via Ctrl-Space & HanYu PinYin input). Left her to it for an hour and she successfully completed her assignment, saved it in PPT format and went home. I did warn her that her presentation may not be 100% WYSIWYG when opened on a Windows PC at her club meeting. *fingers crossed*

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While AMD soon will be introducing the Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards, there is still plenty of life left to the Radeon HD 5000 series especially for those interested in open-source support with the Evergreen GPUs finally being supported by the open-source driver stack complete with OpenGL acceleration via a Mesa driver and this support will continue to mature before there is the same level of support for the next-generation Southern Island GPUs in the open-source world. In this article we are reviewing the ATI Radeon HD 5450 “Cedar” graphics card, which is AMD’s lowest-end Evergreen GPU but will set you back less than $50 USD.

• AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.

Applications

• A task manager is software which enables users to compile a list of tasks to be completed. This list is also known as a to-do list or things-to-do. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘task manager’ should not be confused with monitoring software which provides information about programs and processes running on a computer.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• We hope to have our first Bordeaux for OpenIndiana release within the next month. Your support is welcome and needed to make this happen…

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Almost five years ago, at the traditional KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück, I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on a whiteboard. It felt appropriate to put the server into the center and arrange the different layers of the system around it in circles. The result was a beautiful diagram.

• Trunk already features the new KDE Power Management System, but there are some feature regressions as not everything has been implemented yet, but I can say 80-90% of what’s needed is in. Today we’re going to make the applet play nice with the daemon, and if you want to test all of this goodness, I’d really advise you to wait until tomorrow.

• Those are the main things, but many many more small ones have been done/fixed, to improve your desktop usage and not getting in your way. Hopefully I got you interested, so look forward to a vastly improved power management experience in 4.6!

GNOME Desktop

• So.. I’m actually in Europe to work! Not play. And I’ll give dedicated posts to the two events I’ll be at this month, but quickly, I’m attending the GNOME-A11y hackfest/AEGIS Conference in Sevilla, Spain. This is a solid week of work. And later in October, I’ll be headed up to Germany for the openSUSE conference.

Distributions

New Releases

• Just released version 0.6.101 of stresslinux which is based on openSUSE 11.3. Some extra package are updated as well, these include bandwidth, busybox, memtester, stressapptest and x86info.

• This release of GParted fixes a regression introduced with the previous version. The problem introduced was that when partitions were created using MiB alignment, the resulting partition was 1 MiB larger in size than requested.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Concluding: I’m not saying here – give up on Mandriva and join openSUSE. What I do want to offer is some help – we’re all Free Software communities, we care. Let’s work together a bit more!

Debian Family

• I attended the Debian Policy BoF. It inspired me to start reviewing Debian Policy and led to my submission of a bug report to improve the description of the archive areas in Debian.

• [...]

• I helped with the herculean task of getting Sage, a FOSS mathematics system, back into Debian. After discussing the issue during the Debian Science track at DebConf10, I met Lucas Nussbaum in the hacklab and he (with help from Luca Falavigna) managed to get the old buggy version of Sage removed from unstable (apparently, this version was causing support issues for the upstream Sage community, so this was a positive step forward).

• Debian’s “testing” distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the “Constantly Usable Testing” (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• This is a big thing because now 32 countries out of 44 where Android has footprint can buy paid apps. This should take away one of the biggest drawbacks that Android marketplace was facing.

• Even as Android users, most of us have become familiar with the harsh requirements of the Apple App Store. Rejected App Store applications routinely find a place in the Android Market, and Tawkon Radiation Detector is no exception.

• Google has expanded Android Market paid application support for developers to 29 countries, and boosted to 32 the number of countries where consumers can buy apps for their phones. The search giant has also replaced its Nexus One web store with Google Phone Gallery, a site where users may compare three Android handsets at a time.

• Google has released the latest figures for devices accessing the Android Market and we’re getting closer to a Froyo majority.

Tablets

• Dell’s recently tipped seven-inch Android tablet will ship in a few weeks, going head to head with the new RIM PlayBook and a rumored seven-inch version of the Apple iPad, says an industry report. Meanwhile, Dell is also readying a 10-inch Android tablet for release next year, says the story.

Free Software/Open Source

• * Yellow: Production Orientation * Pink: Marketing Orientation * Green: FOSS Community Orientation

• OpenOffice meets the needs of easily 95% of home users (and a good deal of those that use office software at work) and most of those people using an, often times illegal, version of Photoshop would be able to accomplish the exact same tasks using the legally free GIMP. Beyond this beginning Linux distros such as Linux Mint or Pinguy OS easily fulfill all the desktop computing needs of your average user.

• With all of this in mind, why don’t you see Linux, OpenOffice, or GIMP on the shelf at your local computer store? Simple:

• There is no money in it for the retailer.

• Today is international translation day! As part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), I have been writing a book on the localisation of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

Events

• In only a few years, Free Software has evolved from being a niche phenomenon into an increasingly mature mainstream movement. Despite the commonplace understanding as Free Software as one of the driving forces of tomorrow’s information technologies, the surrounding political and economic environment has often not yet kept up. As the founder and first president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as well as CEO of a Free Software enterprise, the speaker has unique insight into political and economic aspects that keep favouring proprietary technologies until the current day despite the assurances to the contrary by some. From his personal experience, Georg Greve will give some real life examples of how Free Software companies work and interact with partners and customers, and how a truly level playing field would be constructed.

Web Browsers

• That’s a sizable chunk, when you realise that total global average daily users of Firefox at the same time was about 114 million. In short, roughly 1.5 percent of total Firefox users globally are Australian. And the number is growing. As at August 2009, there were 1.6 million average Australian daily users of Firefox. That figure was much smaller — 1.2 million — in August 2008. In other words, although IE is still the dominant force, Firefox is a strong challenger, with Chrome and then Safari coming up behind.

• IBM CIO Godbee compares his company’s adoption of Firefox to the way that the similarly open source Linux operating system gained traction on servers around the world over the past several decades since it was first released.

• “Over a period of time it has been organic,” he says. “And suddenly there is it is, on a wide scale.”

Databases

• MariaDB 5.2 is almost here. The gamma release (think “RC”) was released on 28 Sep and the stable release will follow just as soon as the developers are happy with it.

Project Releases

• FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals. Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”. This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.

• When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents. This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents. It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.

• [...]

• So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption. But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem. Graphics and video are far larger.

Leftovers

• Compounding the problem is decreasing quality and quantity of original material and increasing torrents of swill from content farms, recycling the same shallow junk over and over merely to provide a framework to hang yet more ads on, and then SEO-gaming for all they’re worth. Thanks, I so love it when the first page of a Google search is link farms and content farm crapola.

• Consider supporting sites you enjoy, if they accept reader subscriptions or donations. For example, Groklaw and LWN.net serve up some of the best, most in-depth articles anywhere. Groklaw runs no ads, and LWN.net relies on subscriptions to help them keeps the ads to a minimum. As always, it comes down to the Golden Rule– the one with the gold makes the rules. Me, I don’t even want to live in a world controlled by marketers. Though I fear we are already mostly there.

Science

• They want to establish “at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation”. Um, our simplistic arithmetic shows this would be 438 Fab Labs, based on 307,006,550 residents (from July 2009) divided by 700,000. Many cities would have several Fab Labs, if this scheme works. Oh, and the population is likely to grow a tad by ten year’s time.

• For certain kinds of bacteria, we have reached the end of the line. No new antibiotics have been developed for decades, and some superbugs are now resistant to all those we have. There is no one solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance, but we desperately need new antibiotics.

• Far from helping, though, drug regulatory agencies are discouraging the development of new antibiotics, say those who met in London last week to discuss solutions to the problem of antibiotic resistance, at a conference organised by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. New Scientist finds out what is going on.

• Why are regulators coming under fire?

• They are making it ever harder and more costly to get new antibiotics approved. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came in for the most criticism.

Health/Nutrition

• Could Del Monte, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart become the deciders on stainability? In “What’s New for Dinner,” Frederick Kaufman writes about the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, an attempt by large companies to measure the environmental impact of the seed-to-shelf life cycle of any produce-based product.

• Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve–bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Ed Miliband, giving his first speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September 2010, said of civil liberties, “too often we seemed casual about them”.

• “I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty,” he said. “I want our party to reclaim that tradition.”

• As a report published yesterday by the Civitas think tank makes clear, this is a dangerous approach. The idea behind the Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed and remodelling it will make no difference. The scheme was introduced to make children safer after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002 exposed the flaws in vetting their killer Ian Huntley. Yet it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, while at the same time poisoning their relationship with adults.

• Police will soon have the means to grab someone’s genetic sample and run it through the national DNA database while waiting in the street, if early trials by military industrial giant Lockheed Martin are successful.

• A Norwich two-year-old was asked to take down the hood of his anorak when entering a city convenience store – for security reasons.

• Yesterday Norfolk County Council confirmed that the camera has never been used and as a result no tickets have been issued.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 10:10’s climate change murder video has caused much offence, but one thing nobody is questioning is their inability to control the material, or the debate.

• The instant negative reaction from most of the climate change campaign community after its release yesterday morning, prompted the video to be quickly pulled from 10:10’s own website, but it was even more quickly reposted by people wishing to continue to comment.

• Wisely, in their apology statement yesterday evening 10:10 said they are not going to try to control how people use the video now it is in the wild, for instance via copyright take-downs.

Finance

• Beijing offered to buy Greek debt on Saturday (2 October) and pledged to support a stable euro and not reduce its holdings of European government bonds in an effort to deflect criticism of its foreign exchange policy ahead of an EU-China summit this week.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. Also, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.

• Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.

• The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.

• “It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”

ACTA

• The spokesperson for the Trade European Commissioner has announced Saturday October 2nd, that all parties have reached an agreement on ACTA. This is one more example of how the secrecy of this negotiation permits all manoeuvres to deceive citizens and Members of Parliaments. La Quadrature du Net calls all European citizens to alert their MEPs and National MPs about the need to monitor closely the rest of this negotiation and prepare to reject its by-product.

Digital Economy (UK)

• We have highlighted the problems with the Ofcom filesharing code, most importantly that the code does not comply with the Digital Economy Act.

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