● 10.11.10

● Links 11/10/2010: New Ubuntu Reviews, MySQL Up-selling

Posted in News Roundup at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you use anything but Linux and the associated applications, you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’. The few Windows machines we have put out resulted in virus and malware calls within a week of delivery. We have made a new custom distro derived from Ubuntu 10.04 using a great program called UCK.

• Dave Richards wrote that IT maintenance costs were seriously lower using GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. He published numbers. I think he understated the advantages of GNU/Linux. In my own work I have seen schools increase five-fold the number of seats going to GNU/Linux with a decrease in man-hours spent on maintenance. Here the last two XP machines cost as many man-hours as the seventy-five GNU/Linux boxes. The reason? Nothing seems to keep working on them, not even the anti-malware or automatic updates.

Server

• FreeBSD did very well as usual and so did GNU/Linux, 27 in the top 42, and six in the top ten.

Audiocasts/Shows

Ballnux

• Buy the £600 gadget from now until the end of November and Samsung will give a tenner to charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Applications

• I reached the conclusion that there should have been a better way to use my PC and I looked for a solution that would allow to access both Linux and Windows applications without rebooting.

• I investigated some of the available products. I found that the wine or CodeWeavers Crossover supported most common Windows applications, but some other ones would not work. VMWare looked interesting, but I preferred to use until recently Win4Lin (originally developed by Netraverse to support only Windows 95, 98 or ME and later upgraded by Virtual Bridges to support also Windows 2000 and Windows XP) but this product is no longer upgraded and supported,

• I am a certified Quickbooks technician. And, to be perfectly honest, Quickbooks stinks. When it works it’s great…but when it doesn’t work, it’s a NIGHTMARE! It’s terribly sensitive to network hiccups, it isn’t smart enough to switch itself out of single user mode after a scheduled backup, it’s slow, it constantly can not find data files, it’s expensive…the list goes on and on. And I hear these complaints nearly every day. Along with those complaints comes the question: “Do you know of an alternative?” The answer to that question is always, unfortunately, “No”.

• To ensure the continuous development of the popular monitoring software Nagios, a group of active, long standing Nagios community supporters have decided to fork Nagios and open its development to a broader base. Unfortunately this had to be done under a new name: Icinga.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• The Wine maintenance release 1.2.1 is now available.

Games

• When it comes to Mega Drive emulators that run on Ubuntu, Gens/GS rocks. Gens/GS is a fork of the well known Gens emulator, and over the last several months the author has been cleaning up the source code and adding new features and bug fixes to create an awesome (open source!) emulator.

• We have just received an email from John Diamond, the lead developer of the open-source Alien Arena game, that the Alien Arena 2011 release will be coming this Fall (in North American terms) and we have been told some of the features to be found in this new version.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The last few days i decided to start refreshing the mime types of oxygen… started with the large ones that were looking really old by now.

Distributions

Reviews

• I’m left with a very positive impression of Sabayon Linux 5.4. This distro is not as well known as some others, but it really does deserve to be considered by those looking for a more offbeat alternative for their desktop needs. It also puts Gentoo into more people’s hands, and makes it pretty easy to install and manage.

• I’ll be concentrating on my experiences of setting up eyeOS 1.9 rather than the 2.x version that was launched earlier this year. I tried eyeOS 2.x on a couple of different set ups, but I kept running into the serious performance problems that are widely reported on the eyeOS forum by other people who have tried it. The 1.x series also has the advantage of having been considered stable for more than two years.

New Releases

• We the ZevenOS Team are proud to announce the release of ZevenOS-Neptune 1.9.

• ZevenOS-Neptune is a ZevenOS Distro based fully upon Debian Squeeze, except for a newer kernel and some drivers. In this Version we aimed for creating a fast running Live System for USB Sticks. Therefore we developed an easy to use USB Installer aswell as a Persistent Creator that allows you to store changes to your system on your usb stick. The Debian software repositories are updating the included software regulary so that you will have a long supported distro.

Debian Family

• Each review done individually would be rather short, so I’m combining reviews of these two DEs into one post. It shouldn’t turn out to be too long. The other thing is that I didn’t test the installation procedure in either because I suspect it’s the exact same as in GNOME and KDE (and because this current virtual hard drive is messed up GRUB-wise). LXDE seems to be the new hot thing; to cater to users who need a lightweight distribution either out of necessity (older hardware, need to allocate as much memory as possible to applications without giving up a usable DE) or out of preference, pretty much every major distribution has begun to offer an LXDE edition. It’s user-friendly but light on resources; it’s well-built yet very modular. It just seems like the place to be.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” been released and many people will be eager to grab a copy and install it or upgrade from previous versions of Ubuntu. There are lots of things that you can do that includes customizing and optimizing it to the degree that it is just perfect for your needs.

• From the install screen to a fully loaded desktop, Ubuntu 10.10 looks nicer and is easier to use than its predecessors. We’ll take a look at our favorite new features in Ubuntu’s newest version, appropriately released on 10/10/10.

• Today, as you will all know, Ubuntu 10.10 is released! You will likely to see many reviews posted all over the net – all saying how great Maverick is, the nice new wallpaper and theme, the fancy new font, and the addition of Shotwell among other things. You are likely to have discovered all this already, so this review is slightly different.

• If you’re currently using Windows, you might want to give the open source, flexible, faster and more secure Ubuntu Linux a try (esp. their Netbook edition, specially customized for smaller screens). You don’t need to wipe over your Windows installation or anything. Instead, you can simply set up a “dual boot” system where you have the option to boot into either Windows or Ubuntu on startup.

• A somewhat more civilized and sensible event follows on Tuesday 12th at Fossbox in London, mainly aimed at charities and the voluntary sector, introducing attendees to the Ubuntu desktop.

• For the most part the Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” performance is not hugely different from that of recent Ubuntu Linux releases. However, there are a few areas worth noting, such as with the network performance improving but the disk / EXT4 performance again regressing in a couple areas. The graphics results also continue to be interesting as the open-source drivers mature. Stay tuned for more Ubuntu 10.10 benchmarks across a greater spectrum of hardware.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 10 KDE is now under development as Kubuntu 10.10 is about to be released. So now the question goes out to the community, what do you want added, removed or swapped from Mint 9 KDE to Mint 10 KDE?

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Most of the smart-phones I have seen are not that cheap. People pay up to $1000 for a recent model with good performance/features. That could be changing. MediaTek, an outfit in Taiwan, has been making ARMed devices for a few years and selling them at rock-bottom prices, of the order of $100. One of them caught my eye and upon investigation I found that it had that other OS + Java.

Android

• Following months of teasers, Logitech finally launched its Google TV player today at simultaneous press events in New York and San Francisco. The company’s Google TV family includes the Android-based “Review” STB (set-top box), large and mini remote controls, free iPhone and Android remote control apps, and a video cam.

• Connected TV isn’t a new concept anymore, but it’s about to get way more interesting, courtesy of Google TV. WebProNews was there for the unveiling of the product at Google I/O back in May, and having seen it in person, I can tell you it’s pretty cool.

• Love it or hate it, a huge number of people are more familiar with PayPal than with any other online payment system. And so the Android Market may soon seem more much accessible to them, as a new rumor indicates Google is about to reach a payment-related agreement with eBay.

Tablets

• First Next, now Dixons. The retaill group’s PC World and Currys stores will next month begin selling – yes, you’ve guessed it – an own-brand 7in Android tablet for the low, low price of £130.

• Nicholas Negroponte walked into the Starbucks holding some sort of thin, tablet-like computer. I couldn’t tell what model, because it was zipped inside a carrying case—but I was hoping for a prototype of the XO 3, the next-generation tablet Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Foundation wants to create for children in the developing world for something like $75 per machine.

Free Software/Open Source

• For many blind people, computers are inaccessible. It can cost upwards of $1000 to purchase “screen reader” software, but two blind computer programmers have solved this problem.

• Now THAT’s a genome. A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome—and the largest genome ever found.

• The downturn in the US economy has benefitted Queensland open source company Jentla to the extent that it has had to double its staff numbers to meet demand.

• [...]

• As a result of the demand, Jentla has taken on 20 new staff in the last quarter. The company has offices in Brisbane, its headquarters, Chennai (India) and in Romania. Most of the staff have been recruited in Chennai, at the company’s Tamil Nadu research and development office.

Events

• This year I have been invited to present the first results of my research about Open public data at the 2010 Open World Forum. Due to the subject of my talk, I was also invited by Glyn Moody to a panel on Open Democracy (see Glyn’s comments on that panel at CWUK).

• I have to confess that I went to the Open World Forum expecting to find some pompous, self-referential, corporate driven marketing show. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and this is what I’ll try to show here. The pounding, rave-style music at the beginning of each session was really depressing. A few talks by some politicians were not among the highest moments of the Forum (Glyn already explained why and I agree with him). This said, the Forum agenda was quite balanced and diverse. Personally I found it an interesting, useful event, one I would have been glad to attend even if I had not had to present my work. The Forum explored many sides of openness, not just the commercial one of Open Source software. Here are just a couple of examples.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Double-clicking (and double tapping) is one of the preferred mouse (or touch pad) actions for me. It’s quick and easy and helps to get things done faster. Sadly, double-clicking is really under-utilized in Firefox.

• The only thing you can do by double-clicking in Firefox is highlighting the word right next to the cursor. Besides that (which is a less-known behavior), if you double-click the 2-3 pixel wide bar just beneath tabs, it opens a new empty tab in the foreground.

• The Firefox 4 Android beta is morbidly obese. But Mozilla has a diet plan.

• Over the past twelve hours, after Mozilla released its first Firefox 4 beta for Android, multiple Reg readers have said the browser takes up far too much space on their Googly phones. “Fooking HUGE!!!” said one. “Not even going to waste my time with the beta.”

• As Mozilla announced this morning with a blog post, the latest English-language version of Mozilla’s open source browser — due for release in November — will retain Google as the default search engine. But for the first time, Bing will be listed in the pull-down that lets you change the default. Google will be first on the menu. Yahoo! — now powered by Bing — will be second. And Bing will be third.

Oracle

• Oracle is pressuring customers to pay more for enterprise support for MySQL. Those who may make tons of money from servers may feel comfortable with this but this could be a (another) fork in the road for MySQL. To what extent will the features Oracle is plugging in be available in the Free Software versions available to distros? So far, most of the differences are in clustering, management and support which do not affect many users of MySQL as a simple server.

BSD

• People tend to talk about Linux and BSD in the same breath, but a number of telling differences set them apart, says Jack Wallen.

• I hear it all the time: people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs. On occasion, I’ve even done it myself. Of course, there are plenty of similarities. Both are based on Unix and have mostly been developed by non-commercial organisations. They also share a common goal — to create the most useful, reliable operating system available. But there are also significant differences that shouldn’t be ignored, and I thought it would be worth highlighting them here.

Licensing

• Last week, the hottest new Android-based phone arrived on the doorstep of thousands of expectant T-Mobile customers. What didn’t arrive with the G2 was the source code that runs the heart of the device — a customized Linux kernel. Android has been hailed as an open platform in the midst of other highly locked-down systems, but as it makes its way out of the Google source repository and into devices this vision has repeatedly hit speedbumps. Last year, I blogged about one such issue, and to their credit Google sorted out a solution. This has ultimately been to everyone’s benefit, because the modified versions of the OS have routinely enabled software applications that the stock versions haven’t supported (not to mention improved reliability and speed).

Standards/Consortia

• DB2 pureXML is IBM software for management of XML data that eliminates much of the work typically involved in the management of XML data.The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an open international standard for office texts, presentations and spreadsheets that is very simple to process or generate automatically. This page is a short synthesis of an article published in September 2010 by N. Subrahmanyam, Using DB2 pureXML and ODF Spreadsheets, to give an idea (see my comments at the end) of how flexible ODF scripting is. Please read the original full article to know how to actually generate ODF documents from DB2 pureXML files.

Leftovers

• Maybe Larry Ellison’s killing of Opteron-based servers from Oracle’s Sun Fire x64 server lineup earlier this year was a love touch instead of a bitchslap for Advanced Micro Devices?

• Oracle’s Larry Ellison isn’t the only CEO mouthing off at Hewlett-Packard’s decision to hire Leo Apotheker as the company’s replacement for disgraced former boss Mark Hurd. Now Jack Welch, the ex-chief of General Electric, is sticking the boot in, too.

• Companies have cut salaries and training, held back on bonuses and piled more work on employees in response to the economic downturn. These tactics may well be pushing many IT professionals to go job hunting, according to Computerworld’s latest salary poll.

• The complaint was filed on 6 September by Christopher Soghoian, a former technologist at the FTC’s division of privacy and identity protection. Soghoian has decided to take on Google after leaving the agency that should have done it anyway by issuing a complaint alleging that the search engine and advertising outfit shares data with third parties.

• A day after Google debuted its new Google TV website, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,806,329 to the search giant for its Targeted Video Advertising invention. Among other things, the patent proposes having viewers take 5-10 minutes to ‘fill out a consumer survey and perhaps to provide additional information such as a mailing address survey before starting the program’ to avoid having to watch 10 minutes of commercials. ‘As another alternative,’ the patent continues, ‘the broadcaster may offer the users an option to pay $2 (such as through a micro-payment system, such as GBuy) to exchange for skipping all commercials.’

Science

• What do you do when a 15-year-old boy is close to death and ineligible for a heart transplant? If you’re Dr Antonio Amodeo you turn to an artificial solution and transplant a robotic heart giving the boy another 20-25 years of life.

• The Italian boy in question suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy which rapidly degenerates the muscles and eventually leads to death. Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant meaning almost certain death without an alternative solution.

• The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has, quite literally, changed our view of the Universe. And after nine years of mapping the slight temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, its job is done and NASA has commanded the probe to fire itself into a “graveyard orbit” around the sun.

• Launched in 2001, this ground-breaking spacecraft set out to unravel some of the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology. How old is the Universe? What happened when the Universe was born?

• Wednesday, October 6, 2010, saw the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announce the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: It went to three scientists for their work in synthesizing complex carbon molecules; specifically, “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”.

Security

• The action comes as authorities in Ukraine, the US, and UK last week rounded up dozens of people suspected of participating in bank fraud related to Zeus, a prolific computer trojan that specializes in stealing banking credentials of its victims.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Speaking as an American who lives in Europe, I feel it is incumbent upon me to describe what people like me do when we hear warnings like the one issued on Sunday by the U.S. State Department and cited above: We do nothing.

• A FORMER US SPOOK wants all countries in the world to agree to do what America says or be banned from the Internet.

• It is not clear how much the views of the former chief technology officer at the US National Security Agency Dr Prescott Winter reflect those of his mates who still work there.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Solar panels will be installed on the White House roof a quarter of a century after they were removed by Ronald Reagan, the Obama administration said today.

• A mix of solar thermal and photovoltaic panels will be fitted in spring 2011 to generate hot water and renewable electricity, said Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and energy secretary Steven Chu at a conference on how federal government can green up.

• ISSF member companies account over 70% of the world’s tuna. The power to shift fishing practices on the water is well and truly in their hands, so Greenpeace challenges them to flex their considerable muscle to create positive change. If ISSF is genuinely concerned about transshipment and its role in overfishing and illegal fishing, then it should adopt conservation measures to oblige every one of its members to simply stop buying tuna from fishing companies that engage in tuna transshipment.

• We’ve discussed before on Nuclear Reaction the nuclear industry’s attempts to greenwash nuclear power by rebranding it ‘clean’. It’s a description of this most contaminating of energy sources that nuclear boosters are pushing more and more in the debate about the future of nuclear power.

• Another term we’re starting to see more and more of is ‘emission free’, as in ‘nuclear power is an emission free energy source’. Take a look at this infographic where the Nuclear Energy Institute (‘the policy organization for the nuclear technologies industry’) portrays nuclear power as such. Even institutions like the BBC have bought the industry spin.

• Tcktcktck’s Paul Horsman delivers a traditional Chinese stamp to UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres to mark the wall in support of collective action against climate change.

Finance

• The market structure of the rates of foreign currencies has been thrown into question. China has become more active in the eurozone as a result of the economic conflict with the USA. The Chinese dragon starts to determine quotations on world’s basic currencies, such as the euro and the US dollar. Premier Wen Jiabao of China stated during the meeting with the head of the Greek government George Papandreou that China had purchased long-term bonds, issued by Greece to cover its sovereign debt. Beijing, the Chinese official said, was determined to continue purchasing the bonds if Athens needed new loans to settle its huge budget deficit. Several days before that, the lower house of the US Congress approved the bill targeted against the lowered rate of the Chinese currency vs. the US dollar.

• A computer contractor has been convicted of planting a logic bomb on the servers of Fannie Mae, the financially troubled US housing and mortgage giant.

• Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, 36, responded to the termination of his two-year-long spell as a software development contractor at Fannie Mae in October 2008 by planting a malicious script designed to wipe all the data from its network on 31 January 2009. Anyone attempting to access data on the system after the logic bomb went off would have received the message “Server Graveyard”.

• The jobs crisis has brought an unwelcome discovery for many unemployed Americans: Job openings in their old fields exist. Yet they no longer qualify for them.

• They’re running into a trend that took root during the recession. Companies became more productive by doing more with fewer workers. Some asked staffers to take on a broader array of duties – duties that used to be spread among multiple jobs. Now, someone who hopes to get those jobs must meet the new requirements.

• A top White House adviser questioned the need Sunday for a blanket stoppage of all home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about mounting evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners.

• International bank regulators are planning a fresh wave of rules for the world’s most important financial companies in an effort to ensure that firms considered “too big to fail” are better protected from collapse – and that taxpayers are insulated from the fallout if they do.

• As if voters don’t have enough to be angry about this election year, the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an increase in their monthly benefits.

• It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.

• A top White House adviser questioned the need on Sunday for a blanket halt to home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about growing evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners.

• Karl Case, the co-creator of a widely watched housing market index, was upbeat three weeks ago. Mulling the economy while at a meeting at a resort near the Berkshires, Case thought the makings of a recovery were finally falling into place.

• “I’m a 60-40 optimist,” he said at the time.

• Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, “as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil.” Gensler said he was sorry — hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• An Akamai accounts worker has been arrested for alleged wire fraud. This follows a sting operation during which the man was led to believe he was handing over confidential information to an agent of a unnamed foreign power.

• We found a vulnerability in the way the system processes uploaded ballots. We confirmed the problem using our own test installation of the web application, and found that we could gain the same access privileges as the server application program itself, including read and write access to the encrypted ballots and database.

• The problem, which geeks classify as a “shell-injection vulnerability,” has to do with the ballot upload procedure. When a voter follows the instructions and uploads a completed ballot as a PDF file, the server saves it as a temporary file and encrypts it using a command-line tool called GnuPG. Internally, the server executes the command gpg with the name of this temporary file as a parameter: gpg […] /tmp/stream,28957,0.pdf.

• We realized that although the server replaces the filename with an automatically generated name (“stream,28957,0” in this example), it keeps whatever file extension the voter provided. Instead of a file ending in “.pdf,” we could upload a file with a name that ended in almost any string we wanted, and this string would become part of the command the server executed. By formatting the string in a particular way, we could cause the server to execute commands on our behalf. For example, the filename “ballot.$(sleep 10)pdf” would cause the server to pause for ten seconds (executing the “sleep 10” command) before responding. In effect, this vulnerability allowed us to remotely log in to the server as a privileged user.

• An internet voting system designed to allow District of Columbia residents to cast absentee ballots has been put on hold after computer scientists exploited vulnerabilities that would have allowed them to rig elections and view secret data.

• The system, which was paid for in part by a $300,000 federal grant, was hijacked just 36 hours after Washington DC elections officials began testing it ahead of live elections scheduled for next month. Scientists from the University of Michigan pulled off the hack to demonstrate the inherent insecurity of net-based voting.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

• On Friday, Michael Geist broke the story that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had apparently banned use of CC-licensed music in its podcasts. This seemed odd, given that the CBC’s Spark podcast has long used, promoted, and done interesting projects with CC-licensed music.

• Four of the world’s largest record companies have failed in an attempt to get the “three strikes” rule enforced against illegal filesharers in Ireland.

• Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI brought the case against UPC, one of Ireland’s largest broadband providers, in order to establish a legal precedent that would force internet service providers to cut off illegal filesharers’ internet connections.

ACTA

• But apparently those behind ACTA thought that they might have been able to get China on board. The fact that they have not has stymied ACTA negotiations, according to people familiar with the situation.

• “Critics say the omission of China from the list – the main source of the world’s counterfeit goods – makes the deal almost worthless, an argument strong refuted by the EU”, reports the EU Observer website.

Clip of the DayAndrew Tanenbaum @ FOSDEM 2010: MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating SystemCredit: TinyOgg Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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