● 10.24.10

● Links 24/10/2010: Fedora is Fast, Compiz 0.9.2

Posted in News Roundup at 9:58 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For those of you who are Linux cognoscente, yes, I know technically Linux is just a kernel. But these days Linux is also a marketing term that means an entire operating system with graphical user interface based on the Linux kernel and distributed under some other name. In marketing it is necessary to have short, easy to remember and catchy names for a product. Even for a “free” product with liberating license terms. In this case “Linux” has become that catchy name. I have chosen to live with that. You do not like the idea of “marketing Linux”? Then this article is not for you.

• Windows 7 Total: 1 minute, 55 seconds (115 seconds). And 1 minute, 52 seconds (112 seconds).

• Linux (Fedora 13) Total: 48 seconds, and 44 seconds.

• # Free Software is software that everybody, including schools and businesses, can legally install, modify, copy and redistribute without any license cost or complicated paperwork. Did you know this? # Lots of Free Software programs useful at home, school or in the office also run on Windows, therefore you can try it without giving up your other computer habits and preferences. The most popular examples include OpenOffice (a free alternative to Microsoft Office), the Firefox Internet browser and the Gimp image editing program. Have you ever tried any of them? # Gnu/Linux, instead, is a complete, Free as in Freedom operating system. It is an alternative to Windows. It can run thousands of software programs, from games to business or educational applications. All equally Free as in Freedom. Many of these programs are already used by NASA and lots of great corporations and Public Administrations worldwide. Did you ever try any version of Gnu/Linux?

Audiocasts/Shows

• rsnapshot is an open-source backup and recovery tool based on Mike Rubel’s original concept.

• A SPECIAL EDITION Netcast showing how to install Ubuntu – Netbook Edition 10.10! Dr. Bill uses VMware Workstation 7.1 to allow us to install Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition – and uses BB Flashback Express to record the process for the Netcast. BE SURE TO STAY TUNED for our REGULAR Netcast, which will be released tomorrow!

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• X.Org Server 1.9.1 was released yesterday, which led us to wonder about the status of the X.Org 7.6 katamari that was supposed to come at around the same time as this first stable point release. We hadn’t heard anything about the X.Org 7.6 release schedule in weeks and before that the target to ship this grouped collection of X packages was mid-October, which has clearly passed.

Applications

• Sam Spilsbury has just announced the release of Compiz 0.9.2 as the successor to Compiz 0.9.0, which was released in July of this year. We knew that Compiz 0.9.2 was on the way and that it would offer many improvements from new animations to plug-ins that would make you feel as though you are drunk or tripping by simulating hallucinogenic effects. Yes, really, but at least there’s also useful changes like plug-ins for loading GLSL shaders for windows and GLSL shaders to be applied to an entire screen through an OpenGL Frame Buffer-Object.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Crossover Games is available for $39.95 US; there’s also a 7 day trial available.

• A new patch has been released for Steel Storm Episode 1 that comes with better gamepad support, new difficulty selector (arcade and classic), new camera modes, improved display of scores, in-game messages and chat text and some new sounds among many other fixes. You can find complete changelog here

• MMORPG space combat game ‘Vendetta Online‘ is coming to the Ubuntu software Centre.

• The game, which uses a subscription-based model for funding, sees users to take on the role of spaceship pilots who are able to fly around the in-game universe battling, trading and interacting with potentially thousands of other players online at the same time.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest: Start of KOffice UI Abstraction project, to enable implementing various UIs on top of KOffice without in-depth knowledge of KOffice MVC APIs. Support for picture bullets in the .docx format filter in KOffice. “Reply Without Quoting” in KMail (kdepim/mobile).

• For the past couple of weeks I have been working on a very cool project, one started and lead by one of our brilliant KDE hackers-that-came-from-GSoC, George Kiagiadakis (gkiagia). I remember that the project got my attention when it was first announced. But I was very busy at that time, and could only follow it from a distance, until now.

• As the title of this post reveals, I am talking about QtGStreamer, the Qt-style bindings for the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Distributions

• To round out the week I installed the newly released Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Like the other posts I have made I will walk you through my first impressions as well as the general overall feel of the distribution.

• Before I get to the review, I want to say that while I tested Pardus 2009.2 on my old computer in VirtualBox with 448 MB of RAM, I have tested Pardus 2011 Beta on my new laptop in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM, so it isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Please keep this as well as the fact that I’m previewing a beta release in mind for the rest of this post.

• Overall impression? “It just works” Thanks for watching!

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• MeeGO is a project supported by Intel, so I expect that the target platform will be embedded Atom. The latest stable ARM port is F12, F13 is in progress and the porting of F14 has not started yet. The guys working on it do a really good job, however it is still the secondary architecture, it means limited resources and testing. Debian based ARM ports are ways ahead in this sense.

• The Fedora 13 kernel update that held so much promise a day ago has sapped my already sluggish video performance (or maybe I just didn’t notice how bad things were with the proprietary fglrx driver) and didn’t deliver its advertised suspend/NetworkManager fix.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s the start of a new week so why not give your drab desktop a dust-down? One of these utterly divine 3D rendered wallpapers, created and sent to us by ‘insospettato’, should certainly do the trick.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• How could one possibly go wrong with a combination of the Linux kernel, Debian and Gnome resulting in Maemo ?

• Nokia announced that it is ( finally) going to release its first MeeGo based device somewhere around 2011.

• Good news that they are finally ditching their Symbian based phones.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Infrastructure and Communications Minister Austin Gatt launched what he called a Vision document yesterday, addressing open source software in government. “We would like to receive feedback from the public and private sectors, as well as citizens on this document which is up for consultation,” he said.

• The government’s position with respect to open source software is different from the position adopted for open standards, where they required that government procures ICT solutions that comply with open standards.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla says the JavaScript performance of Firefox has now officially surpassed both the Webkit developer build as well as Chrome.

Oracle

• Of course there will always be the spin doctors at Microsoft that are able to make people think that they emanate some sort of heavenly glow. But most techies actually know better then that. If you don’t believe me just notice that in the you tube video they had to turn comments off. Also notice that the video has 236 likes and 2,439 dislikes. Hmm that’s what we call backlash people because guess what opensource and Free Software people pay attention. We are not just going to stand by in idle while you just harass us and defame our community. Even if our only defense is to post nasty comments and to dislike your you tube video a million times.

• this e-mail is to inform you that I hereby, effective immediately, fully step back from all my roles and duties within the OpenOffice.org project, including those as marketing project lead and German marketing contact.

CMS

• Our last Drupal 7 beta version was released about a month ago. Today, we’re proud to announce the release of the second (and possibly final!) beta version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we’ll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you’ve grown to love!

• The Ruby and Rails ecosystems are built on open source, and on contributions to projects from people like you. Contributing back to the projects you use is good for your resume, your network, and is ultimately what keeps us employed!

• But figuring out where to start can be daunting, so at this meetup we’ll take you through the complete process. We’ll start with finding a project you’re interested in, then walk you through the mechanics of making changes and contributing them back. By the end of the workshop you’ll be an official open source contributor.

• We’ll be using Diaspora, an open-source alternative to facebook, as our project. Several of the Diaspora core team will be around to assist, and to merge your changes back in to the main codebase…as you watch. It’ll definitely be better than Cats.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Last year one of the many projects introduced by Google was the Go programming language. Do you remember? It’s reached a state of being a production-ready language, at least within Google’s confines, but this project hasn’t received as much attention and interest by the Linux and open-source communities as some of their other work such as VP8 and their new container format. It’s possible that this could change once the Go programming language is accessible to more developers, which may very well come with GCC 4.6.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The European Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive is intended to make it easier for everyone to find and reuse information produced by public bodies. The European Commission’s recognition of the value of PSI dates back to at least the late 1990s, well before the more recent wave of interest in open government data. The EC is currently asking for feedback on what could be done to improve the Directive, so if you care about PSI in Europe now is your chance to have your say!

• The spending review, announced this week, promises £81 billion worth of cuts over the next four years. Whilst services face the deepest cutbacks in generations, billions of pounds a year will still need to be found to finance our PFi commitments. Amidst all the talk from government ministers of “efficiency” savings, there has been almost no mention of PFI and its legacy on the public purse.

Open Hardware

• MAKE subscriber James wrote in to share the Hackvision, an open-source video game system based around the Arduino platform. The joypad-shaped circuit board plugs directly into your TV, and provides everything you need to get hacking on your own games. The whole project is open source, and all the source code/schematics/board designs are available at the project website.

Programming

• The Perl Foundation and the Parrot Foundation took part in Google Summer of Code this year, and as the organization administrator, I am very proud of and humbled by all the students and mentors that I worked with. I am constantly reminded that there are very intelligent developers who are very young, and the Perl and Parrot Foundations are very lucky to attract them and have them in our communities. I firmly believe that the passing Google Summer of Code 2010 projects have had a large positive impact on our codebases and many people will benefit from them for years to come.

Leftovers

Science

• This is a slide of lung taste receptors through a microscope. Red bands are receptors, blue dots are nuclei. Credit: University of Maryland School of Medicine

• Taste receptors in the lungs? Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have discovered that bitter taste receptors are not just located in the mouth but also in human lungs. What they learned about the role of the receptors could revolutionize the treatment of asthma and other obstructive lung diseases.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• When Russian troops gradually withdrew from Georgia’s towns and villages in September 2008 following the short war between Georgia and Russia the previous month over the enclave of South Ossetia, attention turned to the potential consequences of the war for the career of Georgia’s unpredictable president Mikheil Saakashvili. Many analysts believed that after what proved to be a humiliating military conflict was over, the Georgia’s people would turn against Saakashvili and drive him from power.

• The Chinese government has attempted to block a United Nations report which claims that Chinese bullets were used in attacks on UN peacekeepers in Darfur. A spokesman from the Chinese foreign ministry, Ma Zhaoxu, said the report was “based on unconfirmed information and made irresponsible accusations.” The report, researched and written by the UN’s panel of experts on Sudan was discussed in the UN committee that monitors sanctions on Sudan on Wednesday.

• Alex Hundert, an accused G20 violence ringleader, has been arrested — again.

• This is the third time the 30-year-old activist has been arrested in the past five months. The Crown has been appealing to have his bail revoked.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, is expected to announce plans within days to dispose of about half of the 748,000 hectares of woodland overseen by the Forestry Commission by 2020.

• The controversial decision will pave the way for a huge expansion in the number of Center Parcs-style holiday villages, golf courses, adventure sites and commercial logging operations throughout Britain as land is sold to private companies.

• Many of England’s best-loved forests and woodlands may be sold to large landowners, housing developers and international power companies in what could be the UK’s greatest change of land ownership since the second world war.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Theft implies loss; and for loss to occur (whatever the circumstances) there has to be a change in stasis from “having” something to “not having” it. Copying something creates an identical duplicate of something, it does not change the stasis of the original. So let’s work through possible angles to explain “loss”.

• Lost stock? “Copyright infringement is stealing, it’s no different from leaving a store with a physical piece of stock that you haven’t paid for.” Wrong, if you have 10 items of stock and 2 are shoplifted, you’re left with 8 items of stock. This is theft. You’ve lost stock. Instead of being able to sell 10 items, you can now only sell 8. That stock cost you £X per item, you’ve lost £X x 2.

• The dramatic appearance of the WikiLeaks Iraq war log documents is about far more than the catastrophic (for the US military) release online of classified material.

• It underscores the new reality that the Powers That Used To Be have lost their ability to tightly control the spread of news and information.

• Now comes news that the family of late country singer Keith Whitley is doing the same. The suit filed by Whitley’s widow and children against Sony Music Entertainment alleges that SME failed to pay certain bonus royalties when Whitley’s album reached various sales thresholds. The suit also claims that SME failed to pay the increased royalty rate for downloads that allegedly should have been considered licensed transactions.

• Something strange has happened to pop music since I began reviewing it in the late 1990s. In the past, how you listened to music played second fiddle to what it sounded like. Only finger-sniffing audiophiles cared whether you listened to Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991 on vinyl, cassette or CD. To everyone else the point was the album itself.

• No longer. Nowadays the format of music, the way it’s sold or listened to, overshadows everything else. MP3 players, internet streaming services, MySpace, mobile phones: music is everywhere. Good news for listeners but perplexing for record companies, who are seeing revenues from recorded music dry up as the old ways of doing business crumble.

• We’re proud and pleased to let you know that from today, February 16th, 2010, we’re rolling out Creative Commons licenses on some of our proprietary content.

ACTA

• The European Commission has made the first public admission that the Telecoms Package is part of the legal framework for IP enforcement. What does it mean for ACTA?

• The European Commission has made the first public admission that the Telecoms Package is part of the legal framework for IP enforcement. What does it mean for ACTA?

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