● 11.16.10

● Links 16/11/2010: Debian 6.0 is Coming, OpenRespect.org Criticised

Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• In a previous article on Linux-Window desktop competition, I shared my thoughts on why desktop Linux shouldn’t focus on competing with Windows. Not because Linux can’t compete, but because Linux can stand its ground on its own merits without being held against Windows for comparison. I believe most groups within the Linux community can agree on, despite their differences on other issues.

• Now let’s ask a bigger question. Is it not possible that the real culprit that prevents people from trying new platforms like Linux is actually due to legacy software and familiarity with the Windows desktop? Seems plausible that the above hurdles could be a common challenge faced by prospective Linux adopters, does it not?

Applications

Proprietary

• One hundred and thirteen is quite a few considering that the version that is gold, Opera 10.63, cannot do one thing with them. But the people who love Opera are a crafty bunch, and some of the better ideas that have found their way into Chrome and Iron are finding their way into Opera. This makes the browser do much, more easily than could be done before, and hopefully will bring hoards of new users into the fold.

Instructionals/Technical

• As most of you are probably aware, HAL is dead. So let us all cry out: HAL is dead, long live… what, exactly?

Wine

• After installation is done. Run this game by clicking. Start Menu -> Wine -> Programs -> Gametop.com -> Madtruckers -> Madtruckers.

Games

• Vega Strike is a 3-D space simulation game that lets you trade, fight, and explore in a vast universe. Both the Vega Strike game engine and Vega Strike Universe game data set are in a playable state, but still under development.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is urging system administrators to up their skill sets with a new base-level certification aligned to the key tasks required of Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administrators.

Fedora

• I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14. The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot. Everything went off without a hitch. My absolute cleanest upgrade ever. Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled. None of the repos had to be disabled. All my usual programs work. I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow. The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again. This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.

• As far as Linux is concerned, there are distributions that are ready for the masses (Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Linux Minut) and there are distributions whose appeal doesn’t go much further than a niche of users. Fedora Linux, however, is a distribution that seems to want to vacillate between target audiences. At one point Fedora wants to reach out to a massive scope of users. At the next point Fedora seems to focus on a far, far smaller audience. And it seems this vacillation happens just about every release.

Debian Family

• Neil McGovern, Debian release team member, wrote to the Debian Development Announce mailing list, “It’s time for another release update as we move, like a glacier, inevitably and unstoppingly towards the release.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• One of the best things that anyone ever said was, “not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap”. Mr Glass was probably talking about writing, but his words could well have been aimed squarely at any well-established software development process.

• I’ve recorded a new screencast introducing Ubuntu 10.10. This video gives beginner Ubuntu users a brief tour of the operating system, and covers installing updates, proprietary drivers, customizing appearance, and installing software via the Ubuntu Software Center as well as with downloaded *.deb files, all in less than 10 minutes. Enjoy!

• In today’s climate, when spinmeisters are trying to gain ascendancy in the FOSS world and are succeeding to a large extent, Torvalds’ comments would not go down well. The man was clearly not showing respect – which, as Stephen Colbert would say, is today’s word.

• But the topic of respect is raised only when it suits people to do so. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution has been under siege recently, for its decisions to adopt a new interface and also a new X server. Some of the criticism has been rather, shall we say, pointed and direct.

• Now suddenly, Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager – the spinmeister-in-chief – has come up with an initiative to try and create respect within the FOSS community. Why? Well, Bacon feels that all the aggressiveness in the community is not of much help in what the community is trying to do.

• With every cycle, part of my responsibility is to understand the needs of the Ubuntu community, understand the needs of some of the key stakeholders to my team, and to plan what the team will work on throughout the next cycle. Recently I have been asking the team (Jorge Castro, Daniel Holbach, David Planella, and Ahmed Kamal) to reach out to the community to get a feel of needs, and flesh out their goals in a set of blueprints. I then reviewed and accepted a set of blueprints ready for the cycle. I think this is a good, solid chunk of work and will make some inroads into some key areas.

Flavours and Variants

• Summary: Linux Mint 10 adds some helpful tweaks and improvements to an already great distro.

• Rating: 5/5

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source multimedia software clearly has remarkable growth potential. Statistics reveal that multimedia grabs a huge percentage of the time most users spend with their PCs and smartphones. Hulu has 30 million viewers a month. Netflix now accounts for 20 percent of U.S. Internet traffic in the evening. According to NPD Group, 30 percent of U.S. music consumers listened to streamed music in August. As of June, consumers had downloaded more than 5 billion songs from iTunes, and they watch 50,000 movies through the service every day.

• Whether your small business has been around for years or you’re just starting out, it simply makes good sense to use open source software for everything from managing your office network to putting together slide decks for your next client presentation. Open source software is inexpensive (and often free!), secure, and easy to customize to the unique needs of your company. Unlike many commercial applications on the market today, you can even find in-depth, no-cost tech support from within the user community.

• Just about every startup on the planet benefits from the use of open source software–everything from database software PostgreSQL to the Apache web server–which is free to use.

• Weinberg’s idea is simple: reckons companies that make a profit with the help of Free and Open Source Software should return a tenth of their profit to the open source community, to help solve problems with some open source projects.

Web Browsers

• Give it a shot. Talk to its community in the #uzbl channel on the freenode IRC network if you need some help getting started. See if you like it. If not, go back to a big, sophisticated browser, if that is what you prefer. To tell you the truth, I am actually using Chromium, Firefox, and uzbl about equally right now, switching between them; I have not entirely given up on those big and sophisticated browsers myself, at least so far. I think you owe it to yourself to see if you like your browser small and simple, though.

Oracle

• This version of the OS can be used for testing and development only and includes network virtualization capabilities

Leftovers

• A hardware hacker has discovered a secret debugging feature hidden in all AMD chips made in the past decade.

• The password-protected debugger came as a shock to reverse-engineers who have hungered for an on-chip mechanism for performing conditional and direct-hardware breakpoint operations. Although AMD has built the firmware-controlled feature into all chips since the Athlon XP, the company kept it a closely guarded secret that was only disclosed late last week by a hacker who goes by the name Czernobyl.

• Share/Save

• One thing we appreciate about Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is that he typically doesn’t pull any punches. Rather than dance around marketing speak and typical PR rhetoric, the outspoken CEO gets straight to the point, oftentimes in a very candid manner. More recently, Huang got on the topic of chipsets, seemingly putting an official end to that part of Nvidia’s business, Xbit Labs reports.

Security

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