● 11.21.10

● Links 21/11/2010: KDE 4.5 and KDE SC 4.7 Plans, Fedora Elections

Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This entry is mostly about my further experiences with AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) along with some more thoughts about Plan 9 and the Zaurus. 16 minutes in duration.

• On Linux Outlaws this week: Symbian and MeeGo talk, System76 shipping to the UK, Fab rants on a stupid Fedora decision, open source Kinect drivers and much more….

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Wayland Display Server since it was announced Ubuntu is going to deploy their Unity Desktop atop Wayland. The new Wayland mailing list has become lively with end-users and developers and there’s more people now trying out this experimental lightweight display server that leverages OpenGL ES, kernel mode-setting, and the Graphics Execution Manager, among other recent Linux graphics technologies. Most people though still haven’t seen or used Wayland, but here’s a short video showing it off.

• While NVIDIA should soon be releasing a new Linux graphics driver beta, for those of you interested in NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) rather than — or as a complement to — OpenCL, there is a new tool-kit release. CUDA 3.2 is now available this week. CUDA 3.2 brings a number of new features to the NVIDIA GPGPU table.

Applications

• Realtime Sunlight wallpaper v0.3.3 has been released, this version comes with some new features also some bugs has been fixed. Sunlight wallpaper is a simple but useful application which retrieve an image from the internet and set it as a wallpaper every 30 minutes, for the clouds are updated every 3 hours with current weather satellite imagery.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• For KDE SC 4.7, Martin has also been working on OpenGL ES 2.0 support for KWin so that it could be used by mobile devices, such as those running MeeGo. OpenGL ES 2.0 is also supported by Mesa and Gallium3D and the proprietary drivers too, due to the web presence of OpenGL ES 2.0.

• So I’ve used KDE for about a work week. During that time I’ve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror. I’m not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a bunch of web pages including my blog. So I stuck with Google Chrome, which is what i use on Gnome, LXDE (Lubuntu on my laptop), and on my Windows 7 install. (Also, I stuck with gPodder for podcasts because that’s working perfectly) So how did it go? First of all, I love the stock screenshot tool in KDE, KSnapshot. I love that lets me choose full screen, region, window under cursor, and section of Window. With Gnome I hit print screen and then I have to edit the png in the GIMP. So it gives me less work for my Linux-related blogging.

GNOME Desktop

• Zeitgeist now has a dedicated MeeGo developer whose tasked with bringing Zeitgeist fruit to bear on MeeGo trees.

• GNOME Shell (both master and the overview-relayout branch) present the list of launchable applications to us as a large, non-hierarchical, immediately searchable list. We can hit the logo key and start typing a few letters and immediately find what we’re looking for. KDE has it. Windows Vista and 7 have it. OS X has it (via Spotlight). And now we have it.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has failed only two of the quick tests that would make it a sell. Does that mean you should hold your Red Hat shares? Not necessarily. Just keep your eye on these trends over the coming quarters.

Fedora

• The F15 election period has just begun! If you are a Fedora contributor (i.e. you have a FAS account and at least one non-CLA group) please take the time to cast your vote before 2010-11-28 23:59:59 UTC.

• Today, I opened up a terminal, issued the su command, and typed in my root password on my Fedora 14 laptop. I then issued the “yum update” command to install all of the latest Fedora 14 updates. I am running Fedora 14 on a 64-bit Toshiba Satellite L675 laptop. Fedora 14 runs extremely well on it with the exception of no wifi drivers, and the touchpad’s response is a little bit subpar. There is also an issue with audio recording/input. I cannot record from my microphone in Audacity. There is an incredible lag/failure in audio recording. When I do try to record, on playback, most of what I recorded is missing.

Debian Family

• It was 8 years ago today that the MEPIS Linux project started when Warren Woodford decided to build a version of Linux that would be easy to try from CD, easy to install from the live environment, and easy for everyone to use. Over the years there have been reports of SimplyMEPIS being the first OS of one year old children, and also the first OS of 90 year old adults.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Most of the difficulties are due to my love for python and the simplicity. However I am learning a lot while hacking this. Tomorrow I will write a short tutorial on how to work with Unity. And Monday I will try to write one how to work with Folks.

• Features include: -

• * Enable/disable Plymouth * Set splash resolution * Fixing errant errors * Choosing/creating new themes

• There are many download servers and mirror server, for ubuntu packages and updates, in this world. A default server will be set for your software sources according to your location. This server need not be the best and fastest server available for you.

• You can choose the best server available and set it as the download server for your software source in Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The Dell Streak’s also at its original “street” RRP of £449, so you’d be better off getting that direct.

Free Software/Open Source

• It seems to be somewhat popular to hold a contest, if a FLOSS project needs a (new) logo or other seemingly singular asset.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• A new KB means that we have a lot of new strings in the UI — more than 2000 words in all. You can find the new strings in Verbatim, our new tool for all UI localization. It’s a lot of words, but fear not: up to 50% of the strings were ported over, so if you’ve localized those in the past you don’t have to do it again. When we moved them we marked them as fuzzy, so you can decide for yourself whether you want to accept them or change them.

• With Prospector, we are interested in improving searches in the browser including those searches that you make through websites. To better understand how people do various types of searches, we have put together a new experiment to help you report back with your findings.

• This experiment is slightly different from our previous experiments like Speak Words or Find Suggest. It is more of a study where you can take a look at your own data and come up with your own ideas of how searches can be improved.

• The long-awaited ‘Firefox’ menu button has arrived in the latest nightly Linux builds – for now.

Oracle

• I wasn’t at Defrag, but the whispers there made their way back to me quickly. My policy is to ignore these, because the probability of any single rumor being accurate is, in my experience, slight.

• But given that we’re now fielding multiple inquiries about it, let me say that like my colleague I do not believe Amazon intends to sell its Web Services division to Oracle.

• It is unclear where the rumor originated. Amazon is apparently reading intent into it, and it’s easy to understand why. A substantial portion of Amazon’s developer adoption and goodwill is driven by the accessible economics it established for the industry. Given Oracle’s history and its recent behavior with respect to MySQL, widely circulated rumors of an acquisition could introduce uncertainty about the longer term economics of AWS. Which is undesirable from the perspective of Amazon, clearly. And just as clearly, potentially desirable for one or more of its competitors.

• It’s been less than two months since the Document Foundation announced that it was launching its own “fork” of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, but already its new LibreOffice alternative is beginning to take shape.

• Forgive the title above; but these past days we started to receive more and more questions about the OpenOffice.org Renaissance Project and whether we would continue its works and implement its changes. I think this calls for some clarification. The LibreOffice Project led by the Document Foundation is the successor of the OpenOffice.org only insofar as the OpenOffice.org project’s community (Oracle excepted) has decided to give itself a new and more promising beginning. It does not mean, however, that we have to bear with the legacy of the OpenOffice.org code base or technical legacy forever. We made clear recently that we would bring some radical changes not just to the code itself, but also to the way we had been working as a community of the OpenOffice.org project before. And the Renaissance Project stands right in the middle of this mix of continuity and changes; after all, not everything inside OpenOffice.org needs to be thrown away.

Project Releases

• Today, Spacewalk – the upstream project of the RHN satellite – released version 1.2. One of the promises the developers made was better support of PostgreSQL.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• I’ m finally making some progress on one of my 2010 goals – making a Lego robot that can take CD’s and feed them to my computer to rip.

• [...]

• I’ve spent quite some time writing an accurate CD ripper for Linux, and I want to have all my audio CD’s in correct digital bytes on a computer, so I can use the files to transcode to whatever format is useful for whatever player I’ll have.

• The Global Village Construction Set is an open hardware initiative aimed at sharing tool-building knowledge.

Leftovers

• Evangelical Christians in Brazil have apparently banned the use of USB connections after claiming the technology is the mark of Satan-worshippers (Hat tip: Fernando Frias). Apparently the revelation came after the evangelists noticed that the USB symbol resembles a trident. Presumably they’re not great fans of Britain’s ballistic missiles either.

• An Amerindian woman may have been the first native American to set foot on European soil, brought to Iceland by the Vikings several centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot on the Americas in 1492.

• Arm’s next generation of processors will support 64-bit computing, opening the way to more memory-intensive applications

• DOS, of course, ousted CP/M – the OS which was considered a shoo-in for the desktop platform of choice, regardless of who made the hardware. And it’s in the role of CP/M that we find Symbian lurking: technically superior in many ways, but with a management that was unable to change fast enough to keep up with the new kids on the block who jumped in before anyone had noticed there was a gap.

• Not that Symbian is the only one who’s been pushed aside – with Android taking Microsoft’s spot that pushes Redmond’s offering elsewhere: roughly into the place where Acorn once stood. Having achieved early success, with the BBC Micro, Acorn created a new platform with huge optimism. That platform, the RISC-based Archimedes, had many nice features but never really caught on.

Science

• Now you can hear a marine-inspired melody from before the time of the Little Mermaid’s hot crustacean band. Acoustic scientists put their lips to ancient conch shells to figure out how humans used these trumpets 3,000 years ago. The well-preserved, ornately decorated shells found at a pre-Inca religious site in Peru offered researchers a rare opportunity to jam on primeval instruments.

• The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he’s found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos.

Health/Nutrition

Security

• Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Boris Johnson is a total Tory and an old friend from college days. In a piece in the conservative Daily Telegraph, he advises George W. Bush not to bring his book tour to Britain, because he could face arrest as a war criminal…

• A Cellist was held at Heathrow Airport and questioned for 8 hours this week. A terrorist suspect? False passport? Drug smuggling? If only it was so dramatic and spectacular. Her crime was coming to the UK with her cello, to participate in musicology conference organised by the School of Music at the University of Leeds and it was for this reason that Kristin Ostling was deported back to Chicago. What was UK Borders Agency (UKBA) thinking? That she would sell her cello to earn some cash, or do a spot of moonlighting at some secretive classical music gig, while she was here?

• The war on terror is over. We lost.

• [...]

• Nowhere is this illustrated more starkly than in the case of Paul Chambers.

• In the snowy depths of January 2010 Paul sent a message of frustration to his Twitter friends when he discovered the weather could affect his travel plans: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together or I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

• In what can only be described as TSA handlers gone wild, the San Diego Harbor Police arrested an area resident for refusal to complete the screening/security process yesterday. This is the same airport that created the TSA security catch phrase “don’t touch my junk.” John Tyner of San Diego started the airport screening firestorm last week as Americans head into the busiest travel week of the year in the United States.

• This time the defendant, Sam Wolanyk says he was asked to pass through the 3-D x-ray machine. When Wolanyk refused, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel told him he would have to be patted down before he could pass through and board his airplane.

• Last weekend, as US-based security researcher Moxie Marlinspike snoozed during a layover at the Frankfurt Airport, he awoke to a scene straight out of a Franz Kafka novel.

• “Some dude shows up with a picture of me on his cell phone, and he’s just looking through the crowd at the gate until he finds me,” Marlinspike told The Register. “He takes me away [and says] ‘I have some questions for you that you have to answer.’”

• Eventually, the man, who identified himself as an employee of the American Consulate, permitted Marlinspike to fly home, but only after the man made a phone call to an unnamed person in Washington, DC. For Marlinspike — who as a frequent traveler had already been repeatedly subjected to secondary searches and some ominous comments from his inquisitors — the incident kicked off a series of escalating confrontations with federal officials.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Since the US embassy in Beijing began tweeting hourly pollution reports last year, I – along with many other smog watchers – have been horrified at the frequency of “bad” and “hazardous” readings.

• But this week, the depth and murkiness of the haze was so appalling that the automated system briefly entered the realm of black comedy with a “crazy bad” analysis of our air.

Finance

• I’ve been reading Fintan O’Toole’s new book about the Irish banking catastrophe. As in his previous book — Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger — the analysis of why the disaster happened is spot-on: the Republic has had a dysfunctional political culture ever since it was founded, and the dysfunctionality became pathological over the last three decades. O’Toole thinks that the only way of ensuring a decent future for the country is radically to re-think the governance of the state, and he’s right.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• With just under a week to go to end of the voting for the EU Worst Lobbying Award, some of the nominees have started receiving visits from the infamous Brussels “Lobby-Cleaner”.

• The TaxPayers’ Alliance campaign group has taken advice from leaders of the prominent right wing Tea Party movement in a bid to galvanise anti-government sentiment.

• [...]

• Last month tens of thousands of politically conservative Americans turned out to support Glenn Beck, a right wing broadcaster, and Mrs Palin at a highly controversial Washington rally to honour the US military.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Terri Dowty from Action on Rights for Children (ARCH) and Dr Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, two exceptional campaigners on civil liberties, will be talking about children’s databases and the National DNA Database (NDNAD) at a free event organised by No2ID this Monday 22nd November, 7pm in the Bertrand Russell Room, Conway Hall (25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL).

• Facebook’s “modern messaging system” may make it convenient to seamlessly move between instant messaging and a Facebook.com e-mail account, but not if you are sharing a link to a file sharing site.

• Facebook began blocking BitTorrent link-sharing on Facebook walls and news feeds last spring, and also started blocking private messages between users that included a link to torrents on the Pirate Bay.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• From Google to web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there is a global consensus that commercial clout should not be allowed to buy preferential treatment on the web -internet service providers, nearly all luminaries agree, should be punished if they allow companies to buy an enhanced service not available to smaller competitors.

• But the whole nature of that so-called “net neutrality” principle was, according to some vocal campaigners, abandoned by the British Government on Wednesday. In a speech entitled “The Open Internet” Communications Minister Ed Vaizey was said to have opened the floodgates for, say, Sky to provide a broadband service that prioritised its TV catch-up services and made those of the BBC practically unwatchable.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Anyway, Alan Wexellat points us to the news that Anderson has now redone the paper as a book, and has released Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States under a Creative Commons license. He’s using a non-commercial license, which we just discussed has some problems, but it really is a tremendously worthwhile read. It basically shows that, as we see today, many people don’t really understand the purpose and intent behind copyright — and that includes some of the folks in charge of making the law. That allowed some special interests to co-opt the process and expand copyright to their own benefit. Sound familiar? Well, history seems to repeat itself…

• In a letter to those coordinating Operation Payback, the series of DDoS attacks carried out against pro-copyright outfits since September, the UK and US Pirate Party are calling for an end to hostilities. They reason that the continuation of the operation plays into the hands of organizations that wish to “pervert” copyright law for personal gain and hampers the progress of those seeking copyright reform through legitimate means.

• The copyright trolling campaign in the United States may not be coming to a grinding halt, but it looks like it may come to a sluggish crawl. In an order issued today in the Achte/Neunte (aka Far Cry) vs Does 1-4,577 case – Judge Rosemary Collyer granted and denied in part the US Copyright Group’s request for an extension to serve all defendants to five years.

• Lawyers from Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) have intervened in a few mass-copyright lawsuits recently, saying they’ve been overwhelmed by the tactics of one Washington, D.C., area law firm, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver. Since January, lawyers from that firm have sued more than 10,000 “John Does” in nine separate lawsuits, alleging that those users have broken copyright law by sharing movies over BitTorrent sites. The firm has requested names and contact info for all 10,000, a task that falls to ISPs like Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) to carry out.

ACTA

• Good news everyone. Remember that international multilateral secret agreement everyone was worried about? It turns out that we do not really have to worry that much about it any more. The newest draft text of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been published, and it turns out that most of the controversial issues have been removed, reduced, or diluted, producing a text that will not change too much in various countries.

• My friend and colleague the Technoloma claims that ACTA has turned out to be a damp squid. He and I are in agreement on many issues, but this is an issue on which we come to different conclusions.

• The reason that technollama gives for concluding: “at the moment it seems like the worst has been taken out of the agreement” is that the agreement as it now stands, and as technollama reads it, does not require statutory damages for copyright infringement, nor do the indisputably worrying intermediary liability provisions require 3 strikes style policing from Internet service providers.

• However from the perspective of developing countries, a perspective which I’d expect technollama to understand and value, these are not have and have not been the primary problems with ACTA.

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