● 12.23.10

● Links 23/12/2010: Linux/Android Gains in ARM, Nautilus 3.0 Mockups Debated

Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The omission of Android from the mainline Linux kernel sparked heated debate through much of 2010.

• Certainly the biggest effect of widespread Linux adoption would be that today’s Windows-dominated monoculture would disappear, replaced instead by a diversity of Linux distributions.

• That, in turn, would make life very difficult for malware creators. Sure, they may begin focusing their efforts on Linux rather than Windows, but instead of having one, huge, slow-moving easy target, it would be a matter of trying to kill 100 birds with one stone.

• Beside necessity, people are also seeing that smart-phones and other mobile PCs are quite useful. That means older PCs which have similar capability are also useful. The facts that XP is deprecated and “7″ won’t run on old PCs means that GNU/Linux will be seen as a way to extend the life of PCs. I see that every day getting better performance from old PCs with GNU/Linux than with XP.

• With rumors that Microsoft will announce a Windows operating system designed specifically for ARM-based platforms at CES 2011, plus the fact that Intel has been working aggressively on its Linux-based MeeGo system, sources from notebook players believe that the issues are an indication that the two giants’ influence on PC vendors and makers will become weaker in 2011 as the two do not have strong control over the tablet PC market, while they are having difficulty entering the smartphone industry and may face declining market share in the PC market.s

• Wintel may be able to hold a few niches like business and USA but the rest of the world will dramatically change in 2011, limited only by production capacity and not monopoly.

Desktop

• Systems get into the “Certified” list (once they pass the test criteria) for different reasons. One of them is because at Canonical we work with manufacturers to make sure that Ubuntu is pre-install with their hardware. Hence, you can go to a shop and buy a laptop with Ubuntu in it. But, what happens when you want to upgrade you laptop to the latest Ubuntu version?

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this chock-full holiday episode: Lots of WikiLeaks updates, OpenBSD backdoored by the FBI, news on Novell’s patent sale, Matt Asay leaves Canonical, Fedora Design Team trouble, some Microsoft and Oracle watch and much more…

Applications

• It’s cmus, just to break the suspense. I first tried it almost exactly a year ago, and dismissed it for personal use just because I don’t really care for applications that “manage” my music.

• Kids are exposed early to computers nowadays, and those who carry the geek gene soon show their true colors. What are some good tools and approaches to nurture their interests? I have not seen anything better than GCompris for the younger children,” blogger Robert Pogson suggested. “Once they have learned a few uses for a mouse, they are good for many hours of entertainment.”

Instructionals/Technical

• Unfortunately, there are significant problems with Fedora 14 when using the broadcom-wl driver and the bcm4312 WiFi adapter, causing it to hang the entire system soon after booting every time. Ugh. So, I uninstalled the broadcom-wl driver… rebooted… and the fonts were back to looking too large!?!?!? Wow, so it really was installing the Broadcom driver that had “fixed” that? Well, I’m either a huge skeptic or a slow learner, because I still didn’t really believe that. So this evening I have repeated the whole thing again, and it’s true. Install the broadcom-wl driver, and the fonts look ok, but the system hangs. Remove that driver, and the fonts look too large, but the system doesn’t hang. Ugh. I hate this kind of problem.

Games

• * Exciting solitaire action with a soccer theme * Take control of your choice of teams in an international-style tournament * Find bonus cards to play fun mini-games * Build up your excitement – and your score – with passing streaks * Each tournament is different!

Desktop Environments

• In case you haven’t noticed I’ve had a bit of an obsession with the Enlightenment desktop of the late. Even though this desktop is fantastic there are currently not very many distributions that utilize it. Today I would like to take the time to mention those that offer a version with my favorite desktop.

• Linux is too hard. Linux is too different. Linux doesn’t have this or that program. Linux is not compatible with x or y or z. Linux is blah blah blah….

• People come up with all of these reasons to explain why they don’t use Linux. But really they are not reasons at all but simply excuses for laziness. You might even think that with all the tripe that is trotted out that most people don’t have the intelligence to be able to use Linux.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Last week the students continued to work on our Handbook, and the tasks are progressing very nicely. Now that the Handbook tasks are almost finished, they are lending a hand for our next “Amarok Insider” (past issues available at http://amarok.kde.org/Insider). It’s inspiring to work with these students, some of whom are very young, and yet are so smart, and work so hard. They have started hanging out in the #amarok and #rokymotion channel more, and getting to know some of our developers and helpful testers and users. I’ve set 39 tasks so far, and 25 are already completed! And most of my open tasks are claimed, so we’re doing very well.

GNOME Desktop

• [T]hese are just mockups which don’t show the exact functionality of the new overlay statusbar.

Distributions

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Last we heard from Mageia they had chosen their logo and set up infrastructure, teams, and roadmap. Now they are beginning to get into the nuts and bolts of organizing the packaging process. And as you know, packages are the distribution.

Red Hat Family

• Rumors about the possibility of Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) moving its headquarters have persisted throughout 2010 and may be resolved next year, if talk on the street is correct.

• Talk of moving the Linux software developer to the West Coast has been one rumor that former executives confirmed earlier this year never ceased to be discussed within the company.

Debian Family

• I would really like to see a Desktop oriented branch of Debian, and please do not tell me that I can use Ubuntu, because that is not Debian, maybe we can think about Linux Mint Debian Edition, but if Debian does not offer a real Desktop oriented release, all those based on Debian, have two options, in my option:

• 1. Patch the packages like Ubuntu, to offer an up to date and stable release (Ubuntu is based on Sid) 2. Offer an almost vanilla Debian more or less like Mint Debian Edition, but this approach will have the problem that when testing is frozen, the distribution based on Testing will be frozen too.

• I’m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002.

• I’m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi.

• I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Don’t expect Unity and Wayland to be the last of what looks to be a year of massive overhaul for Ubuntu.

• During the the 6th edition of the National Conference on Open Source Software in Tunisia our LoCo team scheduled a meeting with Mark. This meeting was an occasion for Tunisian LoCo members and Tunisian FOSS community members to meet Mark and discuss, during one hour, about the LoCo team activity, Ubuntu development, Unity, etc…

Free Software/Open Source

• Nevertheless, my experience among not only vendors, but also investors and particularly large enterprise end users, is that open source is typically atop the list of priorities, strategies and options.

• We’ve updated last year’s Monster List of Open Source Downloads – getting rid of the projects that are no longer active and adding the projects that were featured on Datamation for the first time this year. The result is a sprawling list of 715 noteworthy tools from the open source community.

• Yahoo! is a big user of Apache and Linux.

• NoMachine always had an awkward relationship with FLOSS. They provided no-cost trials and FLOSS clients but kept the “server” non-free.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 4 is getting really close. Help us finished it faster by using the latest betas and giving feedback.

BSD

• The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms.

• The first beta release of PC-BSD 8.2 is released, a user-friendly desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. The Version 8.2 contains a onumber of enhancements and improvements. Some of the notable changes are: added ability to select file system type and to encrypt partitions during installation; added ability to change hostname from installer; numerous fixes and improvements to NetworkManager, including 3G support and ability to enable/disable the lagg interface.

Project Releases

• The Document Foundation is happy to announce the second release candidate of LibreOffice 3.3. This release comes with lots of improvements and bugfixes, and a very substantial reduction in size for the Windows installer. As usual, be warned that this is beta quality software – nevertheless, we ask you to play with it – we very much welcome your feedback and testing!

Leftovers

• You can see the sprawling, Italian-style palace on the Black Sea in satellite photos. There’s a fitness spa, a hideaway “tea house,” a concert amphitheater and a pad for three helicopters. It’s still under construction, but already the cost is said to total more than $1 billion.

• And most amazing of all, according to a Russian whistleblower named Sergey Kolesnikov, it was predominantly paid for with money donated by Russian businessmen for the use of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The funds have come “mainly through a combination of corruption, bribery and theft,” charges Kolesnikov, a businessman who until November 2009 worked for one of the companies he alleges was investing money for Putin.

Security

• Anti-spam organisation Spamhaus has recovered from a denial of service attack over the weekend.

• Initially though, Spamhaus may have been attacked in response to its warning that a WikiLeaks mirror called WikiLeaks.info was being hosted by a Russian bullet-proof hosting outfit, called Webalta, that also played home to phishing, carding and malware sites. Spamhaus advised users to use a safer mirror, WikilLeaks.ch, instead. Trend Micro harboured similar concerns over WikiLeaks.info’s association with Webalta and its reseller Heihachi.net, described by Trend as a “safe haven for criminals and fraudsters”.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Cameras without wireless networking capabilities are the least attractive option. If they are destroyed or confiscated in the field, you probably have lost the damning video you just recorded, including any footage documenting how your camera was confiscated or destroyed. But provided you can hold on to your machine, digital video recorders today are inexpensive, small, and practical. The most popular easy-to-use brand right now is the Flip Video line of cameras, which start at $149. Even the cheapest Flips fit in your pocket, power up in about three seconds, and feature one-button recording. They include a built-in USB port and instant formatting for hosting sites such as LiveLeak and YouTube.

Cablegate

• At Firedoglake, David House writes a lengthy and detailed report from visits with Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been in military detention for months for being the presumed source of Wikileaks’ most damning US government leaks. He has not yet been convicted of a crime. Manning’s lawyer and others have written about his detention conditions as “extreme” and amounting to cruel and inhumane treatment. The sleep deprivation, movement deprivation, solitary confinement, and other elements of his current condition amount to torture, by widely accepted definitions.

• So far every piece of evidence against Bradley Manning comes from one source, Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was institutionalized by the police three weeks before he alleges Manning contacted him and confessed he turned over materials to Wikileaks.

• Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army private accused of leaking classified information to Wikileaks, has been held in the brig at Quantico Marine Corp Base for five months in inhumane conditions, with severe restrictions on his ability to exercise, communicate, or even sleep. Manning has not been convicted of any crime. Nor is there a date certain for any court hearing.

• The conditions of Bradley Manning’s confinement became a top issue in the press last week as bloggers traded blows with US officials over allegations that Manning endures inhumane treatment at the Quantico, VA detainment facility. In the midst of this rush by the Defense Department to contextualize Manning’s confinement, I traveled to see the man himself at the Marine Corps detainment facility in Quantico, VA.

• In U.S. elite media, the main revelation of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables is that the U.S. government conducts its foreign policy in a largely admirable fashion.

• The purpose of this survey is to measure an individual soldier’s competency in four areas, Emotional, Social, Family and Spiritual. Justin is an atheist, as well as a highly dedicated soldier, but according to the SFT, he is “unfit” to serve specifically because he is a non-believer.

Finance

• Sorry, have been out of the loop for a few days, and missed the last round about that Republican primer on how to read the upcoming FCIC report. Four things.

• There needs to be a regulatory response to this, for both the integrity of our courts as well as for the economy. If you’d like to express yourself on this issue, please check out this petition at Stop Servicer Scams.

• More troubled homeowners are dropping out of the Obama administration’s main foreclosure-relief program, which has been widely criticized for failing to help more people keep their homes.

• It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. The country has suffered through a terrible crash in home prices, yet buying a house remains an iffy proposition in many markets.

• When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.

• Major stock indexes were flat Wednesday after a report showed that the U.S. economy did not grow as fast as previously thought in the three months ending in September.

• I wonder if you could go to a Bank CEO’s home, break into his house, and throw out all of his personal possessions — family heirlooms, photos, awards — then claim a paperwork error.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• One of the most unsettling experiences of the last decade has been watching Western democracies sleepwalking into a national security nightmare. Each incremental step towards total surveillance follows the same script. It goes like this: first, a new security ‘threat’ is uncovered, revealed or hypothesised; then a technical ’solution’ to the new threat is proposed, trialled (sometimes) and then implemented — usually at formidable cost to the public; finally, the new ’solution’ proves inadequate. But instead of investigating whether it might have been misguided in the first place, a new, even more intrusive, ’solution’ is proposed and implemented.

• UNESCO is holding an ‘International Symposium on Freedom of Expression‘ on 26 January 2011, with the support of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO. One panel session will focus on freedom of expression on the Internet, and we also expect that our UNESCO publication, entitled ‘Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression‘, will be launched. A penultimate draft of the manuscript is online at SSRN, but a print version will be available by the date of the symposium.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• In the fallout of the controversial net neutrality order approved by the FCC today, they extend what at least on the surface appears to be an olive branch towards openness: the Open Internet Apps Challenge on challenge.gov.

• For years, we’ve been pointing out that while the concept of net neutrality is important, any attempt by the government to put it into law would inevitably involve lobbyists twisting it to be quite favorable to the telcos and others.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an important development for the future of the Internet, it has rather overshadowed another area where crucial decisions are being made: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In fact, ACTA finally seems to be nearing the end of its slow and painful crawl through the secret negotiation process that only recently we have been allowed glimpses of. And the more we learn, the more troublesome it is.

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