● 01.23.11

● Links 23/1/2011: Pardus 2011 Reviews, Skolelinux Interview

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Apple built this platform from scratch, but thanks to the work put in by the GNU project and countless others, we already have a platform. We have a rich set of development tools, a range of desktop environments and a wide range of development forges packed with source control, bug tracking and other features.

• Late in 2010 one of our charitable organization clients, a local church, came to these decisions: 1) The aging XP Professional systems in their office needed to be replaced with new systems. 2) The existing XP Professional systems that were not so old needed to be upgraded to newer operating systems. 3) The existing SBS 2003 system needed to be upgraded to a new OS as well.

• We at ERACC made the pitch for Linux on the desktop and the server but the staff at this client thought they “needed” to stay with something “famliiar like Microsoft” and voted for Windows 7 Professional on their new and “upgraded” desktop systems. (I knew they were not going to see fuzzy, cuddly familiarity with a migration from XP to W7. But I also know when to stop promoting Linux and move on along.) However, the fellows in charge of decision making about their server decided they wanted to try Linux and not spend money to “upgrade” SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008. We considered this latter victory enough for our Linux sales pitch and laid out an upgrade plan for their office. Funds were procured and the parts for new systems were ordered from ERACC in late December. The work began the first week in January 2011.

• [...]

• At this point the upgrade from SBS 2003 to Linux is done. Some call this a “migration”, but we here at ERACC think of any move from Microsoft to Linux as an upgrade, so that is what we call it. Over the next few weeks each user’s PC will either be replaced with a new PC running W7 Pro or migrated to W7 Pro from XP Pro. To date, two of these are done and we are working on the third one this weekend. In case you are wondering, the W7 Pro installations work just fine with SAMBA 3.5.3 on Mandriva 2010.2 Linux.

Applications

• I’ve come close though, with the recommendation of dagger, as a Python renaming tool that uses “conventional” variables to match the information stored in music files.

Instructionals/Technical

• The following steps change the boot mandriva background, ie there are three stages. The first stage is the stage of preparation, the second phase is the editing stage, third stage is the stage of building.

Wine

• So I feel like I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wine developers and the surrounding community which have made it easier for us to convert to marvels of GNU/Linux.

Games

• Ok anyways… today I have a more sensitive topic… yes FOSS gamers have lives too. Hard to believe I know, but out there (yes, outside of your parents basement… the place where yo go for geo-caching) people have real parties (without the LAN- suffix) and they use FOSS games during those occasions! At least some do

• 2D space action shooter M.A.R.S. has got a fair bit of attention on Ubuntu Gamer as of late, but many people have had trouble installing it.

Desktop Environments

• Recently Mark Shuttleworth wrote about how Qt will become part of the Ubuntu 11.10 desktop, and that Qt-based apps will eventually be considered as possible default Ubuntu apps. Obviously, this would be a big change from using GTK-only applications (that is, aside from Firefox and Open/Libreoffice applications), but Mark encourages GNOME developers to consider using Qt, too. He writes, “Perhaps GNOME itself will embrace Qt, perhaps not, but if it does then our willingness to blaze this trail would be a contribution in leadership.”

• I agree on this, and think that enabling usage of Qt in GNOME projects would be a contribution in leadership. It would be great if developers had the option of using tools like Qt Creator and Qt Quick when building applications for GNOME-based desktops (or other devices!).

• 2 days ago I wrote an enthusiastic blog about a cross-distribution collaboration meeting on App Stores we’ve organized in Nuremberg. Then, a day later, Canonical decided to ship Qt with Ubuntu. While not anything special from an openSUSE pov (we give both GTK and Qt equal treatment and offer the best platform to develop for both), it’s a nice move. In the announcement Mark Shuttleworth emphasized Qt integration with Ubuntu. I specifically write Ubuntu, not GNOME/GTK – Aaron Seigo responded to that with a blog post showing a bit of frustration with Canonical’s policy, the push for dconf & Ubuntu-specific Qt integration in apps.

GNOME Desktop

• I was aways setting Gnome Power Manager to stop the display from going to sleep or screensaver when I was going to watch movies. But it is annoying to launch System -> Preferneces -> power management and repeat the setting everytime.

Distributions

• Perhaps with the exception of Slackware, today’s modern distributions have completely mastered the fine art of installing a package’s dependencies automatically. The installation of a package and all its required dependencies is no more difficult than a single command.

• This time the Tromsø office of the Free software Centre and the newly elected board member of the association FRESH I’ve been speaking in my interview series with Skolelinux -people.

• How did you connect with the Skolelinux project?

Pardus

• It’s stable, smooth, reasonably quick, and extraordinarily newbie-friendly. Plus, it has goodies that most people would need on a daily basis. That said, there are a lot of applications that will need to be uploaded to the repository soon. Otherwise, I can only recommend this to people who will only be surfing the web and creating documents (and nothing else).

• All in all, Pardus is a truly underrated and underused distribution. It’s a wonderful offering that everyone should try. And everyone can, because it comes with support for about every language in the known world.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fudcon 2011 will be coming up next weekend. I’m looking forward to it, and hope to see lots of Fedora folks I talk with on irc and on mailing lists, as well as new folks I haven’t met yet.

• I’ve made Fedora branded stripes to submit it for potential inclusion in F15. Unfortunately, Mairin (the famous Fedorartist) explained that wallpapers need to be published under a free license, and since mine contained Fedora logo, it can’t be (that is, Fedora logo is TMed).

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu offers a lot of fonts, in addition to the defaults installed, and the MicroSoft msttcorefonts package , in its repositories. All these fonts mentioned here are provided as packages, which can easily installed using command line tools like apt-get or using Synaptic.

• Welcome news for Ubuntu 11.04 alphas testers partial to non-default icon sets: Unity’s launcher now adheres to your chosen icon set.

Free Software/Open Source

Oracle

• To be fair to Oracle, it shouldn’t be expected that the company carry all the projects forward that Sun sponsored. It would have been nice if Oracle could have seen fit to continue sponsoring activities like GNOME a11y — but hard to argue that GNOME is particularly strategic to Oracle. But the list of projects that Oracle has stopped investing in entirely, or have stopped contributing to the FOSS project, is fairly long.

Project Releases

• Postfix stable release 2.8.0 is available. This release continues the move towards improving code and documentation, and making the system better prepared for changes in the threat environment.

• A new version of GLX-Dock (previously known as Cairo Dock) is on the way – 2.3 (currently in beta), which will bing a lot of new applets: MintMenu, Cardapio and Lancelot menus, a translator applet, Thunderbird unread count applet, Transmission, Deluge and Ktorrent applets and more.

Leftovers

• The debate raging in Italy about Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged taste for teenage girls and prostitutes has taken a surreal turn, after the country’s top porn star weighed in with high praise for the prime minister. “The truth is,” said Rocco Siffredi, “that Italians are proud of someone like Berlusconi who is 74, loves sex and has a good sex life – and I don’t just mean working-class Italians.”

• [...]

• Two years after Berlusconi’s wife left him over his friendship with teenager Noemi Letizia, and a prostitute, Patrizia D’Addario, claimed to have slept with him, Berlusconi is again facing criticism after accusations that he had sex with pole-dancing prostitutes at parties at his mansion near Milan. One guest, Nadia Macrì, described Berlusconi lying on a bed calling out “Next” as women queued to have sex with him.

• Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided “adult supervision,” and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were “geniuses” and he, in effect, was their manager.

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