● 01.28.11

● Links 28/1/2011: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Update, Red Hat Upgraded

Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “Many of the Linux apps actually work much better than Windows audio apps ever did and — as I understand it — Linux give you the best quality you can get out of your sound hardware, whereas Windows has many technical hurdles to overcome to make audio work correctly.”

• Sydneysider John Ferlito will continue to be the president of Linux Australia after he was elected unopposed in the organisation’s elections which were held recently.

Server

• Eric Allman is a figure who is highly revered in the tech world; the man who wrote the first mail transport agent to make email a common thing may be a figure of the past but people will queue to even have a glimpse of someone whom they consider a legend.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Just a short (it’s grading hell….) episode about the little icons in your browser window and the bookmarks. It was a Microsoft™ invention (yes, they invented something ) and so the most compatible file format is the Windows™ icon .ico file.

• Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it’s never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.

• The Arx Fatalis porting effort has been going full steam ahead; a lot of developments on that project. They recieved a Wiki sponsored by the PARPG guys, made subreddit to post updates to and have quite a few repositories where the different team members are working on the seperate goals of the project.

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• * Eye candy tweaks - Added “welcome screen” showed when the Activity Journal starts and loads the items. - Go to Today button always highlighted. - Path’s label clickable in MoreInformation window - Usability tweaks to the views toolbar. - Item’s categories becomes coloured when containing a searched item.

Distributions

• Fortunately, Gentoo has a mature solution to this problem that works quite well. By default, your system configuration files are protected from modification during package installation. After the installation is complete, you are notified that there are configuration files that need updating. At this point, you can use any number of console-based or graphical utilities to merge the changes in the files.

• The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Fivehh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!

• Exactly four years ago, even before Apple AppStore, Android Market and Nokia Ovi. I had the intuition that applications should have been brought to users with some “content” generated directly by other users. I called this “the Web 2.0 of software”. I’ve been able to implement some of my ideas, thanks to NLnet funds, wrote entropy.services package, wrote the “UGC” part of packages.sabayon.org. But when I tried to push the idea to the wild wild², I only got cold feedback.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva will participate to the FOSDEM 2011 (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting).

• The FOSDEM is a conferences series which are held each year during a week-end. This year, the FOSDEM is taking place on the 5th and 6th February, 2011, at Brussels.

Red Hat Family

• Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading session at $40.00 well below calculated support at $45.50 placing the stock in oversold territory, as investors and money managers have been moving out of the stock

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.

• Equities research analysts at Stifel Nicolaus upgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research note to investors on Wednesday. The analysts currently have a $49.00 price target on the stock.

• FUDCon will include many sessions on topics ranging from SELinux and Fedora Spins to BoxGrinder, the Fedora Security Lab and how the Fedora Ambassador program has evolved over the years. This year’s event will also include a robust Legal track with sessions devoted to what Red Hat does to protect and enforce the Fedora trademark, special legal issues faced by many open source projects and how Red Hat’s legal team makes decisions affecting Fedora, including the company’s obligations to Fedora. A full schedule of sessions and events for FUDCon is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011.

Debian Family

• Continuing with the “2011? series, let’s have a look today at the development planned for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Earlier posts can be found here: PC-BSD, pfSense, HeX Live, MaheshaBSD, GhostBSD.

• Robert Millan from the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project emailed an update for his project.

• Both Linux and FreeBSD have their strong and weak points, but overall, they can do almost anything you ask it to do, but when one wants an answer to the question “FreeBSD or (Debian) Linux?” one needs to find an answer to the following questions first to see which operating system suits one’s needs best:

• 1) Is your current hardware supported? If the purchase of new hardware is planned, is it supported by either/both?

• 2) Which operating system is supported by the third party commercial applications vendors that you use? If it is not supported, is there an acceptable equivalent available for the operating system your preference goes out to?

• [...]

Canonical/Ubuntu

• My little sister Lisa gave me an old computer she had, a laptop that is even older than my now-ancient (by computer ages) laptop. It’s a Presario 2200, and had Windows XP installed on it. I intended to use it as a mobile computer since my laptop’s battery has long since bit the dust, and the Presario has enough battery left to be able to be moved, about 15 minutes worth of juice. I spent several days trying to remove enough of the existing software to make it usable for my tasks, but the thing seemed to get slower and slower as I went.

• [...]

• At least now I’m more convinced than ever that I can make that jump, and it won’t be nearly as much a pain as I was afraid it would be.

Flavours and Variants

Reviews

• Puppy Linux began life as a really cool small-sized Linux distribution designed primarily for lower specification hardware while still providing most of the amenities that make Linux fun and usable. It included lots of original utilities and tools for completing tasks and configurations without a lot of resource overhead. Best of all, it was blazing fast. Well, the little puppy has grown up some and branched out, but is still that same light-weight wonder in spirit.

• [...]

• Puppy is a fun little distro with lots of potential and flexibility. The live CD is suitable for any level of experience, although a permanent install might require a bit of knowledge about partitions and such. It has a cute appearance these days and runs like a scalded dog, …er, um, puppy.

• Being based on Ubuntu, I expected a full ~700 MB download, but instead I got a tiny 384 MB one. OK, fine by me, but let’s see the reasons behind this small size. Obviously, the download + burning of the image didn’t take a whole lot of time so I was quickly on board the Bodhi express, also known as the train to Enlightenment. This AKA goes two ways: the name “Bodhi” is Sanskrit for Enlightenment AND the distro’s desktop environment IS Enlightenment! You are now enlightened! Ta-da!

Devices/Embedded

Pandora

• Remember the Pandora gaming handheld? We brought you the world’s first review of the little emulating machine that could last Summer, but if you’ve been following it, you’ll know how tricky tracking one of them down has been thanks to a backlog of pre-orders.

• Today though that changes: Brits can now buy one and get it within a week, with no more waiting lists. We spoke to the lead on the OpenPandora project to find out more.

• Previously, you’d have had to stick your name on the list for a Pandora handheld and wait: production of the County Durham built device was running at about 70 units per day. Now though, we’ve confirmed that you can now order a Pandora for £309.99, and expect delivery within seven days.

• Like the idea of Sony’s NGP but not the closed ecosystem? Pandora is now offering its open-source Pandora console for general sale, promising a seven day turnaround on the $499.99 clamshell.

• The Pandora handheld is available to buy once again – just as a whole new titanic struggle starts to brew in handheld console-land.

• In one corner we have the powerful Sony NGP, all cutting-edge technology, multiple control inputs and console-standard graphics.

OLPC

• On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Brooks and I (Chris Lindgren) went over to Madison Elementary School for a Sugar on a Stick session. Kevin drafted the following plan:

• 1. Everybody gets a computer and stick. 2. Watch / time / note challenges of loading Sugar. 3. Ask everyone to open “Write.” 4. Give them a prompt: “Do you prefer to write on a computer, or with pen and paper? Why?” 5. Give them time to write, then see if they can find each other in the neighborhood. See how many they can find and read. Watch and learn to see how easy / hard this is. Goal: try to read others, and either respond to others if that is possible, or return to their own paragraph and add to it by considering others’ opinions. 6. Make sure they save (Keep) their work. 7. Close down Sugar.

Free Software/Open Source

• The open source movement has developed a new philosophy about intellectual property, maintaining that knowledge should be free – that although it is important to prevent plagiarism or passing off an inferior product as a trusted brand, to curtail the free exchange of knowledge and ideas is a disservice to society. In pharmaceuticals, this is literally a matter of life and death – or blindness. South Africa’s health minister once called the high prices of lifesaving medicines ‘a crime against humanity’. But this is increasingly an issue for our own NHS. One current struggle involves big business trying to prevent the licensing of Avastin – already being used with great success by doctors treating the main cause of blindness in the UK – at £50 per dose – and instead force them to use the ‘very similar’ but differently licensed drug Lucentis, at £750 a dose. Obviously, this sort of thing is unacceptable – but the importance of the open source movement is that it does not simply reject such approaches to intellectual property, but has built viable alternatives – real business models that outperform proprietary interests but still freely share the knowledge they embody. Viable business models that can deliver free services – something that ought to get the attention of social enterprisers engaged in health and social care. It is also relevant to social franchising.

Web Browsers

• Don’t you just miss the previous version of browser wars? Netscape vs Internet Explorer. Scrappy young start up vs. Mr. Softy. Then Firefox vs IE. Scrappy young startup vs. Mr. Softy, round two. Then Chrome jumped into the mix and gave consumers another horse to bet on.

• But what I didn’t see coming — and I presume many others didn’t either – was that the dynamics of the browser war would change from “Them vs Them” to today’s “Us vs. Them.” How did we, the online advertising community, suddenly find ourselves in the crosshairs of the browsers?

Mozilla

• Today we’ve shipped Firefox 4 Beta 10. If you haven’t tried a Firefox 4 beta yet, you should definitely give this one a spin. It’s pretty amazing.

• However, the next version of Firefox is unlikely to require almost a year to be completed. Mozilla’s CTO, Brendan Eich, recently said that Firefox 4 will be released within four month after the final release of Firefox 4. This seems to be a result of discussions at Mozilla to accelerate the release schedule, which is one of the reasons why Google is gaining market share. Faster release cycles support the perception of a fresher browser, whether it delivers lots of new features or not. If you look at it, Firefox 3.6 looks pretty antiquated today.

• If you’d like to take it for a spin, head over to the Firefox add-ons site and install Home Dash (you’ll need to be using a Firefox 4 beta release for Home Dash to work). For some tips and help with Home Dash, see Mozilla’s follow-up post.

Oracle

• Two downloads are necessary: the installer for LibreOffice itself, and a “help pack” executable, which contains US English helpfiles. If the latter isn’t installed, clicking the Help menu takes you to the documentation section of the LibreOffice Web site.

• LibreOffice 3.3 wasn’t even released yet when plans for upcoming versions were being hammered out. A release plan is now in place as well as a development philosophy.

• Editors’ rating:

• 7.9 out of 10

• User rating:

• 10 out of 10

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• There’s a new status report from Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek as to the state of GCC 4.6. While a GCC 4.6 release candidate is nearing, as Jakub says in today’s update, “significant effort has been made recently to fix lots of regressions, yet there are still way too many serious regressions.”

• Table of Contents

• * GNU Status Reports: January 2011 * Binutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils) * Coreutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils) * Electric (http://www.gnu.org/software/electric) * Freefont (http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont) * Gawk (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk) * GCC (http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc) * GNUCOMM (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm) * GNUtrition (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutrition) * Grep (http://www.gnu.org/software/grep) * GSASL (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsasl) * GSEGrafix (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsegrafix) * GSL (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl) * GSRC (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsrc) * Guile (http://www.gnu.org/software/guile) * Hello (http://www.gnu.org/software/hello) * Hurd (http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd) * Texinfo (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo) * XBoard (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard)

Government

• Eva Herzog, Consultant Director of State Finance of the Basel Canton, summed up her Canton’s free software strategy adopted in early 2010, stating, inter alia, that in the future all software developments for the cantons should be made available as open source. She also presented a project where a hundred of workstations will be migrated to GNU/Linux and other free software over a period of two years while being integrated to the current system.

• I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the irony of it all this afternoon when I read Gary Gray’s pompous pronouncement that from now on, Federal Government agencies must consider the adoption of open source software in any technology purchase that they make.

• Does anyone, I thought to myself, take this kind of thing seriously?

• On the face of it, the policy sounds sensible enough, representing what many have long considered to be a rational idea; that is, if a government department or agency needs to procure software, it should look around to see whether there are free and flexible alternatives available first, before it jumps into bed with a proprietary software vendor like Microsoft or Oracle — with all the cost and, often, technical rigidity that implies.

• The faster moving private sector has recognised this principle for decades now. Long before vendors like Red Hat came along to provide supported versions of Linux, system administrators around the world were covertly running their print and file servers on early versions of Slackware and Debian — and in many cases, their managers didn’t even know.

Openness/Sharing

• Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera has a long relationship with Creative Commons licensing. Now, for its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, it has released photographs via Flickr and video on a CC license.

• Available photographs and video are available for free use so long as the user gives attribution and does not alter the products. For the record, all the photographs and video in this post are from Al Jazeera.

Leftovers

Security

• Paris police also announced on Thursday that a French teenager suspected of involvement in the DDoS attacks in the United States was taken into custody for a few hours last December.

• Meanwhile, in the UK, Scotland Yard arrested five young men, aged 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26. They are also suspected of having carried out DDoS attacks and are said to face a maximum of ten years in prison and a fine of up to 5,000 pounds.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• My colleague at CPJ, Mohamed Abdel Dayem, was the first to mail me. “Just a second ago,”, he wrote, “about 10 contacts of mine all disappeared off instant messaging in unison. That cannot be a coincidence.”

• That was yesterday, January 27th, at 5:34pm New York time. A stream of similar emails followed. Everyone I knew had lost contact with Egypt. On the wider Internet, the Twitter streams and Facebook updates from Egyptian journalists, bloggers, and others, which had been overwhelming us since the protests on the 25th, had all suddenly gone quiet.

• As protests rage on in Egypt, the close relationship between the U.S. government and the regime of Hosni Mubarak has already garnered a lot of attention. But it’s also worth taking a moment to examine the lobbying muscle that Egypt employs to secure its interests in Washington, including a mammoth $1.3 billion annual military aid package.

• In response to increasing civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have disabled almost all Internet connectivity with the rest of the world. The Internet’s global routing table, which is used by Internet routers to determine where to send traffic, has had virtually every Egypt-bound route withdrawn, giving the Internet traffic no path either into or out of the country.

• Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of president Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, experts said.

• Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the internet to try and silence dissent.

• A nighttime curfew has begun in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, after a day where thousands of protesters took the streets, demanding an end to Husni Mubarak’s 30-year presidency.

• The curfew was implemented on Friday on the orders of the president, along with an order that the military take charge of security, amid violent clashes occurred between police and protesters.

• An executive at London-based Vodafone Group PLC explained Friday morning that it did indeed have a role in the phone and Internet blackout affecting Egypt since Thursday night, confirming speculation that the firm had cooperated with the regime to close off protesters’ communications.

• Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said that because the order by Egyptian authorities appeared to be in line with the nation’s laws, the company was “obligated” to comply.

• Egypt, which has been under a declared state of “emergency” for decades, long ago passed a series of security provisions that were later mirrored in post-9/11 powers assumed by leaders in the US. Egypt’s provisions, however, went much further.

• For much of Friday afternoon, this city teetered between hope and fear. We knew the army would come – the question was when. About 7:30 p.m., six armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns arrived at the main square. Then something extraordinary happened: The soldiers were surrounded by hundreds of people – and after several minutes, welcomed. As I write this, ordinary citizens are walking up to the two vehicles stationed at Ramleh Square, and photographing each other flashing victory signs. The mood, tense for so much of the day, is turning festive.

Cablegate

• The publication of the US diplomatic cables was a journalistic sensation for WikiLeaks and its media partners, including SPIEGEL. In an excerpt from a new book, Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach recount the tense negotiations with Julian Assange in the run-up to the publication of the diplomatic cables.

• The joint publication of classified United States embassy cables in November 2010 in a number of major newspapers and magazines rocked the diplomatic world. In newly published books, editors at SPIEGEL and the New York Times have documented relationships between the founder of WikiLeaks and the publications that were at time tumultuous during preparations for the documents’ release.

• ¶1. KEY POINTS

• – (C) Egypt’s bloggers are playing an increasingly important role in broadening the scope of acceptable political and social discourse, and self-expression.

• – (C) Bloggers’ discussions of sensitive issues, such as sexual harassment, sectarian tension and the military, represent a significant change from five years ago, and have influenced society and the media.

• – (C) The role of bloggers as a cohesive activist movement has largely disappeared, due to a more restrictive political climate, GOE counter-measures, and tensions among bloggers.

• – (C) However, individual bloggers have continued to work to expose problems such as police brutality and corporate malfeasance.

• ¶2. (C) Comment: The government generally allows bloggers wide latitude in posting material critical of the GOE. Exceptions to this policy are bloggers who directly insult President Mubarak or Islam, and the government has arrested and jailed bloggers who have crossed these red-lines. The GOE has also arrested activists, such as XXXXXXXXXXXX and XXXXXXXXXXXX, who have used blogging to organize and support protests (refs A and C). Activists are increasingly writing blogs to advance their political aims. Contacts accurately point out that bloggers have ceased to function as a cohesive activist movement. It is noteworthy that bloggers did not play a significant role in the most recent example of mass cyber-activism — the April 6, 2008 strike orchestrated through Facebook (ref G).

Finance

• Barclays analyst Roger Freeman says it’s been difficult for Goldman to outline a comprehensive strategy going forward — much less start executing on one — until regulatory headwinds die down.

Censorship

• How hard is it, exactly, to kill the Internet? Egypt seems to have been able to do it. But Egypt’s situation isn’t exactly the same as that in the Western world. And even though Egypt only has four big ISPs, the fact that everything went down after midnight local time suggests that it took considerable effort to accomplish the ‘Net shut-off. After all, it seems unlikely that President Hosni Mubarak ordered the Internet to be shut down as he went to bed; such a decision must have been made earlier in the day, and then taken hours to execute.

• Also, the fact that such a drastic measure was deemed necessary may indicate that more targeted measures, such as blocking Twitter, didn’t get the job done. This nuclear option—see below—was intended to make online coordination of anti-government action impossible; at the same time, the mushroom cloud may give protesters hope that their efforts are not in vain. As one blogger writes: “It’s as if the regime has done the information aggregation for you and packaged it into a nice fat public signal.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• So the history of this issue is that I had DSL and a Cell phone with Hell Canada. The DSL is from a year ago. They are only contacting me about it now. Meanwhile, if you want to switch services from Hell Canada to Rogers or Telus, they will give you mad discounts. Yet if they steal from you and rip you off, they won’t help you.

DRM

• Sony’s motion for a temporary restraining order, asking for an injunction and impoundment, has been granted [PDF]. The Hon. Susan Illston says she thinks Sony has demonstrated that it is likely to prevail on its DMCA claim. She has also ruled that Sony has met its burden to show that the Court has specific jurisdiction over George Hotz in California, because “he purposefully directed his activities at the forum state.”

• A TRO is designed to prevent injury until a full hearing can take place, and a date for that isn’t set yet. So that will be the next step. Meanwhile, there’s a list of things that Hotz and anyone working with him can’t do and must do. Like clean up the Internet by taking back whatever he put up there about how to circumvent. Sigh. And hand over any computers or equipment that has any infringing stuff on it, and not erase anything. The judge says Hotz’s lawyers are free to file a motion challenging jurisdiction “on a fuller factual record,” if they want to, and they’ve said they want to. But I doubt it will influence anything, judging by this order.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Russ Mauch is concerned because sugar beet growers don’t know if they will be able to plant Roundup Ready beats this spring.

• Mauch, a Barney farmer and president of the American Sugar Beet Growers Association president, says sugar beet growers are in limbo when it concerns Roundup Ready.

• At issue is a lawsuit filed by several environmental groups concerned about Roundup Ready sugar beets.

• The legal journey for Roundup Ready sugar beets began in January 2008. On Aug. 13, 2010 California Judge Jeffrey White vacated the deregulation of sugar beets, Mauch said. The crop is now regulated and can’t be grown until the USDA prescribes conditions for planting and cultivating the crop.

• In separate litigation, Judge White issued an injunction in November against 256 acres of sugar beet stecklings or seedlings. The stecklings had been authorized by permits under the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The stecklings were part of a research and breeding project for basic seed and hybridproduction for 2012 and beyond. According to the injunction, the stecklings were to be destroyed by Dec. 7.

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