● 04.01.11

● Links 1/4/2011: Linux 2.6.39 Previews, GNOME 3 Live Images

Posted in News Roundup at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Google is reportedly considering a push for standardization of its Android 3.0 hoping the new strategy will help resolve the drawbacks of the operation system; meanwhile, Google may also negotiate with ARM over the possibility of implementing standardization for ARM architecture products, according to sources from notebook players.

• She sells seashells by the seashore. Well, yes… that may be true, but that’s not the type of shell we’re going to talk about here today.

• How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly.

Desktop

• About a year ago I made a post about installing Linux on my girlfriend’s laptop. Just recently I was quoted on Linux Insider about how successful the installation had been a year later. I said that I believed it to have been a successful conversion of a Windows user to Linux. My descriptions were from my observations only, not my girlfriend’s. I had not thought at that time to ask my girlfriend what she thought about the change of operating system on her computer.

Server

• GNU/Linux on ARM should be a no-brainer for data-centres. There are outfits now jamming hundreds of ARMed cores into 2U.

• Linux is many things, and its power lies in its ability to flexibly support vastly different usage models. But one of Linux’s most important strengths is serving as the workhorse of the storage domain. Thinking about Linux and storage commonly conjures an image of direct-attached disks or the latest file system, but there’s much more to storage and Linux than meets the eye. Elements in the Linux are not only stable but also cutting-edge.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bradley and Karen discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and confusing.

• Newspeak is a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk.

Kernel Space

• While we have already been benchmarking code for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel a fair amount at Phoronix with the Nouveau page-flipping and z-compression merge plus Nouveau Fermi acceleration, only this afternoon did Linus Torvalds tag the first release candidate for this next major kernel update.

• The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux, the Linux Foundation, has announced its top five 2011 Linux.com Linux Gurus. The awarding of Guru status is intended to recognise those individuals that have made the greatest contribution to the linux.com community through their participation on the site, by writing blog posts, answering questions, and so on. The contributors earn points as they participate on the site, and these are totalled each year during the period from 16 February to 15 February the following year. The top five points earners are awarded Guru status.

• This user-space software project now has support for intrusion detection sensors and humidity sensors. LM_Sensors 3.3.0 also provides support for many sub-features implemented by new hwmon drivers, some arbitrary limits have been removed from libsensors, there’s new generic limit printing code in the sensors utility, and there’s new chips known by the sensors-detect program. There’s also been the variety of i2c/hwmon kernel driver updates in succeeding Linux kernel releases since the release of LM_Sensors 3.2 last October.

• Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 are on track to use the recently released Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which introduced some significant performance gains.

Graphics Stack

• As talked about at length yesterday, the Catalyst 11.3 driver that was just released is not compatible with the X.Org Server 1.10 final ABI. What this means is that this proprietary Linux driver update will not work on Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other Linux distributions experiencing major updates. AMD for at least the past seven Ubuntu releases has been seeding Canonical with driver pre-releases to meet the support deadline on new versions of this popular Linux operating system. Over last night, they did this once more.

• How well do AMD’s FireGL/FirePro workstation graphics cards work with the open-source graphics drivers for Linux? It’s something we never have really focused on up to this point, since after all, most workstation users are satisfied with using proprietary display drivers on Linux. It is the workstation market that drives the proprietary Linux driver development after all for AMD and NVIDIA, and that is really the focus of development, not Linux gamers or enthusiasts. But curiosity got the best of me, so here’s what happens if you try to use an expensive FirePro graphics card with the open-source driver stack and the Mesa Gallium3D driver.

• As mentioned this morning when AMD provided Canonical with a Catalyst 11.4 driver pre-release for proprietary Radeon / FirePro support under Ubuntu 11.04, there’s more than just support for Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10. This Linux driver update also provides support for AMD PowerXpress with dual-GPU notebooks.

• The discussion surrounding issues with the Linux kernel DRM code has been quite interesting. From the 40+ comments so far, there’s been some interesting feedback from some of the key open-source driver developers along with AMD. In particular, the generation to succeed the next-generation of AMD graphics processors (what will be the “Radeon HD 8000 series” if they continue with the same marketing names) should be a pivotal moment for AMD’s open-source strategy.

• With NVIDIA still not providing any open-source support or technical documentation for their graphics processors, for those in the open-source community who seek to use their GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” GPUs without NVIDIA’s binary driver, they are left to use the reverse-engineered, community-created Nouveau driver. Fortunately, the support for the NVIDIA Fermi GPUs is coming along at a respectable pace — with even working OpenGL acceleration — considering that NVIDIA is providing no support at all. In this article are the first benchmarks of this experimental GeForce 400/500 “Nouveau NVC0″ driver versus NVIDIA’s official proprietary driver.

• With the month ending, Linux users were beginning to wonder where is this month’s proprietary driver update, but AMD’s web team has just uploaded the Catalyst 11.3 binary Linux driver. What’s changed though in this month’s update? Read on to find out.

Applications

• There is no dearth of good CD/DVD burning tools for Ubuntu. Brasero Disc Burner comes as default in Ubuntu and it is a good enough tool with almost all functionalities you expect from a basic CD/DVD burning application. But what really are the alternatives. Here is a quick listing of very good CD/DVD burning applications available for Linux(in no particular order). Read on.

• Recently, I’ve ramped up my dabbling in 3D art. I’m going to continue exploring Kerkythea. I have shown you the program basics, but our next task is to start using the SketchUp plugin to export my 3D models. Hopefully, this won’t prove a too dazzling task for my brain. I will also try Blender. There’s another cute Windows-only program called anim8or. That shalt be tried, too. More plugins, exports, animations, fancy stuff.

• With luck, in the coming weeks and months, the 3D section will grow beyond what it has today, covering all sorts of otherworldly beauties. But let’s focus on POV-Ray. Truly amazing. I’m speechless.

• One of the tasks that we want to offer students in this year’s GSoC is porting GIMP plug-ins to GEGL operations. This is a very interesting task and if you are a student with experience in C programming, be sure to consider it.

• In my quest to find the perfect text editor (for me), I’ve stumbled upon Scribes and I was quite impressed with its simplicity and features so I though it deserves a post on WebUpd8.

• It turns out that The Board‘s distro packages were a great success! The PPA package alone has been downloaded more then 330 times in just a week. Not bad for package only available for an unreleased version of Ubuntu. And I’m not even counting the implicit testers using the GNOME 3 live image. I’ve got some useful feedback from early testers and I expect get even more from now on.

• iotop does for I/O usage what top does for CPU usage. It watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. It is handy for answering the question “Why is the disk churning so much?”.

• At the most basic level, as I (a non-packager) understand it, packaging software makes it easier for someone else to deploy it. Repeatedly, identically, easily, in an automated manner.That’s it. That’s the big deal. So the question of do I want this software packaged? becomes would it be in my interest to make it easy for other people to deploy this software?

• This means that answering the question “should it be packaged?” isn’t actually about looking at the software, per se. Instead, you look how the situation of a group of people would change if the deployability of the software changed.

• Mounty is a very simple indicator applet you can use to mount CD / DVD images. It supports ISO, IMG, BIN, MDF and NRG and besides mounting, it can also burn the images to a CD/DVD.

• I have reviewed several video players in the past that use MPlayer as a core component. This includes my favorite video player SMPlayer but also KMPlayer (just received an update to version 3) or MPlayer WW. UMplayer is another MPlayer fork with some interesting new features that you won’t find in the other players. I do not want to say to much but I’m pretty impressed by the video player.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• In working on some Phoronix Test Suite improvements for Wine / CodeWeavers today and another code push this afternoon, I checked on the ReactOS site only to find that a new release was made last week and hasn’t yet received much attention from the web.

Games

• Supergamer is, as you might guess, a Linux distribution whose main focus is on gaming. It’s based on a lighter distributions, features a light desktop, and is chocked full of games and demos. It began life in the Spring of 2006 and was received with great enthusiasm.

• As some may have heard, via Twitter or in other communications, with Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad we’ll be ramping up several key areas of our open-source benchmarking software and with our collaborative testing platform, OpenBenchmarking.org, and our continuous integration system, Phoromatic. From this already, Half-Life 2 and 3DMark are running by the Phoronix Test Suite.

• Big Fat Alien, a Kelowna based indie game development studio is coming up with new fun space explorer and platformer for Linux in this April called BEEP.

• Spring technology is far, far from being mature and ready for the common gaming markets. The vast amount of preparation steps needs to get the game going, the bundle of glitches and errors and cryptic messages, the difficulty in getting the games downloaded and setup, all of these make Spring feel like an early alpha-quality concept rather than a true game engine. The potential is there, however it has not been tapped.

• My biggest disappointment is the high expectation I had. Having taken a look at the official websites and the lovely screenshots shown there, I was expecting a visual culinary blast, instead I was greeted with bland, late 90s graphics and a non-inspiring gameplay. Riddled with technical difficulties, Spring left a sour taste in my proverbial mouth. Now that I know how to handle the setup issues, future testing will be easier, but I’m not sure when Spring will become an exciting, marketable product.

• At the moment, it pains me to say, but Spring is not ready for prime time. Grade: 3/10. But hope shall not wither. Maybe in a year or so, I shall revisit my review. For now, the one true free RTS is still a dream.

• A month ago we heard the Source-based Postal III game was planned for a Linux release from Vince Desi, the CEO of Running With Scissors. At that point we heard they were planning for a May release of the game, but now it looks like it’s been pushed back to being a “summer” release and the state of the Linux client for Postal III is a bit less hopeful.

Desktop Environments

• Why KDE? I don’t know… I sat down once and decided to put all the pros and contras of KDE and GNOME in one list. Result was quite strange… Kubuntu had same number of “pros” and “contras” on KDE side. While GNOME only gave me “pros” and no significant “contra”. So, there is something irrational which makes me to choos KDE when I boot my laptop.

• This time I want to talk about being GNOME friendly. While that may sound odd for a KDE developer to think about GNOME, assuming we want our applications to reach the largest possible audience, we should try to ensure GNOME users get a pleasurable experience. After all, a user is a user, there are efforts going on to ensure KDE works well on Windows and Mac OS X, I think we should also take care of GNOME users. They are at least as likely if not more likely to contribute back to our applications.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• After sitting on a train for four hours that whisked me through the countryside of Switzerland and into Germany, I am sitting in a room in Darmstadt that is full of familiar faces, along with one or two less familiar ones.

• For instance, it’s been a few years since I had the opportunity to meet up with Eva, who was KDE e.V. president before I was, and even longer since I got to sit down with Stefan Werden and discuss high level topics about Free software, distributions, KDE, etc. In fact, I think the last time I met up with Stefan for an extended visit was at the Appeal meeting in Berlin all those years ago. We’ve passed each other at conferences a few times since, but today and tomorrow we’re sitting down to really bang our heads together about (what else?) Plasma.

• Camp KDE 2011 is nearly upon us, but that hasn’t stopped the organizers from continuing to add to the fun. Be sure to check out the Camp KDE web site for the final agenda as well as speaker bios.

• Damien Tardy-Panis interviewed Robert Konopka, one of the founders of Xompu, to find out more about the company and why they chose KDE software. Read on to find out more about Xompu, what they think of KDE and our software, and news on job opportunities with the company.

• Ever so often, I take a stroll over to KDE-Apps.org and look at some of the fantastic creations people from the KDE community develop. There are a wide range of apps in nearly every category, but I have selected 5 that stand out and would be very useful additions to my desktop and hopefully yours too. All of these apps are either new or have been recently updated within the past few months.

• Peter Penz blogged about removing the Menu from Dolphin. While this is very interesting and nice looking I have a better idea: why not move the menu into the decoration? All what we need is already there. We have the awesome DBus Menu which allows us to send the menu to any other application (in most cases Plasma). So we could use this technology to direct the menu from the window into its decoration. Of course the menu should not be presented in its full completeness but be compacted into one dropdown menu – just like in the Netbook Shell.

• Time for another giveaway. This time, anyone who buys the digiKam Tricks book has a chance to win a classy f/stop Dial Wristband and a Lomography notebook. As always, the rules are simple: when you buy a copy of the digiKam book, you automatically enter the giveaway. If you buy the book via Amazon, please send me your order confirmation as proof of purchase.

• The latest KDE version is well worth moving from its GNOME counterpart.

GNOME Desktop

• After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

• We have three release team members present. They have told us that they, assisted by Ryan Lortie, will be doing ‘release team things’. The rest of us are mainly busy with marketing and GNOME.Asia organisation. Our websites are a particular focus for the marketing work. Andreas has already added Jason’s first GNOME 3 video to www.gnome3.org as well as a countdown timer. We’re also going to be doing a lot of work on the new gnome.org. We’ll keep you posted as the changes roll in.

• GNOME Color Manager has shown 2D CIE 1931 plots for a couple of years now, but as all color savvy people know, a gamut is a 3D object, and a 2D slice can be horribly inaccurate and misleading sometimes.

• Release team decided to do another call for tarballs to fix some bugs across the entire GNOME3 platform, so 2.91.93 was released yesterday.

• On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME.

• As always, you can download it from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html. If you want to install this image on a system, just add “liveinstall” on the boot command line.

• Frederik Crozat has been doing a fantastic job of making it easy to try out GNOME 3. To complement his OpenSuSE based live images, we are happy to present a Fedora-based GNOME 3 preview. While this image is based Fedora 15 (beta), it is not the same as the Fedora desktop spin, e.g. it is not installable. We expect to re-spin this image with the final bits for the 3.0 release next week.

• Here is a cute video of a benchmark I’ve been looking at in recent times. It’s nice because it not only shows the performance improvements, but also the themeing fixes that were applied. The benchmark shows glade starting up and loading a huge glade file with 4 different GTK versions. It starts with executing glade on the command line and ends with the app quitting when it’s done loading.

Distributions

• The Foresight Linux project released Foresight Linux 2.5, the first major release of this rolling-release Linux distro in two years, featuring Linux 2.6.35, GNOME 2.32.1, KDE 4.6.1, and Xfce 4.8. Meanwhile, rPath released rPath X6, a specialized Linux distro and appliance-building system that, like Foresight, is based on the Conary package manager.

• SliTaz GNU/Linux is a mini distribution and live CD designed to run speedily on hardware with 256 MB of RAM. SliTaz uses BusyBox, a recent Linux kernel and GNU software.

• I recently moved over to Aptosid, and after a few days of using it I think it’s going to be a keeper as a replacement for Arch. While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I would share my experience of moving – from the perspective of someone who has used Arch Linux for over a year. I’ll give a little background, then a brief summary, then some real details on how I got some things to work.

Reviews

• In summary, I am pretty impressed with Zenwalk Linux 7.0. It looks good and it works well, as long as you don’t have a netbook which needs the latest Broadcom wireless driver. I will probably keep it as the primary distribution on my HP 2133, and once the brcm80211 driver is included in it, I will be considering it for some of the others.

New Releases

• Linux is usually exciting, but this past week brought several nice developments. Slackware announced another developmental milestone for their next version. Bodhi Linux reached 1.0. Foresight announced their first release in two years. Zenwalk developers released version 7.0. And SimplyMepis gets a release candidate.

• Slackware server hosting is one of the newest trends in domain hosting that is allowing many users to move from a Windows hosting platform. There are a lot of clients that are accustomed to Windows hosting, but loads of clients are seeking new hosting environments.

• Slackware isn’t exactly a new environment, but it has maintained a widespread use since its inception in 1993. It never quite gained the same popularity as Windows, but it has managed to be popular enough to move from one version to the next.

• Even though I’m already running MEPIS 11 Beta 3 as my production system, I downloaded the RC version 1 to test it.

• The Live DVD booted with no issue on my box. That’s great. I still need to try it on older systems, so I’ll wait a bit.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Today we have posted the first publicly available screencast of the new Mandriva Application Manager (MAM) on youtube. It shows the basic look&feel.

• [...]

• Soon we are are going to deliver the first alpha (at least a tech preview) too.

• On September 18, 2010, in response to Mandriva’s liquidation of its “Edge-IT” subsidiary and the attendant layoff of a substantial share of its developers, a group consisting of former Mandriva developers and Mandriva community contributers announced their intention to form a non-profit organization and release a fork of Mandriva Linux called Mageia Linux.

• I’m very glad to announce that awesome is available in Mageia since last week

Red Hat Family

• Open source operating system and middleware firm Red Hat may be about to bulk out is JBoss middleware line through acquisition, CBR has learned.

• The news was confirmed in a CBR interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who said that now that the firm is approaching the billion dollar revenue mark, acquisitions are on the cards.

• Duffy is a Senior Interaction Designer for Red Hat. She leads the Fedora design team. Máirín is an avid artist, and she happens to be very involved in the OSS (open source software) community. Needless to say, she is a huge fan of Inkscape. Duffy is also a contributor on the GNOME project, and co-founder of GNOMEWomen.

• Recently I saw a blog on Red Hat and its decision to pay a company for the use of that company’s royalty bearing patented software. The author of the column lambasted Red Hat because (in the author’s opinion) Red Hat had (on one hand) stated a policy against software patents, and (on the other hand) seemed to be “encouraging patent trolls”.

• Open source supplier Red Hat is growing its business quickly in non-traditional markets in the UK, mirroring US expansion, according to chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

• Whitehurst told Computerworld UK that while Linux had a deep presence in financial, telecoms and military sectors, Red Hat predicts fast growth in other markets where a number of companies are moving away from Unix.

Fedora

• So, this is what is implemented for F15 now. For F16 we will make a minor change on top of this: /var/run and /var/lock will become symlinks to /run (resp /run/lock), so that we don’t have to use bind mounts anymore which are not the most beautiful thing to use by default, and confusing to the admin. Due to the implications of symlinks and RPM we didn’t want to make that change in F15.

• In short, it is awesome.

• One thing I’ve found is that I’m liking GNOME 3 more and more recently.

• On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I finally decided to take the plunge and install the Fedora 15 Alpha on my primary workstation. I’ve been using GNOME Shell pretty much exclusively since Fedora 13, and I was looking forward to an even cleaner setup as it got closer to its first official release. The installation went smoothly, and, soon enough, I had the new interface up and running, and, I have to say, it’s looking great!

• Though Fedora and Ubuntu have taken contrasting approaches, they’ll both offer the new-to-Linux user two high quality choices.

• Now this guy was a Fedora Ambassador and imho a good one, promoting Fedora and teaching new users how to get their systems up and running. But now he is no more an Ambassador. Why?… because some guys here think that the Freedom preached by this community ends when it comes to talk about Fedora.

• So if you are a fedora ambassador, promote the freedom we provide under our terms!!… wait.. that sounds weird…. oh yes… its a bit of contradictory isnt it? This guy was banned as a fedora ambassador for teaching on a blog post how to configure some UI things in a Windows 7 virtual machine, how to install Flash player under Fedora (omg he’s so evil!!), for explaining his blog followers how hi did to get some stuff working even if they are not the Fedora ‘standards’ for doing things.

• So I upgraded my machine to Fedora 15 last night using preupgrade, and spent hours in trying to clean up my /home from ancient stuff since way back to Fedora 5 as they were causing weird issues.

• To those who are wondering: No, Fedora 15 beta is not out yet, its still in late alpha. Beta should be released in few weeks time, but I’m too excited to wait :P. Check out the Fedora 15 schedule for details on release dates.

Debian Family

• Debian Squeeze is a good choice if you want to run a server or a desktop with stable packages and a couple of years of security patches, even more if your hardware is from an exotic architecture.

• I’ve mentioned two or three times now that I have been spending a lot of time in Arch and Debian these days. I hold both distros in equally high regard for being fast, light and good starting points for outdated machines.

• Debian gets points for reaching all the way back to the 486 generation, which means I can use it on my very very old systems. At the same time though, I find myself floating back to Arch more often than not.

• Warren Woodford has uploaded SimplyMEPIS 10.9.94, the first release candidate of MEPIS 11.0. This RC is available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_64.iso.

• In each of the cases listed above, the failure case has been analysed and is understood. Fixes for all of the problems have been developed, and replacement images have been produced and tested. Following our normal naming scheme, the new images are versioned 6.0.1a to denote the bugfix rebuild.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Dear Ubuntu 9.10 users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Karmic Koala release of the popular Ubuntu operating system. One month from today, on April 29th, it reaches end of life (EOL).

• Tomorrow, March 31st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, due for release on April 28th, 2011.

• If you have used Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition interface, you will be familiar with Unity. Unity interface is made of a launcher on the left where active application windows, pinned application shortcuts and unity-places are shown. On the top left corner there is an Ubuntu icon that shows dash menu with shortcuts. The panel on top is not customizable and movable and on the right, all the app-indicators stack up. Unity launcher also supports quick-lists and some applications like Gwibber, Shutter, Take Screenshot etc. are already using them.

• That’s the first thing that went through my head when I learned that the next version of Ubuntu Linux, Release 11.04, would be codenamed Natty Narwhal, in keeping with the tradition of alliterative animal names.

• Since 1996, I’ve been through Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gusty Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Lucid Lynx and Maverick Meerkat, though I had skipped a version or two.

• A narwhal, as it turns out, is an arctic whale, a sign, perhaps, that cool things are coming with the next release of Ubuntu, which is expected on April 28. Earlier in March, Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, released the third alpha test version of the operating system, and was scheduled to make available two beta versions before the final release version.

• I’m a big proponent of “nonfree offsetting” (few people are, but I’m sticking to my guns); If Canonical wants to ship nonfree Flash instead of almost fully working GNU Gnash, then they should be willing to offset their balance with adequate investment into the free software alternative; i.e. they should be putting money into Gnash.

• I’m not going to try and re-fight the old battles about who contributes and who doesn’t, or who contributes more or should contribute more. I just wanted to show one area where I think Ubuntu is a top contributor: putting the “community” in open source.

• The combination of Ubuntu Linux’s growing popularity with all the big changes coming up in the next version mean that Natty Narwhal, or Ubuntu 11.04, might just be the most widely and anxiously anticipated release of the open source operating system ever.

Flavours and Variants

• Huh – pre-orders are usually needed only by software that requires a cost to download… Upon clicking on the link was I redirected to paypal with the item “elementary: Jupiter” in my order summary. I’ve read a few things around the internet about Elementary OS and I was keen to give it a try, but after having paid for Elive I don’t think I’ll ever be using a Linux based OS again that requires me to pony up some green for it.

• I liked from the beginning the idea behind Bodhi Linux and so I followed the progress of this young version of Linux and take advantage of version 1.0 (congratulations to Jeff and the entire team) to make a review.

• For the uninitiated Bodhi Linux is a recent project that taking as a base Ubuntu 10.04 “reconstructs” the Enlightenment desktop, it use the login system manager of LXDE (and also as the terminal) and offers its own package system (.bod); The system being based on Ubuntu is still compatible with .deb and dpkg and aptitude can be used without problems.

• I have recently become smitten with the Bodhi Linux distribution. It’s melding of the Enlightenment desktop and the Ubuntu distribution makes for quite a solid and speedy distribution. Because this distribution is fairly new to the scene, I thought it would be a good idea to interview one of the developers, so you can get a better idea where Bodhi Linux comes from.

• 1. What made you decide to begin Bodhi Linux?

• PinguyOS is one I hadn’t heard of until recently. It seems to be just a baby, in Linux distro terms, although I say that not due to size or its features, but because of its age. PinguyOS only came onto the scene sometime in 2010. The distribution is an offshoot of Ubuntu, and therefore follows its six-month release cycle and simple naming. PinguyOS 10.10 64bit. My new distro for the week.

• PinguyOS comes as a LiveDVD. As expected of a Live DVD, it comes packed with features! In fact, this has to be the most feature-packed distros I have seen to date.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• After Nokia revealed its partnership with Microsoft, many developers began regarding MeeGo and Symbian as sinking ships. However, they’re not being immediately ditched by the world’s biggest phone maker. Nokia’s still selling Symbian devices, and many millions still exist in the hands of consumers. But how long will it be before these platforms really do run out of gas for good?

Android

• IDC predicts 450million smart phones will ship in 2011. That’s a big number. About the same as “PC” shipments. Linux will be on a lot of them, about 39.5%.

• With thousands of Android apps to choose from everyone has their favourite. These are some out our picks

• If you’re an Android user there are literally thousands of apps to choose from in the Android Market. Which is great for variety but a nightmare to find the ones that you really will use versus the ones that will simply take up space on your mobile phone or tablet PC.

• Android’s development model has always been flawed. Google develops it behind closed doors and then makes the source available after each major release. This puts Android in the strange position of being FOSS only after development on a release is complete. During development it is closed. This has often raised my suspicion but I’ve never considered it more than an annoyance. I’d often wished that Android was developed out in the open by a larger community than just Google; however, having Android be FOSS by the time it got to me has always been sweet enough to stomach the sour taste of closed development. Now, with the recent announcement of Google’s intention to keep Android 3.0 closed source for some unknown length of time, it is clear this can no longer be ignored. Google, and thus Android, cannot be trusted.

Sub-notebooks

• Hercules has launched a new range of eCAFE netbooks, the eCAFE Slim HD and the eCAFE EX HD, both models are designed to be ultra portable, and the EX HD is designed to provide up to 13 hours of usage.

• Both models comes with a Cortex A8 processor, and Linux as the OS, you get 512MB of RAM a standard and 8GB of storage in the eCAFE Slim HD or 16GB of storage in the eCAFE EX HD, plus 50GB of online storage.

• Hardware maker Hercules this week gave Linux fans a nice boost by unveiling two new additions to its eCAFÉ netbook line that use ARM processors and run the open source operating system.

Free Software/Open Source

• http://robertogaloppini.net/2011/03/31/osi-the-open-source-road-ahead/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CommercialOpenSourceSoftware+%28Commercial+Open+Source+Software%29

• I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source. The license just helps pass the sniff test. I use one other test which I like to call “The Patch Test”.

• NASA has been implementing an Open Government Plan for nearly a year, and this week they held the first NASA Open Source Summit in Mountain View, CA. But the roots of open source at NASA go back much further, to its founding legislation in 1958, which designed NASA as a source that would “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information”–a goal perfectly suited to an open approach.

• Google open source guru Chris DiBona has called on NASA to use more open source code in its aerospace program, urging the government agency to test free software in unmanned flights and “blow-up some robots.”

• “I’ve heard people say: ‘We don’t want to endanger flights. We don’t want to endanger lives. Open source software comes from unknown sources.’ But that’s not what open source software is,” DiBona told gathered NASA employees on Wednesday at NASA’s inaugural Open Source Summit at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. “Open source software is still software. You have to make sure it fits your mission. You have to make sure it provides utility and security and the ‘bug-free-ed-ness’ you’re looking for. It’s just software.

• Today I’m giving a presentation at the NASA Open Source Summit at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Mountain View, CA. The talk is called “Open Source Governance for your Organization” and is based on my experience within IBM in the last few years and what I have written in this blog.

• You might think that a good program is all about good programming. But for a number of applications, the barrier to success isn’t programming at all. Some of the most interesting projects nowadays — speech recognition, for example — rely on machine-learning from databases of information. It’s not enough to write free software for these applications, we have to also provide that software with the right data. Contributing to these projects is needed from a much larger group of people, but it also can be very easy to do.

• Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said.

• Open source software (OSS) is recognized for the cost savings it delivers when compared with proprietary alternatives. As enterprises continue to adopt OSS, the open source communities, mostly made up of volunteers, have been calling on enterprises to make contributions and donations with the aim of fostering open source software innovation and growth.

• With more that 1,000 open source communities in existence today, enterprises have many options when choosing where to contribute. With each community potentially delivering enterprise-grade technology, large companies have many reasons to keep open source alive and well. How can enterprises evaluate which communities to work with and how to get involved? Here are some suggestions.

Events

• In fact, even if you’ve never touched a GNU/Linux based computer there are sessions and activities for you too! Throughout the entire Linux Fest Northwest weekend the Tutorium is open with several repeated mini-sessions running throughout and skilled volunteers looking to help and introduce new users (and potential new users) to GNU/Linux!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• One of the new features that Mozilla introduced in Firefox 4 is a Do Not Track (DNT) setting. When the user enables the DNT option in the browser’s preference dialog, Firefox will transmit a custom header in HTTP requests that will inform servers that the user wants to opt out of Internet tracking. The concept has obvious merit because it provides a simpler, more predictable, and more consistent approach than the cookie-based mechanisms that are currently used today to signify opt-out status.

• The latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, version 4, was released this week with a number of new security features, including a mechanism for preventing web-based attacks.

• One of the new security features, called Content Security Policy (CSP), is enabled by default and designed to stop common web-based attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and data injection, by providing a mechanism for sites to explicitly tell the browser which content is legitimate, according to Mozilla.

• Firefox 4 is the best Firefox yet, and it’s packed with useful tricks and features that can make your online life easier.

• Mozilla is already offering a preview of the next-generation Firefox 5 for download and is planning on providing a stabilized version in about two weeks. Firefox 5 final is expected to arrive in the week of June 29.

• Firefox 4 is special in many senses. Mozilla has made sure that this time users would love this browser in every aspect, whether it would be performance or display. We would be sharing some wonderful tips which would let you speed up Firefox 4.

• Mozilla released Firefox 4 last week. I’m trying hard to like the new browser, but it keeps finding ways to annoy me. First, it moved the Reload button for no good reason (same for the Home button, but that’s just as easily fixed). Second, it put the tabs at the top of the screen (again, easily fixed). Third, and most important, a bunch of my favorite add-ons stopped working. Luckily, I’ve come up with a few ways to fix the interface quirks that are driving me nuts and solve the extension compatibility problem.

• It turns out that Mozilla was not kidding. Firefox 5 is already in the works and can actually already be downloaded as a preview.

• Mozilla has officially ended support for embedding the Gecko layout engine in applications other than Mozilla core applications. The move will have an impact on any application which has used the Firefox layout engine in their applications and the first to announce that it will have to make significant changes is the Camino browser. A layout engine provides all the functionality needed to take HTML or other web content and convert it into a displayable form.

• In a posting to mozilla.dev.embedding, Embedding Module owner Benjamin Smedberg said that Mozilla had been considering the future for embedding Gecko in other applications. He cites the difficulty involved to date, the expected complexity of moving to a multiple process model and the desire to “strongly prioritize” Firefox as the key product of Mozilla. There is a possibility that embedding support could return in the future after Mozilla has moved Firefox to a multi-process model, but the developers are not going to prioritise that as a goal in their design work.

SaaS

• When, as Gingras pointed out, it’s been reduced by Microsoft’s cloud commercials to the answer to all of life’s problems, we’ve clearly reached a level of complete absurdity. You need to fix that family picture? Go to the cloud. You bored at the airport? Go to the cloud.

Databases

• The stable release of Drizzle has generated a lot of interest in migrating previous MySQL web sites to Drizzle. The good news for people attempting such migrations is that this isn’t incredibly difficult in many cases; this article will describe what to look out for and how to go about converting a web site or any other database related project.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• We already know what some of the big-ticket items are likely to be. There’ll be room for other features too, however, both large and small. It’s therefore time to define a simple process for collecting, sorting, reviewing, and prioritizing proposals and plans for new features, for JDK 8 and for later releases.

• OpenOffice.org is a huge lumbering beast.

• Don’t get us wrong, we like it in principle and the practice is steadily getting better, but there’s still room for improvement.

• Here are 20 things we’d change about it to make it better.

• The Document Foundation published a summary today listing its achievements since its inception on September 28, 2010. Most users know of the widely publicized events such as the three releases of LibreOffice and the call for donations in order to fund the formation of a legal foundation. But activity has also encompassed, among other things, social and other media interaction, intellectual property protection, and distribution relationships.

• PortableApps.com and The Document Foundation are proud to announce the release of LibreOffice Portable 3.3.2. LibreOffice Portable is a full-featured office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database — packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.

CMS

• In my DrupalCon keynote in Chicago, I talked about the key initiatives that I believe we should focus on for Drupal 8 core. One of those key initiatives that I talked about was configuration management.

Business

• Others, which mix proprietary software and open source, fare little better. SourceFire is at $130m, while companies like Alfresco, SugarCRM, Pentaho, JasperSoft, etc. talk about reaching $100m as the likely threshold to filing for an IPO.

• But no one – no one – is anywhere near Red Hat’s $1bn. Why?

• It looks like it’s time again to ponder on Red Hat’s ability to (nearly) make $1bn in annual revenue and wonder why open source has not produced more billion dollar success stories.

Semi-Open Source

• I have been asked to turn “Open for Business” into a monthly column, focusing on applying the open source way to business. Let the reader beware that I am not a millionaire. I don’t own multiple houses or drive a new car, but for the past eight years I have made a living running a business focused exclusively on open source software (and that’s without needing outside investment). The suggestions offered in this column fall in line with our business plan of “spend less than you earn.” I hope others will find them useful.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Today we’re launching the first in a series of features on how to use common websites without using proprietary JavaScript.

Government

• In November 1959, for TV Guide Magazine, John F. Kennedy wrote about television as “a force that has changed the political scene”. He had recently experienced the first televised Presidential debates, against Richard M. Nixon, and realised that things would never be the same again. But not even he foresaw that 50 years later, that same communication technology would still be rewriting the rules of politics and government, continuing to open up yet more aspects of political life — not least by bringing the workings of parliaments around the world into our homes.

• Today, we’re excited to announce that our Civic Commons team, working with the White House and the Federal CIO, has made the cost-saving IT Dashboard, the technology behind IT.USAspending.gov, freely available for any government entity to use and customize. This development is the latest in a growing movement to cut government IT spending by sharing reusable technology, thereby reducing redundant development costs and encouraging cooperation between multiple branches and levels of government.

Licensing

• At the beginning of his talk, DiBona said that according to Google’s net crawlers, the web now contains over 31 million open source projects, spanning 2 billion lines of code. Forty-eight per cent of these projects are under the GPL, 23 per cent use the LGPL, 14 per cent use the BSD license, 6 per cent use Apache, and 5 per cent use the MIT license.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Programming

• Details about the utilities can be found a post on the Greplin:tech blog. Greplin also notes that, “As always: we love pull requests, issue reports, and comments!”. The tools are hosted on GitHub and are released under version 2.0 of the Apache License.

• Last week we interviewed Luciana Fujii Pontello a representation of women power in the GNU/Linux world. This week we are publishing the interview of Patricia Santana Cruz who was played a critical role in the release of the latest version of Cheese.

• The stories of software development projects in crisis are amazingly familiar to all experienced programmers and managers. In this column, we’ll see which aspects of projects in crisis are strikingly similar and how they relate to bugs.

• A software product is inseparable from underlying software process which resulted in creating it. Though bugs are technical in nature, it is the software development process that has the most impact on resulting in bugs. To illustrate this, see what happens in a new software project when – Raphus cucullatus, nicknamed Dodo – was given the responsibility of managing the project.

• All is well: Dodo kick starts the new project with a team of experienced developers. Dodo thinks that software can be produced under tight deadlines and creates a project plan. The customer is satisfied with the plan.

Standards/Consortia

• Today the ARD internet platform Tagesschau.de will receive an award for the use of Open Standards at the “Document Freedom Day”. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII) for offering the broadcasted shows also in the free video format “Ogg Theora”.

• In Berlin FSFE and FFII will hand over a certificate and a cake with the “rOgg On!” label on to Sven Bruns, technical manager at tagesschau.de. In Hamburg, Sabine Klein, vice editorial director of tagesschau.de will accept a DFD cake on behalf of the editorial team.

• Approval of OpenDocument Version 1.2 as Committee Specification(CS)

• On 17 March 2011, the Technical Committee (TC) of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument or ODF) officially and unanimously approved ODF 1.2 as a Committee Specification.

• The ODF TC is in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of standards for electronic business and web services, and which is the designated maintenance body for the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 IS26300 format. The next stage of the approval process is the official vote within OASIS to adopt this specification as an OASIS standard.

• Today marks the annual observance of Document Freedom Day (DFD), a global day for document liberation.

• On this important occasion, let’s all recognize that progress has been made to promote and use open standards and to liberate documents. In January, India’s Department of Information Technology published its draft Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (IFEG), which lists ODF on its approved standards for e-governance in India.

• “Yawn – yet another music player?” might be your first reaction at the sight of yet-another media player gracing the pages of OMG! Ubuntu, but this one is actually rather special.

• The HTML5-written media player runs in the browser (so what?) but is designed to play back your local media (oooh!): your entire music library can be added and played through it (super neat).

• Today being Document Freedom Day, I’m taking stock of how unencumbered my digital lifestyle is — both on the consumption as well as on the production side.

• Today, the United Kingdom’s CabinetOffice released is official Government ICT Strategy – not only in .pdf and .doc, but also in .odt!

Leftovers

• Southwark Council’s claim for £2.5m in damages from IBM for supposedly faulty software has been dismissed.

• The court found that IBM had delivered the system as requested in 2007. It was bought through a framework agreement between the Treasury and IBM.

• Google and Oracle have each now filed Claim Construction Statements, along with supporting declarations, in the Oracle v. Google patent litigation, and the previous dustup over discovery has broken out once again, with Oracle writing to the judge whining about Google’s responses to Oracle’s Interrogatories numbers 4-16.

• The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode.

• 1. The command line interface. 2. Various shells, including their script syntax. 3. Builtin programming language support for many languages.

• As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.

• Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.

• The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

• The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

• The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

• Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

Finance

• Since we can’t watch Lloyd on trial in the Galleon case, we present the next best thing – a few minutes of last January’s FCIC hearing with Brooksley Born, who warned more than a decade ago about a derivatives nightmare before being professionally silenced by Greenspan, Summers and Rubin.

• For Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Special Situations Group, disasters can be a source of some of the biggest profits. Now the secretive investing operation faces its own potential calamity.

• Goldman Sachs already has shut two units that made bets with the company’s money because such proprietary trading by banks will be prohibited under the Volcker rule approved by Congress last year. Still, the Special Situations Group, known as SSG, continues to make investments and named a new global head last month. Executives have argued that SSG shouldn’t be affected because it’s more of a lending than a trading business.

• A few weeks ago we asked a simple question: Why are the same Wall Street banks that lobbied so hard to dilute the passages in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill banning proprietary trading now jettisoning their proprietary trading groups, without so much as a whimper?

Privacy

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Microsoft has once again stood up to Apple’s epically ridiculous attempt to trademark the term “app store”, filing another request that the US Patent and Trademark Office deny Apple’s trademark application in full.

• “Apple cannot escape the hard truth: when people talk about competitors’ stores, they call them ‘app stores.’ You don’t have to look far to find this generic use – The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs,” reads Microsoft’s latest filing with the US Trademark and Patent Office.

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