● 04.12.11

● Links 12/4/2011: KDE Targets Mobile Devices, OLPC Growth in Peru

Posted in News Roundup at 12:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When laptop sales overtook desktops, “Microsoft didn’t care,” Hudson pointed out. “Either one meant the sale of a Windows OS, and often other software.”

• The switch to “mobile-everything,” on the other hand, “is already having a huge impact, because in most cases it marks the loss of another customer to Apple or Linux.

• “Maybe it’s not the year of linux on the desktop, but it’s also not the year of Windows on mobile devices, and it never will be,” Hudson concluded. “Mobile is where the growth is, for both business and the consumer, and that market is being divvied up between Apple and Linux, with Linux dominating.”

Server

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation this week officially released the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification (CGL).

• CGL provides a set of specifications which helps to define the requirements of carrier and network equipment vendors. The CGL 5 specification is the first major revision since CGL 4.0 was released in February of 2007.

• The new CGL 5.0 specifications have been available in draft form for months, and vendors including MontaVisa and Wind River have already released products that will support the new specification.

Applications

• VLC is beyond doubts the most popular open source, cross-platform media player and multi-media framework written by VideoLAN projects. VLC player is small in size,vlc-logo just about 17 Mb and immensely powerful! In this post we will explore the player and list 20+ things you can do with VLC player.

• With each passing day, I find myself more amazed at the level of innovation shown from within the browser community. Both open source and closed source browsers on the Linux desktop manage to extend browser functionality far beyond the usual. This has proven both exciting and problematic. Exciting in the sense that we can now do more than ever thought previously with our browsers, yet problematic in that we have more moving parts that malfunction us.

• In this article, I’ll highlight the best browsers for the Linux platform and offer some additional thoughts on how they have made an impact on our lives.

• Most of us know about portable apps for Windows, and how useful they can be sometimes. It’s great to simply have your favorite programs and add-ons with you, especially in the case of browsers. However, portable Linux apps have been nonexistent, at least until now. Lately a decent collection of Linux portable apps have showed up, and are now worth mentioning for those who want to try them out.

• [...]

• Whenever you’re on the go, it’s very important that you can take notes and keep track of them. Gnote is a great choice because it’s lightweight and doesn’t have Mono as a dependency. It’s easy to use, has lots of formatting and organizational features, and doesn’t take up much space. It’s your best bet to jot down those sudden ideas.

• Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour’s native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies – see the advertisements on the site – and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour’s audio capabilities and Harrison’s unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.

• There’s no shortage of quality free media players to entertain your eyes and ears, regardless of your computer or operating system. With cracking cost-free solutions like VLC (often considered the king of media players) and iTunes alternative JetAudio, you really shouldn’t be paying for this sort of software.

• Universal Media Player, or UMPlayer for short, is yet another addition to the media player category which uses the MPlayer backend to chew through any media you give it. The app promises to play everything and integrates various web services into one desktop solution.

Proprietary

• The bugs are dying at an incredible pace in Norway today, as the Opera Desktop Team has put forth another release candidate, these last few coming with point numbers! The latest, and 2nd for this very long spring day, is RC 4.1, which brings lots of presentation bugs to an end.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• For a comprehensive tutorial on sed, check out the Introduction and Tutorial of sed by Bruce Barnett.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The Plasma Quick initiative aims to take libplasma, which is the underlying infrastructure for Plasma based applications, and make it an even better solution for devices that it already is.

• Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, “In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors.” For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds.

GNOME Desktop

• With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that’s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it’s only in experimental for now.

• For those that prefer a “dock” approach to launching apps, the GNOME Shell has that option covered as well, just add your favorites to the dock and click to launch. The dock is also an easy way to switch between open apps.

• GNOME 3 Shell seems a lot more mature and usable than it did two months ago, while GNOME 3 fallback mode presents a compelling traditional alternative to GNOME 3 Shell.

Distributions

• CTKArch is a distribution, or perhaps more a spin, based on Arch Linux that is using Openbox as default window manager. It’s minimal in size, if you believe that anything under CD size is minimal these days, and seems to be designed first and foremost to run from CD or USB as a live system, so it has a lot in common with ArchBang. Only a few days ago, 7th April, v. 0.7 was released into the wilderness of the Linux distribution jungle. I had toyed with 0.6 on and off for a few weeks and thus am in the position to make a few observations.

Reviews

Red Hat Family

• That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

• Last summer, in fact, it was named the most popular Linux distribution in that area, with almost 30 percent of the Linux server market.

• LINUX DISTRIBUTION CentOS has released a major update following in the footsteps of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, which has been updated to version 5.6.

• CentOS is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the same versioning scheme as RHEL, with both distributions now on version 5.6. CentOS is essentially a free version of RHEL built with the same packages as Red Hat’s commercially supported version but without the Red Hat branding.

• While Red Hat released RHEL 5.6 in January, it has taken a few months for the CentOS lads to get around to removing all the necessary branding to avoid infringing Red Hat’s licences. However the delay has been made worse by having to split effort between CentOS 5.6 and CentOS 6.

Debian Family

• . My conclusion is CrunchBang appears to be a good tool, I just haven’t found any task for it.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For the last few months, on nearly every site I blog for, I have been saying that Ubuntu 11.04 was going to be a big setback for Ubuntu. This “setback” was mostly due to Canonical’s decision to use Unity as the default desktop. This decision sidestepped GNOME and GNOME 3 all together. Well, after using Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1 for a few weeks now, I have to say I was wrong. Although there are a few weak spots in the release, this beta release has gone a long way to showing me that Ubuntu hasn’t fallen off the tracks, jumped the shark, or is about to lose it’s way. In fact, Ubuntu 11.04 will remain king of Linux for new users as far as I can see.

• In the short time since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 beta, the OS has received mixed reviews. Some testers say it is the worst Ubuntu beta release ever, while others say they are impressed by its new features.

• The new Unity interface is surprisingly usable. Of course, it does have some rough edges and power users may find it limiting in many ways. Still, we think that the new interface has great potential and is already good enough for day-to-day computing. Naturally, Ubuntu 11.04 is more than just a fresh interface, and the new version brings a slew of other updates and improvements that make it a solid release indeed.

• Not to say i hate everything about it. I like the speed, and it looks great. The new app launcher is excellent so far despite one or two crashes. The idea of a dock isn’t horrible, but i’d like more control over it, not some hidden options in the Compiz settings. And a final note for anyone who’s going to troll… get used to articles like this as Linux becomes more popular… it’s called constructive criticism, and i noticed the Linux community often doesn’t take it very well. This is just an opinion, you’re free to po

• Ubuntu announced its 8.04 Desktop release almost 36 months ago, on April 24, 2008. For the LTS Desktop releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 36 months. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop will reach end of life on Thursday, May 12, 2011. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop.

• As I read the reviews of Unity that have started to appear around the web, I see there is a concern regarding the graphics hardware support for Unity. Some users are concerned that Unity will not run on their hardware, and so they will have to use Unity 2D instead. Let me tell you about the choices we made.

• As time goes, hardware becomes old and obsolete. This is very much true for GPUs. The rate of graphics advance over the last 10 years has been impressive. What was great 5 years ago isn’t enough to run all types of real-time 3D graphics programs anymore. For Unity we looked at the visual effects we wanted to do and the level of performance we wanted to achieve. To minimize the number of draw calls per frame in Unity, we needed GPUs to have support for frame buffer objects. With frame buffer objects support, we render only the parts of the interface that need to be updated and leave the rest untouched. For rendering, we wanted to have flexibility and the best visual results possible. So we decided to require ARB vertex and fragment support.

Devices/Embedded

• The Linux Foundation announced the availability of the Yocto Project Release 1.0, which includes a version of OpenEmbedded’s bitbake build system, major improvements to its developer interface, and Linaro technology for improved ARM support. The Linux Foundation also announced new Yocto Steering Group members Dell and Mentor Graphics to help oversee the embedded Linux standardization project.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

• But what strikes me is that these do not address what is, for me, the central question: why does Nokia need Qt in the long term – that is, beyond the short-term requirement to “harvest additional value” from the platform, as Nokia put it so charmingly? Until that question is answered, I remain pessimistic about the long-term effects of Nokia’s moves on Qt and open source in general – however many refutations the company issues on other points.

• And if Qt has no future, why on earth would Nokia continue to invest money and people in producing the open source version that would be commercialised by someone else? Surely it is bound to pass the open source side across to Digia at some point, or maybe to some other party, although it’s hard to see who would want to pick up the non-commercial part of Qt when the money-making aspect resides elsewhere.

Android

• Google is baking specifications for a tablet based on its Chrome OS into its open source Linux code, the company confirmed. Meanwhile Google flattened its executive structure, promoting Android creator Andy Rubin and others to senior vice president roles, and has also acquired Pushlife, makers of an iTunes-like music app for Android.

• LinkedIn released the final LinkedIn for Android 1.0 app to help professionals view and manage LinkedIn connections. In other enterprise-related Android news, Google upgraded its security and device management programs for Android with three Google Apps updates, including a Device Policy update, a Google Apps Lookup app, and a Honeycomb tablet encryption feature.

• A report today from Taiwanese Digitimes shows some explosive estimates for $150 and cheaper, contract free Android phones. Specifically, the paper says it expects to see 20-25 million entry level Android devices ship in 2011, up from 2.5-3 million in 2010.

OLPC

• Alan Garcia, the President of Peru, just announced that the country will be handing out their one millionth XO laptop by the end of this year and will soon be building manufacturing facilities to build the laptops locally. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program created the XO laptop as an inexpensive tool for children around the world to learn with. The OLPC program in Peru has a goal to have laptops in 100% of the country’s public primary schools by the end of 2011.

Tablets

• Housed in aluminum, the Iconia Tab A500 includes Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth connectivity, but for now foregoes either 3G access or the need for a wireless carrier contract. The tablet is said to offer 10 hours of battery life, but measures 10.24 x 6.97 x 0.52 inches and weighs 1.69 pounds, making it heftier than the iPad 2′s 1.33 pounds and 9.5 x 7.31 x 0.34-inch frame.

Free Software/Open Source

• A Google engineer has released an open source Java client for Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency that may eventually revolutionize online transactions.

• Gene sequencing has gotten incredibly fast and cheap, and researchers around the world are pouring huge volumes of genomic data onto their private servers, in the hope they will sift through it all to make groundbreaking discoveries. Should so much genomic data be so closely guarded, or should it be poured into a free and open database that all scientists share?

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has committed to a more aggressive release schedule for the Firefox Web browser. There were nearly three years between the launch of Firefox 3 and Firefox 4, but Firefox 5 is expected to be introduced in a matter of months at the end of June. There are some benefits to the rapid release schedule, but also some potential pitfalls.

• Mozilla has announced that it will release the first update for Firefox 4 on April 26, about a month after the original release, back in March 22.

• New with this release is that Mozilla will start using code names (somehow related to the main branch codename, in this case Tumucumaque) for udpates as well, as a way to help developers that follow Firefox development closely, more clearly understand what is coming when.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Healthcare

• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking to establish a Custodial Agent (CA) that will facilitate the establishment and operations of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) Open Source software development ecosystem and define the relationship between and interactions among developers, users, vendors and service providers.

• Last week I wrote about the UK government’s “new” IT strategy, which is designed in part to avoid some of the costly mistakes of the past. And as far as the latter go, there aren’t many bigger or costlier than the NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NpfIT).

• Now, some of us might say that one of the reasons this was such a disaster was that it did just about everything wrong: it was imposed unilaterally from the top, and built around huge slabs of proprietary code – but you’d expect me to say that. So here’s someone else opining much the same, slightly more politely:

Business

• Since free software was originally created by hackers for hackers, it’s no wonder that the first programs they created were tools – things like Emacs – and something to run them on – GNU/Linux. The second generation applications were key infrastructural elements – Web servers, databases etc., while more recently, we’ve seen the rise of applications like enterprise content management and CRM, as open source moves closer to the end users.

• But one class of software that seemed totally absent was that for managing human resources – HRM apps. I thought this was something of a lack, but that would be filled in due course. It turns out that it was filled quite some time ago – 2006, to be precise – and that I somehow overlooked the open source OrangeHRM product completely since then. To remedy this, I met up with Sujee Saparamadu, the CEO and cofounder of the company, to catch up on the subject.

Programming

• I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.

Standards/Consortia

• There are two undeniable facts in the information technology industry today, which often end up being forgotten in our day by day activities:

• Corporations are monopolistic by nature and technological dependence is at the base of the information technology industry economic model.

Leftovers

• Network engineers and hard-core Web architects know that HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), the data transfer method used by the Web, isn’t the most efficient data transfer protocol around. So, back in November 2009, Google started working on a faster replacement: SPDY, pronounced “speedy.” And, now, if you’re using the Chrome Web browser, and visiting Google Web sites, you can see SPDY in action according to Conceivably Tech.

• I would be falsely modest if I said that I am not proud that our pleadings have been entirely endorsed by a panel of three highly authoritative judges. The facts are simple and very well described in the order. Basically, typing in the Google search field “Name Surname” of my client, the autocompletion and the “suggested searches” (now “related searches”) offered to complete it with “con man” (“truffatore”) and “fraud” (“truffa”), which caused a lot of trouble to the client, who has a pulic image both as an entrepeneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance. Google argued that it could not be held liable because it is a hosting provider, but we showed that this is content produced by them (and by the way, they do filter out certain content, including terms that are know to be used to distribute copyright infringing material), although through automated means. Therefore in this case the search engine cannot avail itself of the safe harbour provision of the Ecommerce Directive.

Cablegate

• JULIAN ASSANGE: We have increased our publishing since late last year when my present difficulties began to include over 63 media organisations from around the world. We have now published over 7,000 US Embassy cables relating to Cablegate, so, yes, we’re continuing on. Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing.

Finance

• By mid-March, as the government tells it, Matthew H. Kluger knew the FBI was closing in.

• As a lawyer for three of the nation’s premier corporate law firms, most recently in the Washington office of Wilson Sonsini, he had allegedly stolen secrets that yielded tens of millions of dollars of insider trading profits. Now he was trying to eliminate the evidence.

Privacy

• A federal grand jury has opened an investigation into mobile apps and what kind of personal data they might transmit about users, Pandora has revealed. The streaming music company recently amended its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to note that it had been subpoenaed to produce documents about its user data collection on Android and iOS devices, which the company believes is related to an industry-wide probe into how mobile apps capitalize on user information.

• Google and Facebook are among a group of net heavyweights taking the French government to court this week.

• The legal challenge has been brought by The French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) and relates to government plans to keep web users’ personal data for a year.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• A federal appeals court on Monday rejected as “premature” a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s pending rules aimed at keeping Internet service providers from blocking access to certain websites or applications. The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, is a first-round victory for the FCC and its chairman, Julius Genachowski. But the real battle over the agency’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has barely begun. Several broadband companies, and some consumer advocacy and public interest groups, are likely to return to court this year to challenge aspects of the rules. Edward McFadden, a Verizon spokesman, said Monday that the company intended to refile its lawsuit this year. The House will take up a joint resolution condemning the new Internet access rules this week.

DRM

• Here’s the joint statement. There is a permanent injunction, but no admission of wrongdoing by Hotz, who, as he said from day one, was never trying to enable piracy. I commend SCEA for taking this step, and I mean that sincerely.

Intellectual Monopolies

• WASHINGTON—A U.S. federal appeals panel, hearing a case over Myriad Genetics Inc. patents for identifying breast- and ovarian-cancer risk, Monday probed whether it makes sense to continue allowing the patenting of human gene sequencing.

• A relatively quiet but intense struggle in the federal courts will decide under what conditions a company can patent the building blocks of life — or in some cases the building blocks of death — for profit.

• The struggle almost certainly will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

• For now, those fighting the case are waiting for a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, which decides intellectual property issues.

• On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit today against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant’s patents on genetically modified seed. The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should they ever become contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, something Monsanto has done to others in the past.

• And Sheen is also getting into the intellectual-property game. According to a variety of news reports, Sheen has filed trademark applications on 22 of his catchphrases, including the expressions “Duh, Winning,” “Vatican Assassin,” and “Tiger Blood.” Click here for the NY Post story.

Newspapers

• Last week I got in a bit of an argument with Adam Thierer, Randy Picker, and others about the New York Times paywall. I think a paywall is a bad business strategy, but my opposition to paywalls is mostly a matter of (as I tweeted to Adam) “personal principle rather than business advice.” Adam seemed confused by that statement, so let me see if I can elaborate.

• I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry’s stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.

Copyrights

• So, how can we little people – the ones that are actually paying for all this work, but that are never allowed to provide any input – head off this danger of a biased, misleading report emerging from RAND Corporation?

• I think the only way is to starting making noises about the fact that it *might* be biased and misleading, so that those preparing it at RAND Corporation know that we are watching them like proverbial hawks, and that we will assuredly tear their methodology to pieces when it comes out, and will thus be certain to find – and brandish – the slightest lack of rigour or bias therein.

• Got that, RAND Corporation people? Excellent.

• As the Report from the European Commission to the European Parliament rightly says: “this initial evaluation of the effectiveness of the Directive comes at the right time.” The world of digital content is evolving so quickly that the current form of IPRED is sadly out of date, and urgently needs to be re-thought in the light of new evidence in this field.

• The Report goes on to make the following comment: “Several studies carried out by international organisations and industry have shown that infringements of intellectual property rights have reached a significant level, with certain of these goods posing a danger to consumers’ health and safety.” This statement requires closer analysis.

• One of the striking features of reports purporting to estimate the “damage” caused by piracy – both of software and content – is that without exception, as far as I can tell, their numbers and methodology simply do not withstand close scrutiny.

• The trouble is, when it’s a question of lone voices like mine or even that of Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, probably the most dogged debunker of piracy FUD, the content industries can ignore such posts, presumably in the belief that our quick analyses somehow don’t count.

• Ars Technica freelancer Eriq Gardner was recently sued over a photo that appeared in a piece he wrote for us last year. The flimsy lawsuit was quickly dismissed, but the company behind it lives on—and has sued 50+ people in Colorado for their use of the same photo. Now, the federal judge overseeing all these cases has made it clear that he sees through the company’s “lawsuit as revenue generation” strategy, and that he’s not interested in enabling it. Righthaven is already backing down.

• Last year, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) appealed its loss in its copyright lawsuit against YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), and the video-sharing site has now filed a reply (embedded below) to Viacom’s arguments. Many of the arguments in the 107-page brief repeat what was argued in the courts below, but it’s interesting to observe the tone set in the opening pages of the brief. YouTube takes its time before getting to the legal points, showing that it’s really a good corporate citizen of the internet.

• San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of advocacy groups have asked a federal appeals court to reject attempts to thwart federal copyright law and saddle online communities with new litigation fears in the appeal of Viacom v. YouTube.

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