● 04.14.11

● Links 14/4/2011: Parted Magic 6.0, Firefox 5 and 6

Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• 63% use Debian, 18% are found to use an assortment of other Linux Desktop, closely followed by 15%using Fedora / Red Hat

Desktop

• An email arrived earlier today announcing the new Zorin PC. Just as it sounds, it’s a computer shipping with Zorin OS. Kyrill Zorin said, “Zorin OS is our Linux distro that aims to be the gateway to Linux for Windows users to grow the popularity of Linux. We have recently launched the Zorin PC’s website and are now taking pre-orders.”

• I started my Linux Adventure a bit late in life. I’ve always had an interest in all things technical. My career for the majority of my working life was as an electronics technician (component level repair). I had aspirations at one time of gaining an engineering degree in electronics; other paths were taken, though.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This episode is a recording of Karen’s talk, Sign on the Dotted Line: NDAs, Employment Agreements and Free and Open Source Software from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit.

• Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper

• Selenium is a suite of tools used to automate web app testing across many platforms.

Kernel Space

• The addition of ipset support makes it easier to run a firewall, as it means that only one table needs to be modified in order to block a specific IP address. The situation with regard to drivers for WLAN chips continues to improve, with Ralink and Realtek now actively involved in developing the Linux kernel drivers.

• SJVN: “What’s Linux real birthday?” You’re the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?

• LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.

Graphics Stack

• The NVIDIA crew working on their proprietary Linux driver have just pre-released a new build, NVIDIA 270.41.03. This Linux driver update mainly adds support for a number of new GeForce / Quadro GPUs.

• The list of newly supported hardware is huge: GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT 530, GeForce 405, GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GeForce GT 420, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GTX 470M, GeForce GTX 485M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 555M, NVS 4200M, Quadro 1000M, and Quadro 2000M.

Applications

• After using and covering the Linux operating system for more than a decade, I have seen plenty of applications come and go. Many of the applications that go are those that wind up either too broken to work or that lack the features users need. The applications that stay are solid, reliable, up to date, and offer plenty of user-friendly features. And user-friendliness is the key for modern Linux — especially on the desktop.

Instructionals/Technical

• I travel a lot with my laptop, and it can contain private information that shouldn’t get disclosed if it’s ever lost or stolen. For this reason, I’ve been using various types of disk encryption over the years, such as Ubuntu’s encrypted home directory feature, to reasonably assure that my data remains private.

Games

• One of the most addictive online shooter for Linux, ‘Teeworlds’ 0.6.0 has been released that brings many new features and fixes.

• Teeworlds is a retro, cartoon-themed shooter where up to 16 players fight each other online. The game have huge fan following with hundreds of players playing the game daily.

• Hammerware has released a demo version of their game family Farm for Linux. They have said the release date will be April 15th for the final product. Family farm is currently available to pre-order with 20% off at €11.99.

• The number of truly free and open source games available for download is small in general, but in terms of genre, first-person shooters (FPS) have plenty of representation. This is largely due to the 3D engines that have been released into the free software community, which lend themselves well to FPS games. The Cube Engine 2 is one such 3D system, and Red Eclipse is the latest FPS to utilize it. Version 1.0 of Red Eclipse was just released a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try. It is free to download for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows

Desktop Environments

• This post is not intended to represent complete ideas or possible solutions. It is rather a post relating to the thoughts that I have had concerning the upcoming changes in Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE 4.6.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Finally, for the first time I’ll meet in person with Nuno in a couple of days, and we’ll take this opportunity to revisit (and hopefully improve) the last few UI elements with which he is not so happy today. In the process of doing so, we will notably incorporate some quite useful input from Dolphin dev, Peter Penz.

• Sometimes the number of choices the Linux operating system provides can be overwhelming. I am starting to look at other options for my preferred desktop environment as GNOME 3 and KDE 4 go in directions that might be unsettling to my computing routine. One obscure yet interesting replacement candidate is Bluetile.

• This is the third in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at a concept we call “Active Apps”. Where Plasma Quick is mostly (though not entirely) about infrastructure and Contour is a project with a Plan(tm), Active Apps is where we are really looking to the broader community of developers, designers and dreamers to help Plasma Active achieve its full potential.

• [...]

• If you are unsure if your app is “ready” for Plasma Active, it won’t hurt to ask for feedback and start a discussion. We have many months, several sprints and conferences and a major KDE release day in the summer between now and the first Plasma Active release.

• Well, Camp KDE 2011 has come and gone. Some of you attended in person. Others may have listened to the live audio stream in Amarok. Maybe you missed it completely, but fear not! Because while time travel is not yet feasible, all of the talks were recorded and are posted for your viewing and listening pleasure. In addition, we have a bunch of interviews with the organizers, speakers, and attendees.

GNOME Desktop

• Wow, I’m dazed with geek-pleasure right now. I just saw the latest screenshots of GNOME 3 Linux Desktop emailed by my brother-in-law in Europe. He is a certified linuxhead and he was the first one to inform me that GNOME 3 is now finally available for download. He raved and showed me his new GNOME 3-draped Ubuntu 10.4 laptop and I can only say – Wow, this new Gnome 3 update looks like an iPad 2 iOS screen! I might as well post my Gnome 3 review after testing this new Linux desktop environment, I said to myself so here it is (plus new features).

Distributions

• For a while Foresight Linux users had no graphical interface for managing their systems packages and/or updates, mainly because the development for the conary backend fell out of scope and our radar (this is a nicer way to say that we didn’t have someone to maintain it). But thanks to the work of zodman, jesse and others PackageKit is making its way back to our desktop.

Reviews

• Zenwalk is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution originally based on Slackware. The latest stable release is Zenwalk 7. It was made available for download on March 25, 2011, roughly ten months from the last prior stable release – Zenwalk 6.4. The Zenwalk project makes four editions available – The Standard Edition, Core Edition, GNOME Edition, and the Openbox Edition. This article presents a detailed review of the Standard Edition.

New Releases

• Parted Magic 6.0 has been released. The latest update gets a new major version number, due to some underlying, structural changes, and comes with a number of updated, as well as downgraded, packages.

• Several changes have been implemented which should make booting significantly more reliable. Many booting issues should be fixed now, though, since this is a new system, others may have creeped in.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• However, to resurrect this blog with something fancy, why not posting a screenshot of how my Mandriva 2011 desktop currently looks like?

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is developing a new Java Virtual Machine-based programming language intended to overcome the limitations of Java itself. Unveiled earlier this week by lead developer Gavin King at a conference in China, the effort is known as Project Ceylon.

• Because of its nature, it is very clear that CentOS is mostly oriented to server market. But CentOS can also be used on desktop computers and laptops.

Fedora

• Fedora Core 5′s Bordeaux — a wine region in France, but also a comic book character — begat Fedora Core 6′s Zod, another comic book character. One of my favorites is Fedora 11′s Leonidas — which comes from Fedora 10′s Cambridge (Cambridge is a ship in the Navy, and so is Leonidas) — because it allowed some fun with the name with “300″ memes. Ubuntu? THIS! IS! FEDORA!

• As an aside, it’s unfortunate that Barona was not chosen as the Fedora 16 name, which would lend itself to rewriting the lyrics to The Knack’s “My Sharona.” Such are the things that go into consideration in Fedora circles regarding what name to choose in the ranked voting.

Debian Family

• All my notebooks till today have been ThinkPads from the T series, sadly Lenovo decided (or, maybe, were persuaded) to go with nVidia GPUs for their current designs (T5xx). That’s sad, because nVidia doesn’t cooperate with the FLOSS world. I still wanted a ThinkPad with up-to-date parts. That left me with the Edge series, which is designed to be the bridge between consumer and business models. After some searching I settled on the NVLJ6GE model (the last two letters just indicate, that this is the “German” variant). The key specs are Intel Core i5-480M, 4096 MB RAM, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5145, Intel WLAN module and a non-glare display.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We have recently created a few bits of public documentation that I wanted to share with you. The first is a general guide to the certification programme. It explains what we are aiming to achieve and what our processes are. This can be found at:

Flavours and Variants

• Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux project.

• [...]

• Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.

• Looking for a beautiful, functional operating system? Check out the first Elementary Jupiter OS. This Linux-based operating system is designed from the ground up to stay out of your way so you can simply use your computer. Whether you’re a long-time Linux user or a complete beginner to open source operating systems, Elementary’s elegance is impressive and more than worth checking out.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• It is common knowledge amongst my friends that I am a Linux gadget freak, especially in regards to mobile phones. I have been using Linux-based mobile phones for nearly 6 years now. I was an early fan of the Motorola Linux phones owning 4 of them along the way. I have owned 2 iPhones in the past before selling them and one Windows Mobile-based phone as well. None of them equalled to my love affair with Linux phones.

• For me, a mobile phone must be able to take good pictures, and recently, make some good video shots including night scenes. My mobile phones have helped me come up with the content for many of my postings at SaigonNezumi.com.

• It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!

Android

• Sony Ericsson created a minor controversy on Wednesday with the launch of its own brand-specific channel in Android Market. The category both includes official apps but also recommended titles and occasional exclusives. It will also be used as a sales pitch area and will be a “highlighted market space” for chosen developers’ apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• Here’s the most typical scenario. You fight a fierce battle, and migrate your entire organisation to FOSS. After a few initial hiccups, you’ve got all systems and people humming along just fine. One fine day, you decide it’s time to move on in your career. Once you’re out of the organisation, it takes just a few seconds for everyone to gleefully reformat everything and go back to their slavery under proprietary software. You just shrug your shoulders and try not to think about it.

Events

• We had a great time and the discussion was vigorous! The last year has continued the expansion of open source use, confirmed recently by Laurie Wurster’s March 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=619. In particular, Android has been spectacularly successful and was a significant factor in Nokia’s recent failures in the handset market. The new Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, described Nokia as being on a “burning platform” and identified Android as one of the major sources of their problems.

• Leaders of the technology industry will come together in Boston next month for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, says customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts will take part in a series of discussions to learn, network and explore open source. The full agenda is available here.

• A few years back, Argentina’s government looked at mandating the use of all open-source software in its offices, largely to save on software costs.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Creative team here at Mozilla has been growing rapidly lately, so it feels like a good time to share a quick update on who we are and what we’re doing.

• [...]

• The group includes two veteran Mozillians…

• Mozilla has taken the first major step in its new browser release schedule and transitioned Firefox 5 from its initial mozilla-central to the new aurora channel where the browser will be brought up to beta status.

• Since, its an experimental prototype of an upcoming firefox feature(Yep! this is what it says under the developer comments :D), I shouldn’t expect much. But this comment seems to be a few months old. I wonder why it wasn’t included in Firefox 4 but it indeed deservers to be an integral feature.

• Many of the mockups of Firefox’s new interface, dating all the way back to August 2009, have featured a small home tab. But up until now, I haven’t had a chance to explain the various ideas surrounding Home, elaborate how it fits into our broader cross platform and cross device strategy, and answer some really basic questions, like what will happen if the user has already customized their home page.

• Firefox 5 has been moved into the aurora release channel, the second of a total of four release stages. Firefox 6 alpha 1 has been moved to mozilla-central and is available for download.

• Mozilla currently labels the Aurora releases in fact as “Aurora” browsers with a new logo and the mozilla-central versions as “Nightlies”, also with a new logo. The transitions appear to be mainly testing the new rapid release cycle procedure and there isn’t much to see for Firefox users yet. Firefox 4 will get the 4.0.1 (Macaw) security update in May before we will see any changes in the preview releases of Firefox 5. Among the key changes will apparently be the integration of the Home button, which will be built into Firefox as an app tab that will hide the Home desktop application for Firefox.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Long story short, the proprietary Adobe Flash was blacklisted in the GNOME 3.x releases of Epiphany because it uses Gtk+ 2.x (or 1.x) while Epiphany uses Gtk+ 3.x. An unwanted side effect of this is that it also disables Gnash, depriving me of my daily dosage of Youtube, Rebecca Black and crappy, obscure Bollywood songs.

Government

• Another suggestion is to spend more time explaining the benefits of open source. “A desktop refresh doesn’t have to mean a Windows upgrade,” Silber says. Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal agrees that education is key. “There is still a perception that Linux isn’t ready for frontline use. This is nonsense. Linux is ready. It’s the project managers who are not,” he says.

Licensing

• The Sabayon Foundation has just had an official sub-license granted for our use of Linux(R) as part of “Sabayon Linux” & “SabayonLinux”, covering goods and services on every corner of the planet (including Antarctica!).

Programming

Leftovers

Finance

• According to Cnet, one US Senator is preparing to introduce legislation that would radically alter online commerce. The bill would end the ability of Americans to buy goods from online retailers free from state sales tax. Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois is expected to present the bill shortly after the Easter recess.

Civil Rights

• Mike Lazaridis the co-CEO of Research In Motion, the Canadian firm behind the Blackberry, refuses to answer a question about problems the company has had in India and the Middle East.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Nearly 18 months since the CRTC adopted its Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) policy, industry experts are divided on its effectiveness in securing net neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• It was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira.

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