● 04.21.11

● Links 21/4/2011: Choqok 1.1 Released, Fedora 15 Beta and GNOME 3

Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Another week and another interesting set of events on the Linux Planet. Once again, SCO made headlines and Oracle finally threw in the towel on OpenOffice.org.

Kernel Space

• Open source compliance garnered its fair share of attention at the recently-completed Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit April 6-8 in San Francisco. There were great presentations in a compliance track and a legal track, as well as working group sessions for the SPDXTM technical and business workstreams. And there was a great turnout for the Linux Foundation’s offering of the full-day compliance training course immediately after Collaboration Summit. Most of all, attendees reinforced their commitment to compliance as the way to do business and focused their attention on ways to operationalize compliance activities and make them more efficient and ingrained in everyday business practices.

• The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is just two days away, and we were excited to be able to reach Texas Instrument’s Bill Mills, chief technologist for open Linux solutions. Mills is participating in a highly-anticiapted panel on Wednesday titled, “Introducing the Yocto Project: What it Means for the Embedded Linux Industry,” and shared a few thoughts with us before he prepares to arrive at Hotel Kabuki, including his idea of the state of embedded Linux.

• Texas Instruments has announced a mobile-grade, battery-optimized Wi-Fi solution to the open source Linux community as part of the OpenLink project. The project is focused on providing a wide range of wireless connectivity solutions for native Linux.

• Search pioneer and premier digital media company powers its business with Linux, supports ongoing development and initiatives

• SAN FRANCISCO April 20, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Yahoo! is its newest member.

• [...]

• By joining The Linux Foundation, the company can maximize its investment in Linux while directly supporting the Linux community’s developer and legal efforts.

Applications

• The popularity of this time management method lies in its simplicity: work on a single task for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. After four 25-minute sessions, take a 15-minute break. Not exactly rocket science.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• The folks over at CodeWeavers have given us two new dealcodes. A dealcode is coupon code that can be used in their online store. The two new dealcodes are “EmulateMe” this dealcode is good for a 15% discount on CrossOver or CrossOver Games for Mac and Linux. The second dealcode is “CxForLess” and it will get you a 10% discount on any product in their store.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• This beta does have a new desktop background as well. It’s a simple aqua background with white puffs. I doubt this will be their final choice.

• But that’s all that jumps out at me this time. Tune in next time for As the Penguin Turns.

Red Hat Family

• Recognizing the benefits of Red Hat technology, Portugal Telecom has expanded its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to benefit from innovations in open source technology and to leverage the platform’s comprehensive certification and support across its robust ecosystem of certified hardware and software platforms.

• Concerns are rife about the fate of a 315,000 square foot New York Stock Exchange data centre in Basildon, Essex, after NASDAQ launched a bid for the exchange that vowed to rationalise servers.

• The Basildon data centre was recently built by NYSE Euronext at an estimated costs of hundreds of millions of pounds in order to serve European share traders, and employs technical staff with extensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux and trading technology expertise. Alongside a data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, which serves US markets, NYSE spent around £300 million on infrastructure.

• When a FOSS company gets to be the size of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), pretty much every move it makes is of interest to those of us here in the Linux community.

• So when said company unveils plans to create an alternative to none other than Java, well, let’s just say everyone sits up and starts listening.

Fedora

• Some of the folks on the Fedora marketing list are in a tizzy over the amount of Fedora branding present, or not, in the upcoming Fedora 15 release.

• While I applaud the Fedora folks for being concerned about marketing, I think that they’re losing sight of the big picture — the actual impact of GNOME or Fedora “branding,” in the Fedora desktop is minimal at best.

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• The actual danger of that, however, is incredibly small.

• The Fedora Project announced the beta release of its Fedora 15 “Lovelock” Linux distribution, featuring the new GNOME 3 desktop, the Systemd initialization system, and a new dynamic firewall feature. Meanwhile, though, GNOME 3 has received mixed reviews from the GNOME faithful, many claiming the project went too far in simplifying the interface.

• The Fedora Project, through Dennis Gilmore, proudly announced yesterday (April 19th) the immediate availability for testing of the Beta version of the upcoming Fedora 15 operating system, due for release at the end of May 2011.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Wiki had an ambiguous license till date. Few months ago a decision was made to change the license to a creative commons one.

• Today David Planella has blogged that Ubuntu Wiki has been relicensed to Creative Commons Share Alike 3.o license.

• When I was in college and most of my friends were using pirated versions of Windows, I picked Ubuntu. They always complain about reformatting their PCs because of viruses. We remember every time someone PC had to be formatted it was a festival as he had to run around looking for CDs of drivers.

• The only area where Ubuntu lags behind Windows is games, but this does not matter if you’re not a serious gamer. There are few commercial games available for Ubuntu. Fortunately there are hundreds of free games of every category available for Ubuntu, as well as emulators for popular gaming consoles like NES and Sega Genesis. All in all I think Ubuntu is an excellent operating system and worth considering by anyone wanting an alternative to Windows.

• Much better now…. Now I’m able to reboot with the natty kernel and we are fine. And let me tell you that graphics are much better now… I have noticed a couple of things so far (I have to restart squid3 after I reboot in order to make it work, when the screensaver starts, sometimes it kills the whole kde session) but I’ll look around to see if updates arrive that solve this problems or if there are easy fixes for them (besides not using them, of course).

• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server release is nearing the end of its support life; Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu, and Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager, summarize what this milestone release meant to the Ubuntu project and community.

• And that’s where Ubuntu excels, it has the really great technical aspects of Debian (like the package manager), without the bureaucracy and boorishness of it. Also, it just looks good. And is one hell of a lot easier to use. It’s like and Apple product, except more customizable, more stable, and less expensive. Canonical really did a great job with it.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY, which is claimed to be the the world’s first PlayStation certified smartphone, is now on sale in shops.

• The Xperia PLAY launches with more than 60 games from the industry’s biggest content providers including Sony Computer Entertainment, Gameloft, Electronic Arts and Glu Mobile.

• Intel has announced that the Intel Atom platform, formerly codenamed “Oak Trail,” is now available and will be in devices starting in May and throughout 2011.

• The Intel Atom processor Z670, part of the “Oak Trail” platform, allows applications to run on various operating systems, including Google Android and MeeGo.

• A month’s free trial on Rackspace Cloud Hosting during April, just Quote FREE1

• Intel’s president and chief executive Paul Otellini says his company is hard at work porting Google’s tablet-specific Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, to the x86 architecture.

• “We’ve received the Android code – the Honeycomb version of Android source code – from Google, and we’re actively doing the port on that,” Otellini told reporters and analysts during a conference call on Tuesday announcing Intel’s first-quarter 2011 financial results.

• On Tuesday of this week, Intel announced record financial results–a good sign that fortunes are improving in the technology industry, and possibly in Silicon Valley. Historically, when Intel has done very well, given the fact that its chips and technologies are central to many other technologies, the tech industry has also done well. On its earnings call, though, another interesting bit of news came out: Intel President and Chief Executive Paul Otellini confirmed that Intel is working with Google’s Honeycomb 3.0 version of the Android mobile OS, with an eye toward enabling tablet devices that run it. As we’ve reported, Honeycomb is in development with only select partners of Google at this point, but the fact that Intel is on top of it bodes well for Honeycomb and tablets.

Tablets

• Following in the footsteps of the Motorola Xoom, the G-Slate becomes the second Android tablet to run the Honeycomb operating system. It also differs from rival tablets in a number of ways.

Free Software/Open Source

• Muktware* or Free and Open Source animation software Blender is being used by Japanese gaming major SEGA.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced a couple of days ago, April 18th, the immediate availability for testing of the second and last Beta version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system. This version is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (see download link at the end of the article).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Knowing which hardware devices support GNU/Linux is important not only for practical reasons — you want your hardware to work with the software that you want to use — but also for ethical and political reasons.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• The vast majority of the phone-buying public has never heard of the FreeRunner, let alone OpenMoko as a company. But they’ve certainly heard of Android and Google, and the different ways the OpenMoko bombed make for a good case in how open too often comes at the expense of useful and complete.

Programming

• NetBeans IDE 7.0 introduces language support for coding to the proposed Java SE 7 specification with the JDK 7 developer preview. Developers can now take advantage of the new language features from Project Coin /JSR 334, with editor support for code completion, hints, and in specific cases converting existing Java SE 6 based code to use the new Java SE 7 based syntax.

• Deploying PHP to the cloud is about to get easier thanks to a new partnership between commercial PHP vendor Zend and cloud management firm RightScale.

• The new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack integrates RightScale’s Cloud Management Platform with Zend Server for scalable cloud PHP deployments. The new effort is part of Zend’s overall move to advance PHP in the emerging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) marketplace.

• VMware shocked a few people last week when it released Cloud Foundry, which appears to provide enterprises with an open Platform as a Service (PaaS) option. This approach has to be very attractive to enterprise IT departments reluctant to lock into something like Microsoft Azure, but just because VMware has built it, will the developers come, and how can you be sure it’s the right way to go?

• This past week in Madrid, Spain; the next iteration of the C++ programming language, C++11, passed review by the technical standards committee. Barring unforeseen delays the official standard will be approved in the fall.

• You want to fork the OpenJDK. You look at the license, see that it is GPLv2, say “woot!” and start hacking. You add the important optimization to your fork which you need, and now want to release it.

• If you don’t care about calling it Java, you can, under copyright law and the GPLv2, just cut the release, publish it, and go about your business. The catch is that there are tons of patents all over the JVM, and the GPLv2 does not include any patent protections. So, while you are clear from a copyright point of view, anyone that has contributed intellectual property to the JVM/JDK, ever, is free to sue both you and anyone using your distribution for infringing any patents they hold on their contributions. Aside from breaking the law, getting yourself, and your users, sued is not generally a good thing, so we look at option number two, passing the TCK.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• Google Video is shutting down and all the video uploaded to it will go dark.

• Cisco Systems orchestrated the arrest of Multiven founder Peter Alfred-Adekeye last year in order to force a settlement of Multiven’s antitrust lawsuit against Cisco, a Multiven executive said on Wednesday.

• As for Intel’s plans to reportedly subsidize its partners with US$10 for producing each Intel tablet PC, the sources pointed out that Intel should be helping its partners to re-energize the whole PC ecosystem. Since its notebook and netbook partners are all facing a crisis by being squeezed out of the market, if its downstream partners are all severely impacted, Intel may not stay out of the damage forever.

Finance

• The Institute for One Wisconsin, a non-partisan organization, released a report (pdf) last week that says that “despite claims from Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin is not ‘broke.’” Their research found that the state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen in the past twenty years, and though the state is overall quite wealthy, the bulk of that wealth has shifted to the richest people of the state, while Wisconsin’s tax structure “is built around the middle class.”

• For quite some time, I’ve been interested in the general concept of currencies and how money works in general. I remember an early episode of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, in which they tried to answer the simple question: what is money? They quickly discovered it’s not an easy question to answer (and, in fact, those working on the podcast have revisited the question many times in many interesting ways — including a fascinating episode a few months back looking at the Island of Stone Money. That episode discussed the island of Yap in the South Pacific, that for many years used massive limestone discs as money. And, by massive, I mean sometimes weighing upwards of a ton. In other words, it didn’t have one of the key features that many normally associate with “money,” which is that it’s a “currency of exchange.” In theory, you can’t easily “exchange” a giant rock.

Privacy

• Your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad has been secretly recording your location for the past 10 months.

• Wired.com can confirm that fact: The screengrab above shows a map containing drop pins of everywhere yours truly has been in the past year.

DRM

• Digital locks emerged as one of the first issues discussed last night in one of Canada’s most hotly contested ridings. An all-candidates debate in Kitchener -Waterloo, home of RIM and one of the closest ridings in the 2008 election, moved quickly to a discussion of digital locks and the “PlayBook tax” during one of the first questions on the most pressing issues in the riding.

• Kindle Library Lending and OverDrive – What it means for libraries and schools

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• In a response to a written question presented by French MEP Françoise Castex the European Commission has refused to make public the preparatory documents of ACTA, as required by the Vienna Convention in its article 32 when certain issues in an international treaty remain “ambiguous or obscure”. The EC states that it fulfills its obligations with the Vienna Convention by simply answering parliamentary questions presented by Members of the European Parliament and instead of publishing the documents the EC proposes to offer private debriefing sessions with individual MEPs on ACTA.

Clip of the DaySteve Jobs on privacy, Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference (Video)For context, see the “Privacy” links at the top. How foolish he must look now.Credit: TinyOgg Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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