● 05.04.11

● Links 4/5/2011: KDE Publishes 2010 Report, Red Hat Eyes $1 Billion in Revenue

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• While only a few years ago Linux skills were just one in a series of possible assets for job applicants looking to stand out, in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive workforce, it can actually be a make-or-break element. In fact, a quick search of job sites shows more than 8,000 technical jobs requiring Linux. Add to that recent reports showing demand for Linux skills has exceeded Unix for the first time ever and this is one trend IT professionals need to be aware of.

• For me Linux/Ubuntu (the operating system I use) reminds me of America in the sixties. Linux is the free love movement, the hippies, the switch off, tune in and drop out people, flower power, smoking joints and dropping acid.

• While Microsoft/Apple are corporate America, drudgingly ploughing forth in their slow, monotonous way towards profits and percentage points, working your way up the corporate ladder, teams of lawyers to protect everything you make, say or do.

• Linux and Open Source is a meritocracy. To move up the food chain in Open Source development, you have to prove your coding prowess. Everyone has the opportunity to contribute, but only the gifted or those that work hard succeed. It does not mean that everyone born can contribute. Linux and Open Source under the various GPLs offers FREEDOM not free of cost.

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• Linux is about freedom – freedom to choose which components to use, freedom to alter the source code as desired, and the freedom to redistribute for profit or not.

• Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that has once again raised the question of to what degree the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.

• In a request for tender document issued last week, the department said it required anti-virus/anti-malware protection software for its environment, for the “Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Linux-based operating systems”.

Server

• ASP and LAMP have a long shared history of competition as the foremost of the Web development suites, dating back to the early 2000s.

Kernel Space

• LinuxFR : You’ve been doing Linux for about 20 years now and it’s a hard job. Is it still fun ?

• Linus Torvalds : Oh, absolutely. It’s still fun. And partly exactly because I’ve been doing it for 20 years, I wouldn’t call it “hard”. It’s still challenging and interesting, but I think I’m good at it.

• LinuxFR : Why did you choose to switch the kernel from his original non-GPL copyright to the GPL licence ? Was it an ethical or a practical choice ?

• Linus Torvalds : Practical. I think my original license contained the ethical parts I cared about, but it turns out that it was too strict about that whole “no money” thing, and it also wasn’t well enough known. Moving to the GPL fixed the problems that people had with my original license, and had the advantage that it was a known entity and also a lot more likely to stand up in court than the short blurb I had written originally.

• GL Communications Inc. announced today the release of Linux Driver Support for Universal T1 E1 and OC-3/12 STM-1/4 Cards. Speaking to newsmen, Mr. Vijay Kulkarni, CEO of the company said,” The Internet as we know it today would not exist without “open source software”, a model based on collaborative software development available free to anyone. Its roots are in academia, colleges, and universities where open and free exchange of ideas (and software) is a way of life. The Internet is powered by open source, like Linux, Apache, TCP/IP, DNS, PHP, the list is endless.”

Applications

• In addition to all the technology ramblings I post here every month, I am also a student. This is my final semester in an undergraduate mathematics program with a secondary in education. I believe free open source software (FOSS) is the way of the future and should be used in schools as much as possible. In addition to being free of charge, having code be open promotes learning (as future computer students can see how the internals of a program work).

• The Linux kernel was essentially created on a mailing list. In the early 1990s, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds announced his toy OS kernel to the world. People thought it was great fun, and started hacking on it. By the mid-1990s, it was something of an Internet phenomenon, with complete operating systems built around it. The three oldest-living Linux distributions are Slackware, Debian, and SuSE, in that order. Others have come and gone, and the number of available distributions has increased at a surprising rate — an alarming rate, to some. See the GNU/Linux distro timeline for details.

• This proliferation is part of the genius of the Linux development model. The Linux community, on the whole, does not fear the fork (even if specific individuals often do) and it has reaped great rewards as a result. Being the second major operating system family (after the BSD Unix line) to use open source licenses for the whole system also factors into the somewhat accidental brilliance of Linux development.

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• A Fifth Horseman has reared its equine head, and its name is NetworkManager. This piece of software is The Standard Way To Configure Networks these days. Don’t worry; it will probably be replaced in a couple years, by something even worse.

• I’m keeping a close eye on Miro every since the product was released as the Democracy Player back in 2006. A lot has changed since then, not only the name. The developers have pushed out the first beta of the upcoming version of Miro. Let me explain quickly what Miro is all about.

• When you hear the phrase virtual machine today, you probably think of virtualization and hypervisors. But VMs are simply an older concept of abstraction, a common method of abstracting one entity from another. This article explores two of the many newer open source VM technologies: Dalvik (the VM core of the Android operating system) and Parrot (an open source VM technology for efficiently executing dynamic languages).

• A new version for free note taking Application, MyNotex has been released that brings support for importing notes from Tomboy and Gnote.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Personally, I don’t like colors in my shell. I think it would be fine as an option, but to have it as the default offends me and many other old Unix hands.

• You can shut off command line colorizing by editing /etc/DIR_COLORS and changing “COLOR tty” to “COLOR none” or (less drastically) by removing the “TERM ansi” line from the same file (which removes colorization for ansi but doesn’t affect console use).

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The report summarizes KDE activities in the last three months on 2010, including sprints and trade shows attended by KDE contributors with the support of KDE e.V. It features the individual supporting membership campaign ‘Join the Game’, and how KDE benefits from it. There is a showcase for community artwork, including the report itself. New KDE e.V. members are presented, as is an overview of KDE e.V.’s finances.

Distributions

• If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.

Reviews

• When I see distributions like this one or Bodhi i always start with a positive feeling, others distro have used me to install everything and more and then i spend time to remove stuff that I did not had requested. In this case, CrunchBang install the minimum indispensable and discreetly asks if you want extra things, and then I have at my disposal the repository of Debian so I can really have fun and install anything.

New Releases

• After one year of development, antiX MEPIS 11 has been released earlier today (May 3rd) on mirrors worldwide (see download link at the end of the article), available for 486 and 686 architectures).

• Dubbed Jayaben Desai, the antiX MEPIS 11 operating system is a light, fast and very complete/flexible desktop Linux LiveCD based on SimplyMEPIS and Debian Testing distributions. This version defaults to a completely customized icewm-Rox desktop environment.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced momentum for the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization by North American channel partners as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Accelerator Program. Launched in June 2010, the Program has driven the adoption of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio through training and support of virtualization-certified Red Hat channel partners.

• Today at the Red Hat Summit, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that Nimbula Director will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, which provide a strong foundation for today’s cloud deployments. Nimbula will also work with the Deltacloud community to ensure support for Nimbula Director in the Deltacloud project.

• Linux giant turns increasingly competitive to protect profits. Rory MacDonald investigates…

• Enterprise Linux champion Red Hat announced record fourth-quarter earnings this month following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). As many companies closed up their financial year, the world’s most profitable open source company announced that its revenues for the financial year (FY) 2011 were up 22 percent at $909.3 million.

• At Red Hat Summit this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst will attempt to turn a rare triple play. Indeed, Whitehurst and the Red Hat team will strive to more clearly connect the dots between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Cloud Foundations — a set of educational tools that can help channel partners get started with cloud computing. Here’s the update.

Fedora

• I am pleased to announce that the FUDCon conference in the North American region in 2012 will be held from January 13th through 15th, 2012 on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. We had two excellent bids for the North American FUDCon (Blacksburg, VA and Needham, MA) and both were excellent proposals. It was a difficult decision to make, and I’d like to personally thank all those who took the time to submit bids and to help in the decision-making process.

Debian Family

• I made a post last month outlining some of my thoughts on the Unity desktop Ubuntu rolled out with it’s latest 11.04 release. If you are one of the many that has mixed feelings about the Unity desktop then odds are you may be looking for alternatives to the latest Ubuntu release. The following is a round up of alternatives that won’t leave you feeling completely lost as they still use the apt-get package manager.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Whenever a new version of an operating system is released, it’s common to see a wave of reviews following on its heels, assessing how the software compares with what came before it and weighing its new pros and cons.

• Do not try to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal from GNOME3-Team PPA, at least for now. I was trying to do just and ended up with a completely unusable Ubuntu now. Even PPA-Purge was not able to fully recover my Ubuntu 11.04. I should have really read this warning before trying to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04.

• Recently on the Xorg-Devel mailing list, Michael Stapelberg, who is the author of the i3 window manager posted a new tool, which presents a nice alternative to both xtrace and xscope called x11vis. This tool allows you to monitor every single X Request and have a report on what your program is doing, much like strace will tell you what’s going on with IO and valgrind will tell you what’s going on with memory. It’s especially important for window manager authors like myself since a lot of the bugs that we face are often complicated X11 related timing issues, race conditions, requests that don’t get processed or mysterious events that seemliness’s come out of nowhere.

• These days we’ve got a lot of comments requesting for a temperature monitor applet with Ubuntu AppIndicator support that displays the CPU / Motherboard temperature, Fan speed, etc. on the panel.

• It is Linux distribution releases that make the Linux Planet go around. This past week was a big week for releases, with two very different distros releasing their latest and greatest offerings. It was also a big week for browser releases with new Firefox and Chrome browsers for Linux.

• Tired of learning all those difficult technical terms like “Applications” and “System” just to get to your favorite porn site or play another online game of Slash Your Neighbor?

• Well, relax. You can just install our new word-free desktop, Nasty Nonwhale, and you’ll never need words again. You’ll use pictures for everything, pictures that are as simple and limited in what they can do as the ones on your phone. In fact, we’ve reduced the functions you can access to the point that less than a dozen big, colorful icons will show you everything you’ll ever be able to do with your computer.

Flavours and Variants

• I have been trying to use Broadcom 4311 WiFi card on most Linux distro I have tried so far. This card is built into my Compaq C300 laptop. I think it became my idee fixe at some point. Especially when I was taking Debian-based systems for review.

Devices/Embedded

• Jayex announced a Linux-based digital signage computer aimed primarily at waiting-room applications. Available with multimedia and client call software, the “Web Media M4″ is built around a dual-core Intel Atom D510 clocked at 1.66GHz and offers 1GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, HDMI and VGA ports, as well as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB connectivity, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

Databases

• The open source PostgreSQL database is gearing up for a major new release.

• PostgreSQL 9.1 is now available in beta, introducing a number of new features. Among the new features is support for synchronous replication for the database.

CMS

• Last week, you installed Drupal and were left hanging at the point of basic configuration. This week, you’ll take the short path to Drupal setup. Of course, you’ll only see a fraction of Drupal’s capabilities in this tutorial but you’ll have enough information to discover the rest on your own. For those of you who don’t know, Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that powers some of the Internet’s most high profile sites. Do a Google search to find out who but trust me, you’re in good company.

Business

• Software engineers of corporate America are wired in a way that promotes fear. It hurts creativity and growth. And open source is finally changing that.

• Let’s try the following exercise: Write down three things that come to mind when you see the following email subject from your company’s CEO in response to your new open source project announcement.

• There’s also a third aspect. Perhaps the IT professionals have not even bothered to understand their true worth in the industry; or are just too lazy to seek a job that offers dignity and delight. In fact, some of the most exciting and demanding jobs in the industry today are based around FOSS, and all such jobs are offered by the top companies.

• So, if you feel you’re stuck, and being exploited in a low-paying job in the FOSS industry, here’s what I think you should do. Get to know your true worth by applying to another FOSS-based company, and then confront your employer with the written offer made to you. If your employer refuses to give you a fairer deal, you should quit. It’s about time FOSS companies that exploit freedom-loving employees get a wake-up call.

• If there are no FOSS companies that offer you a similar job description and/or package, then definitely apply in other companies. Yes, I mean in proprietary-software companies. You should know your true worth, and should know whether you really do have desirable and marketable skills. Once you become aware that you do, you’ll find it’s very difficult to let yourself continue to be exploited.

BSD

• Six months after version 4.8 arrived, the OpenBSD project development team has announced the release of OpenBSD 4.9, its free BSD UNIX-like operating system. According to developer Bob Beck, version 4.9 is the 29th release on CD (30th via FTP) and includes a number of new drivers, performance improvements and new features.

• The x86 and amd64 versions of OpenBSD 4.9 now feature read-only support for the NTFS file system and a vmt(4) driver for VMware tools support as a guest OS, both of these are now enabled by default. Other changes include the ability to boot on machines with up to 64 cores, support for AES-NI instructions found in the latest Intel CPUs, and further improvements to suspend and resume.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Programming

Leftovers

• Lord Patten, the new BBC chairman, has admitted that some of the BBC’s executives are still paid too highly and that not being able to pay top dollar for talent is something the corporation “has to live with” in return for not having to “flog advertising and subscriptions”.

• Speaking on Radio 4′s Today programme, Patten said that the corporation was working through a series of cuts that would scale back the number of senior executives by about a quarter. “In some circumstances, yes [pay is too high],” he said.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Baidu’s open online encyclopedia Baidu baike (“Baidupedia”) was accused of copyright infringement by unofficial members of Chinese Wikipedia recently.

• The infringement involves quoting and modifying Wikipedia’s content without specifying author or source, sharing not in accordance with Wikipedia’s CC-by-sa-3.0 license, and without permission from Wikipedia.

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