● 05.10.11

● Links 10/5/2011: More on SimplyMEPIS 11, Ubuntu Hype

Posted in News Roundup at 6:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• We’re celebrating the impending release of issue 100 this week. Kicking off the celebration is previous Linux User editor, Simon Brew who says we shouldn’t be afraid of opening our wallet for open source, but we should fight hammer and tongs to ensure freedom is kept at its core…

Kernel Space

• Ixonos creates solutions for mobile devices and services for wireless technology suppliers and telecommunications companies, as well as mobile device and consumer electronics manufacturers. It has been actively involved in mobile Linux development efforts since 2006 and joins The Linux Foundation today to maximize its investment in the operating system. The company will collaborate with other leading vendors, users and developers to help advance Linux-based mobile platforms, including Android and MeeGo.

• With the recent look at the major Linux power regressions taking place within the Linux kernel, some initially wondered if the increase in power consumption was correlated to an increase in system performance. Unfortunately, it is clear now that is not the case. With that said though, here’s some performance benchmarks of all major kernel releases going back to Linux 2.6.24 and ending with the Linux 2.6.39 kernel.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• I just got the replacement battery for my Acer Aspire 3810T and decided to make a clean cut. Instead of continuing to use Windows 7 as the operating system I have decided to install the latest Ubuntu on the notebook. I’m not using the device that often, actually only if I’m on holiday, and I thought it would be a good way to start fiddling around with a Linux desktop OS.

• The Acer laptop comes without optical drive, which means that I have to install Linux from an USB device. But how do you get the Linux installation files on the USB device and ensure that Linux can be booted and installed from the device?

• I have this habit, or paranoia rather, of not storing my passwords with the browser. I never let the browser remember passwords for me. Maybe this is because a lot of my friends use my laptop at times, and it becomes risky to have autologin on for websites. So whenever I use a browser, the first thing I do is turn off the ‘Offer to store passwords’ option or similar. I was sad that Rekonq, my favourite browser, did not have this feature. So I wrote this patch that adds a setting which allows the user to disable the notification saying “Do you want to store the …” by unchecking a checkbox. Here goes a screenshot -

Games

• Trine is a familiar Alternative Games (for Linux) release as part of the Humble Indie Bundle (third). An original FrozenByte product, it is for those gamers who want the logic of puzzle solving in their hardcore gaming environment. Add to it the fact that it is developed around popular concepts of physics and …that it is today offered as open source Linux game the joy of exploring it visibly doubles, triples!

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Qt 4.0 was released in June 2005, almost six years ago. A lot has changed in the software industry over these years. While application development back then happened mostly on desktop systems, mobile devices connected to the web have become increasingly popular. User interface technology has moved from static widgets to a fluid touch based experience. Since Qt 4.0 we have released seven minor versions of Qt to stay ahead of development needs, for example by releasing Qt Quick. Within the growing Qt user base, we have had a strong up-take and new needs from embedded and mobile app and UI developers.

• April saw the release of Kdenlive 0.8. I’ll take you through some of the new features, along with some notes on how I built it for Debian Sid.

• Kdenlive 0.8 is a release that fixes bugs and adds new features rather than being a complete departure from the previous version, probably welcome news to the regular users. New features aside, my hope for this revision is that it can overcome the main shortcoming of Linux video editing programs: poor stability. It didn’t crash while I was testing it, but user feedback in the long term will be the real indicator of improvements that have been made in this area.

• I am long established fan of KDE3 (Trinity). There might be 2 reasons: 1) My first ever Linux was SLAX which is based on KDE3. 2) I prefer old-school menu style with one column in main part with branches for each of them. When I see several columns in main menu I quickly get lost in navigation. It’s like Win95 style compared to Win7 style. Or KDE3 compared to Mint Menu or KDE4 in some Linuxes. That’s why every Tux which is blessed by Trinity is interesting for me. That’s why I am very thankful to Sirius Lee who gave me some more ideas in the comments to Pardus review.

GNOME Desktop

• In the past couple of months, I like many others have been caught up in the GNOME3/Unity changes and the various debates of “are they good, are they evil.” I have continually had this case of deja-vu as if the words being said were ones I had heard before but maybe slightly different. While having deja-vu a couple of times is normal, having it constantly means I am probably “Forgetting History” and “Doomed to Relive It” (or some variant of the quote.)

Distributions

• Yeah, continuing from where i left it off, the Linux journey got more interesting this year. 1st because i wanted a little more adventure and installed Arch. Later on, my motherboard requested for retirement by breaking down, and hence had to either resurrect or renovate it. I chose the latter.

• Installing Arch, was intimidating when i did it on my old box. Venturing into a mouse-less world was a new thing and till i was at the end of the official Arch installation guide, i was skeptical about the whole idea. Once up and running with proper interface and stuff, the experience was better than that of Ubuntu, partly because I know what was, is and will be present in my system, and also coz my veteran system was able to satisfy my demands for a crisp freeze-less response.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Beside the products and partnerships presentations, Mandriva will outline its new strategy and market positionning. The research activities of the company will also be described, showing how Mandriva is preparing the future by innovating in the key areas of Cloud Computing, formal methods applied to the enhancement of the Linux kernel, Enterprise 2.0, smart devices and Green IT.

Gentoo Family

• Back in 2004 Matteo “Peach” Pescarin did a poster edit of his “Gentoo Abducted” wallpaper. The poster is portrait format and shows a city in background, instead of countryside, if you look close. He has now re-released its SVG sources.

Red Hat Family

• RHEV-M manages Red Hat’s version of the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor (KVM) and is based on Microsoft .NET. The software will be ported to a Java code base in the next version, which will be out in beta later this year, according to previews at this year’s Red Hat Summit. The Microsoft SQL database on RHEV-M’s back end will be replaced by PostgreSQL.

• Users at the recent Red Hat Summit conference said that this change can’t come soon enough. Travis Tiedemann, systems engineer at Union Pacific Railroad, said he’s sticking to Xen virtualization until RHEV runs on Linux. “We’re waiting to bring in the RHEV product,” he said. “When it’s fully Linux, we’ll start looking at KVM.”

• The emergence of several open source Infrastructure-As-A-Service platforms must have VMware and Microsoft on edge.

• Linux leader Red Hat joined the fray last week with the public debut of CloudForms, its cross platform multifaceted IaaS platform for building private and hybrid clouds. It is based on Red Hat’s DeltaCloud APIs.

• There are several others, namely Eucalyptus, Cloud.com and Rackspace.

• The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that open source solutions provider Red Hat has joined the DMTF Board of Directors. The addition of the industry-leading company adds to DMTF’s expanding presence in the IT industry. Red Hat joins AMD, Broadcom, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix Systems Inc., EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware to continue DMTF’s mission to enable interoperable IT management solutions.

Debian Family

• This past week has been quite turbulent for Debian wheezy. Mostly because of the great Perl upgrade from 5.10 to 5.12. This included rebuilding of hundreds of Perl modules to play well with new version of Perl. Most of the time I had all this stuff put on hold, and only yesterday have I found guts to digest all 300 of new packages. For one day I was without trusty pidgin, but today even that popular messenger has been recompiled to work with Perl 5.12. There’s still a small number of perl modules (like libembperl-perl, libgimp-perl, libgstreamer-perl, libjifty-perl, etc…) not yet adapted, but I’m sure we won’t wait long until each and every perl module has been upgraded to fit Perl 5.12.

Derivatives

• The MEPIS project announced the release of the Debian Linux based SimplyMEPIS distribution. SimplyMEPIS 11 moves up to Linux kernel 2.6.36.4 and the KDE 4.51 desktop, switches from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice 3.3.2, and provides FireFox 4.0, which was recently recompiled to run much faster on Linux.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In conclusion, I’d have to sum up my experiences with Ubuntu 11.04 as being generally good, but largely inconsistent. As an example, all my hardware was detected and worked properly, but when the OS couldn’t find a suitable graphics card on my desktop machine, it crashed. Attempting to work from the live CD on my laptop caused the machine to hang until I forced the installer window to close. The classic GNOME interface is well put together, but scrollbars now vary in form and accessibility from app to app. The Software Centre is probably the best it’s been, intuitive and helpful, but it seemed to request my password almost randomly. Usually I’d be asked for my account password with every new package installation, but sometimes the prompt would be skipped and I never did find a conclusive pattern.

• The update notification didn’t work on either of my test machines. Unity is, for smaller devices, probably a good UI, but I really feel it needs to be more flexible if it’s going to catch on with full-sized notebook and desktop users. The default applications which come with 11.04 are well thought out and, of course, Ubuntu offers over 33,000 packages in the repositories, making it easy to find what we need. I’m of the opinion there are good features in this release, but 11.04 definitely suffered from being rushed out the door while it was still beta quality. Ubuntu aims to be novice-friendly, but this release is buggy and I think they missed the mark this time around. I’m limiting my recommendation of 11.04 to people who want to play with an early release of Unity.

• Do you move to the newest release, or stick with what you know already works? Often, applications or devices that work on your current system will no longer do so once you’ve installed a new OS. There is also a period of adjustment when you try to figure out how tasks you have grown so accustomed to doing are done under the new system. Certainly, it seems prudent to wait at least until all the kinks have been smoothed out before jumping into a new operating system.

• For people who write about technology, however, there is really very little choice. So when Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) was released, the question for me wasn’t if I would move to it from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), but how I would do it.

• Despite the fact that Indonesia is a country with high use of social media and technology, there are still some regions in the country that lack computer literacy. To remedy this, a social program called Computers For Indonesia (or simply called Comp4id) are giving away old computers for schools in small towns. On Saturday May 7th the “1st Impact Day” event was held, and ten used computer units were donated to SMK PGRI Jatinangor (a vocational high school) in Bandung, Indonesia.

• Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

• Canonical are pleased to announce more great collaboration with Lenovo, the world’s fourth largest PC manufacturer.

• There are now over 30 Lenovo ThinkPads certified with Ubuntu, with many of these being completed in the first half of 2011. The great work with Lenovo continues.

• Canonical, through John Bernard, has just announced a couple of minutes ago that they will start a collaboration with the popular Lenovo company, the world’s 4th largest PC manufacturer.

• It is now official that Canonical will work closely with Lenovo to certify the Ubuntu operating system on various Lenovo laptops, workstations and servers.

• At the moment there are more than thirty (30) Lenovo ThinkPads that are certified with Ubuntu, and many more will come by the end of this year. To check all the existing Ubuntu-certified Lenovo machines, please click here.

• Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is here and has already been thoroughly reviewed. And for me, the latest Ubuntu 11.04 is one the favorite Ubuntu ever. Now, here is a really good collection of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal themed wallpapers from around the web.

• This morning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit there was a discussion about Unity 2D, the lightweight 2D version of Canonical’s Unity desktop that isn’t dependent upon 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. Work on Unity 2D based on Qt began during the Ubuntu 11.04 cycle, but with Ubuntu 11.10 it should be more polished and comparable to the full-blown Unity desktop experience.

• The 11. 04 preinstalled user interface is called Unity and it is very weak. Video acceleration is very slow, it lets the impression that it does not even exist. Other than that, things are identical to Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is a better option, it has a much better video acceleration, it navigates much faster through the menu and it has some extra apps compared to Unity.

• Have you ever attempted to move an OS install from one PC to another? I am sure many of you have, and for those who are all too familiar with the process, you’re likely aware of the headaches that can ensue. Different PCs means different hardware, and where any OS is concerned, the chance of a non-bootable OS is sometimes an all-too-real caveat.

• It’s been a while since I’ve had to do something like this, but over the weekend, due to what seems like my netbook giving up the ghost, I moved my Ubuntu 11.04 install over to a different notebook that I managed to get working after it being “dead” for well over a year. Yes, my two notebooks apparently switched positions.

• Hooray! Gnome3 is in the standard Arch repositories! Hooray! I install it! Boo! It says my grahpics card is not capable of runnin Gnome-Shell so it drops into fallback mode. What the heck?

• At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, Hungary, Mark Shuttleworth — Ubuntu’s founder — just delivered a killer keynote that outlined Canonical’s outrageous goal of reaching 200 million users in the next four years.

• To put that figure into perspective, Ubuntu had 8 million users in 2008, and around 12 million users in April 2010 — and those are combined totals, factoring in both desktop and server installations of Ubuntu. Canonical has not released updated figures since then, but estimates put the total number of Ubuntu installations between 15 and 18 million. Those numbers, incidentally, are derived from unique IP addresses that “ping” the Ubuntu update servers; they don’t take into account any offline installs of Ubuntu.

• Since its debut, I’ve had plenty of time to work with the latest Ubuntu release known as version 11.04. And even considering some of my earlier harsh criticism, I’ve indeed found some nuggets of goodness within the 11.04 release.

• This got me thinking. It appears the only gripe I have left is addressing Unity itself in some way. As I stated before, I have no problem with Unity being among the available desktop options. But defaulting people automatically to it is just plain foolish. There should be a cleaner indicator for folks that GNOME’s classic experience is still available.

• Yes, it is here! Probably the most controversial Ubuntu release since EVER hit the servers, as planned, on the 28th of April. Canonical is, if nothing else, to be admired for the courage of sticking to their original plan and pushing their ideas forward, despite all the unrest they caused. On the other hand, this courage is a bit diluted by the fact that the GNOME project has also undergone a major makeover so users are now pretty much stuck between these two. A much riskier move would’ve been for Canonical to release the Unity-powered desktop well before the GNOME 3 release. On the other other hand, the community has every right to be pissed at the company for ignoring their gripes.

• Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu operating system, announced yesterday, May 9th, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest that Canonical’s goal is to have 200 million Ubuntu users by 2015.

• Ubuntu Developer Summit for Oneiric Ocelot, the upcoming version of the popular Ubuntu operating system is taking place these days in Budapest, Hungary. Mark Shuttleworth delivered yesterday morning his usual keynote where he set the goal for 200 million Ubuntu users in 4 years.

• Getting ready to review a Linux distribution is usually pretty straightforward. After some background research into the distribution’s history, you download the latest ISO and beseech the head of IT to lend you a netbook or scrounge up some moth-infested, aging desktop PC.

• In the case of Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition (“Linux for the Damned”), however, I had wondered whether I would require some kind of spiritual preparation: Perhaps a confession of my sins to the nearest religious authority. Deadline pressure meant that there was no time for me to unburden myself of my frequent and extensive contraventions of the moral codes of many major religions (and quite a few minor ones). My atheist soul would have to face the distribution unshriven.

• It is raining new releases this month as a result of the domino effect caused by the release of Ubuntu 11.04. The latest in line is Linux Mint. Team Mint has always managed to come up with a distro that improved the strengths of Ubuntu many fold while remaining true to the original one. However this time the scene is completely different. The team had recently announced the release of Linux Mint 11, codenamed Katya. Although, its usual to give a feminine name to each Mint release, this one seems to have a meaning. Katya which means “pure” In Russian seems to hint subtly that the Mint team is upto something.

• The Unity desktop that comes rolled into Ubuntu’s latest version, Natty Narwhal, could prove very divisive. A change this big will be met by users with a love-it-or-hate-it reaction. Personally, you can put me in the latter category. I did not like Unity in its earlier iterations, especially on the Netbook Remix version. And I like most of its features — or lack of features — a lot less now after seeing them in Natty Narwhal.

• The second point is that distributions like Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition serve to highlight the “free as in freedom” aspect of open source software. Yes, there is no doubt that this distro is a little tongue in cheek and a jab at the Christian Edition of Ubuntu Linux. But, along with the Christian Edition distro, this is an example of taking the powerful open source tools collaboratively developed over the decades and tailoring them to suit a niche market. Why not have a Satanic Edition of Linux? Or a cat fanciers’ edition, for that matter? The freedoms to innovate, customise and build upon are an essential part of the open source experience, delivered to users by the GPL and other free software licences.

• All up, if you prefer your walls black, your music loud and your hair long (and don’t care about Narwhal), then Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition may be right up your alley. It is, as you would expect, a modern, easy to use operating system that is probably more profound than its creators realise.

Flavours and Variants

• Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced last evening, May 9th, the immediate availablity for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 11 operating system.

• Dubbed Katya and based on the newly released Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, Linux Mint 11 will feature Linux kernel 2.6.38, GNOME 2.32.1 and X.Org 7.6. Unity will NOT be included in Linux Mint 11.

• Canonical has been much in the headlines with its 11.04 version of Ubuntu, featuring Unity, but the shakeup at the top of Canonical has been much less in the news. The latest executive to announce that he is leaving his post at the company is Matt Zimmerman, who has spent seven years as CTO of Ubuntu. Zimmerman announced his decision in a blog post, and while it’s clear that he will remain an active participant in the Ubuntu community, his departure immediately follows the exit of noted open source executive and blogger Matt Asay, who had been Canonical’s COO. Is Canonical suffering from a leadership problem?

• Last week I installed XFCE on my laptop, to experiment. The machine was running Zorin OS with Gnome, and I just did sudo apt-get install xfce4 to add the new environment as an option. I played with it a while, and I wound up with a desktop I really liked – Compiz, Docky, pretty much everything I’m used to. So one day if Gnome-based distros abandon the traditional desktop paradigm completely – as it looks like will happen – I can switch to XFCE and get a pretty good approximation of what I’m accustomed to.

• However…

Devices/Embedded

• Freescale Semiconductor announced a faster, 1.5GHz version of its quad-core QorIQ P2040 processor called the QorIQ P2041, claimed to deliver up to 10Gbps performance and ship with a Linux BSP. The P2041 system-on-chip (SoC) is available in a newly announced, 1U MR-630 networking appliance from Lanner called the MR-630, equipped with 12 or 16 gigabit Ethernet ports and aimed at the unified threat management (UTM) market.

• Freescale Semiconductor announced a faster, 1.5GHz version of its quad-core QorIQ P2040 processor called the QorIQ P2041, claimed to deliver up to 10Gbps performance and ship with a Linux BSP. The P2041 system-on-chip (SoC) is available in a newly announced, 1U MR-630 networking appliance from Lanner called the MR-630, equipped with 12 or 16 gigabit Ethernet ports and aimed at the unified threat management (UTM) market.

• Wind River announced a partnership with GoAhead Software whereby the two companies will become “preferred integration partners,” selling GoAhead’s OpenSAFfire middleware to embedded Linux customers. The company also announced a “Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart” professional services and technical support package for its OpenSAF customers.

• Tilera unveiled a roadmap for its Linux-ready Tile-Gx multicore system on chips (SoCs): 16, 36, 64, and 100-core versions of a networking-focused Tile-Gx 8000 series; an upcoming, multimedia-focused Tile-Gx 5000 series; and a Tile-Gx 3000 series aimed at cloud server applications. Tilera also announced Wind River Linux support for its MIPS64-based TilePro and Tile-Gx SoCs.

Phones

Android

• Music and movie rental services are coming to Android devices straight from Google’s labs, the company announced at its I/O conference today. Customers will be able to stream movies from the Android Market and stream their own uploaded music from a service Google is calling “Music Beta.” Users can also “pin” both types of media to their devices for offline consumption.

• Music Beta, which is currently available by invitation only for Android devices with at least version 2.2, allows users to upload up to 20,000 songs to music.google.com. Customers can then stream the music to any Android device, or “pin” it to the device for local storage. Devices will also be able to automatically cache recently played audio content for offline use. The music service will be free “at least while it’s in beta,” so here’s hoping for a Gmail-style development trajectory.

• Google has added features to its Google Goggles visual recognition software for Android intended to make it more user friendly. Google Goggles 1.4 for Android adds note-taking capabilities, offers improved search history, and has better business card recognition, the company says.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The VAR Guy is watching and listening closely for potential Google Chrome OS launch news. Chrome OS, a lightweight Web operating system for netbooks and notebooks, may grab the spotlight at this week’s Google I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco. There’s speculation Samsung may unveil a Chrome OS netbook at the conference. But here’s the big question: Can Chrome OS revive the struggling netbook market or will Google simply evangelize Chrome OS for notebooks? Either way, there could be hardware as a service (HaaS) opportunities for VARs and MSPs. Here’s why.

• HP announced a revamped version of its Mini 210 netbook that includes upgraded audio plus color that’s skin-deep. Still with a choice of Intel Atom processors and Windows 7 operating systems, the device now includes a social-media-centric upgrade to the available, Linux-based QuickWeb operating system, according to the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• EMC World opened today in Las Vegas with a morning full of major announcements from EMC-acquired companies Greenplum and Isilon. This included the world’s largest file system at 15.5 PB, and a full-blown EMC adoption of the open source model for its Greenplum division at the very least.

• The announcements all tied in to the conference theme of Big Data Meets the Cloud.

• As the Google I/O conference kicks off this week in San Francisco, many developers and others are tuning in remotely to streaming events. If you’re an open source developer or user, though, one of the existing ways to get at a treasure trove of archived video-based material from Google is the company’s relatively new open source channel on YouTube, found here. Dubbed Google OSPO and launched late last year, it is chock full of good content and you can set alerts for new content that arrives there that relates to your interests. Here is more on how to get the most out of this tool.

• Non-profits and other charity organizations need all the help they can get, administratively speaking. That’s why it’s great to see something like what the folks at OpenPetra have put together. Flexible and customizable, it helps volunteers and non-profit agencies get the management tasks out of the way and focus on what’s really important: the cause at hand.

• A loose affiliation of open source organisations is forming, which hopes to provide a more serious challenge to monolithic data management and business intelligence systems sold by companies such as IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute.

• The Ubuntu project announces today that future versions of Ubuntu Cloud will use OpenStack as a foundation technology. The Ubuntu project is gathered in Budapest, Hungary to discuss future development plans that will culminate in the October release of Ubuntu 11.10. This announcement will move OpenStack to being a core part of the Ubuntu Cloud product, which enables users to build an open source cloud.

Events

• A great fosscomm (the annual greek foss community conference) took place the weekend at Patra. The organizing committee did a fantastic job, but besides that it seems that the Greek FOSS community has raised the bar of quality holding some very interesting technical presentations.

Mozilla

• A WEB STANDARD enabled by default in the Firefox 4 and Google Chrome web browsers has serious security issues, according to an independent security consultancy.

• WebGL, which stands for web-based graphics library, is a software technology that allows you to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to a web browser without the need for additional software. Enabled in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, it can also be switched on in Safari and Opera.

• Here on OStatic, and elsewhere, the new version 4 of Firefox has been widely discussed, with some OStatic readers ditching the new version of previous versions due to reported performance problems. Still, it’s easy to forget the global power that Firefox commands, especially in certain targeted areas of the world. In a highly interesting new Computerworld report, for example, Gen Kanai, Mozilla’s contributor engagement director for Asia, discusses the browser’s growing prominence in Indonesia and parts of Asia. In Indonesia, in particular, Firefox is far and away the browser of choice, with neither Internet Explorer or Google Chrome anywhere near its market share level.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• This is of course my view, and I hope yours, but naturally it is worth presenting at least some rational and working for this conclusion. Unfortunately, there are so many reasons why TDF and LibreOffice are done right, that I can’t list them all in linear time. However, I’ll try to address some of the major ones recently raised by congenital worriers.

• While Attachmate has talked a lot about its plans for Novell after it bought Novell, no one saw Attachmate closing down Novell’s Mono programming effort. Indeed, other than cutting Novell’s work-force by 25%, Attachmate has said little concrete about the company’s open-source plans. I have learned from sources though that LibreOffice, the open-source office suite, will continue to receive Novell’s support.

• Novell developers were leaders in founding the LibreOffice’s parent organization, The Document Foundation and splitting LibreOffice away from the Oracle sponsored OpenOffice project. Their feeling was that Oracle, as Sun had before it, had been neglecting OpenOffice and letting bugs go unfixed and new features go un-added for far too long.

• The parties have each responded to the judge’s order reducing the number of Oracle’s claims in Oracle v. Google from 132 to 3. And each has provided requested input to the judge on his tentative order on claim construction. If you recall, the judge asked for their input.

• I thought you’d like to see the Apache subpoena [PDF] that Oracle just sent them. Specifically, it’s a Boies Schiller production, as you can see at the bottom of page one.

Business

• A reader asked me today about the OpenSim business case — are there enough users on any of the grids to make it worthwhile for a business to set up a presence there instead of in Second Life?

• The short answer is: no.

• Second Life’s average concurrency is around 50,000. If you log into Second Life, depending on time of day, you are likely to find anywhere between 35,000 and 65,000 other people logged on. (See Tateru Nino’s great statistics page for more details.)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Are you using Gmail? Nearly 50% of the FSF’s 40,000 strong supporter mailing list has an @gmail.com email address.

• JavaScript, once lauded for adding simple visual effects to web pages, is now used by web sites like Gmail to run powerful programs on your computer. These programs, like any other program running on your computer, should be free software. But right now, the vast majority of JavaScript programs do not respect your essential freedoms to run, study, modify and share them. They take control of your computer away from you; the same control we have been working for over 25 years to protect.

Licensing

• Sometime after I posted this entry, Apple went ahead and posted the source code for JavaScriptCore-721.26 and WebCore-955.66.1, the code mentioned in this entry. No explanation on the delay was given, just the code. The immediate issue has passed, which is nice. My closing point about better communication, however, still stands.

Programming

• The Perl 5 porters officially ended support for Perl 5.8 on November 5, 2008. Fortunately, Enterprise Support exists to help your legacy Perl 5 installations cope. Distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its offshoot CentOS will continue supporting old versions of Perl 5 for up to ten years since their release (the release of the distribution, not the release of the version of Perl 5 they distribute).

• For example, the most recent CentOS release, CentOS 5.6, includes Perl 5.8.8. (CentOS 5.6 came out just over a month ago. Perl 5.8.8 is seven stable releases out of date.)

• Throughout its existence, Google has been very dedicated to enlisting developers all around the world to embrace its projects and help with the creative process, and one of its hugest annual events that focuses on this is the Google I/O conference. This week, in San Francisco, Google I/O is in full swing, and there are announcements arriving, and many sessions related to Google App Engine, Android, Chrome, Chrome OS and many other projects. Even if you can’t get to the conference, there are still ways to participate in sessions remotely, and Google will post archived versions of sessions after the event.

• The next version of Google’s Android operating system, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, will converge the formerly disparate phone and tablet versions of the OS, Google announced at its I/O keynote today. Ice Cream Sandwich will maintain a single UI across all form factors and will allow developers to create applications for both kinds of devices in one motion. It will follow the rollout of Android 3.1 to the Motorola Xoom tablet and Google TV.

• Google says the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android will “all be open source,” including APIs for face-tracking and other new features. Developers will be able to account for all form factors within this same version of the OS, and Google will be adding a lot of UIs to accommodate Android devices of all shapes and sizes.

Standards/Consortia

• Requirements for the service including conforming to the OpenSearch protocol and support for compressed and uncompressed versions of non-HTML documents like PDF, RTF, CSV, Microsoft Office formats and Open Document formats.

Leftovers

• In a way, M$ is its worst enemy. As it has convinced people that they must buy a new PC to get anything new in IT, they have also convinced people that a new anything is good: tablet, notebook, smart thingie… and many of these do not come with that other OS. Expect further poor quarters for that cash-cow.

• see TheRegister – Microsoft resuscitates ‘I’m a PC’ ads to fight Apple Alert Print Post comment Retweet Facebook PCs have come a long way since the PC

• How many cycles of the Wintel treadmill does it take to convince the subject that the next revolution is actually the same as the last one? The problem for M$ is that people are not gerbils and can solve the problem of spending years getting nowhere.

• Michael Arrington continues to try to con everyone, including possibly himself, into thinking he does technology journalism. Normally, I ignore the scum of the technology press. Life is too short. Every field has its fakes, its liars and its prostitutes, but every now and again someone, such as Arrington, falls to the bottom and makes such a splash along the way, that I can’t ignore him.

• Arrington, for those of who don’t know him, is the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a tech “news” site now owned by AOL. TechCrunch and Arrington are famous gossip-mongers—the National Enquirer if you would—of technology journalism. That’s fine by me. I’m not interested in covering MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe supposed romance with Paris Hilton. More power to you if that’s what floats your boat. After all, there are more readers for that than the kind of things, such as Linux and networking, that I cover.

• The keynotes at Google I/O — Google’s developer conference — are always filled with such promise. Google TV, Google Wave, music in the cloud! But the products themselves haven’t always gone on to meet expectations. With Google I/O 2011 beginning on Tuesday, here’s a look back at what’s happened with past keynote product graduates.

• Cloud computing lacks both cross-compatibility and standards. Added to vendor lock-in is the possibility of outages, breaches of security or privacy, providers suspending your account, losing data or even going out of business altogether.

• A variety of vendor strategies are in play. Apple and Oracle exemplify the proprietary lock-in model, while Google champions open source without truly being open. VMware combines its high-margin virtualisation business with acquired software companies to create a hybrid model that is both proprietary and somewhat open all at once.

Security

• Facebook has leaked access to millions of users’ photographs, profiles and other personal information because of a years-old bug that overrides individual privacy settings, researchers from Symantec said.

• The flaw, which the researchers estimate has affected hundreds of thousands of applications, exposed user access tokens to advertisers and others. The tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user, such as posting messages to a Facebook wall or sending RSVP replies to invitations. For years, many apps that rely on an older form of user authentication turned over these keys to third parties, giving them the ability to access information users specifically designated as off limits.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• After a long-running campaign, a controversial set of CCTV cameras are finally being removed from Sparkbrook and Washwood Heath in Birmingham. The regions are predominantly Muslim, and local residents had been fiercely opposed to the system. Many wondered why two medium-sized districts in Birmingham required 218 cameras, including 169 advanced Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras which monitor the movement of vehicles.

• David Davis has alleged that the Home Office and Metropolitan Police may have broken the law while using security camera images. The claim was made during Home Office questions in the House of Commons.

Finance

• Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), has sought to quell shareholder concerns about its bonuses and business practices at the past two annual meetings. Today, he will try again.

• As the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets hosts investors for the first time at its building in Jersey City, New Jersey, shareholders are still questioning Goldman Sachs’s actions during the financial crisis, executive pay and business model.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc has just a few more months to put its stamp on the Volcker rule, and it is not wasting any time.

• The rule, designed to limit banks from speculating with their own money, will cost Goldman at least $3.7 billion in annual revenue, by one estimate. And billions more could be at stake if regulations now being drawn up are extra-tough.

• Goldman Sachs shareholders voted on 10 proposals this year, covering everything from climate change to executive pay. Goldman’s general counsel, Gregory Palm, announced the preliminary results at the end of the investment bank’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held on Friday in Jersey City.

• Shareholder approval for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s 2010 compensation plan, which doubled pay for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, tumbled to 73 percent from 96 percent a year ago.

• General Counsel Gregory K. Palm announced the vote tally at the end of today’s annual meeting, held for the first time at Goldman Sachs’s building in Jersey City, New Jersey.

• With Paul Volcker having given up and riding off into the sunset, GoldmanSachs (GS) and its army of lobbyists is busy doing “God’s work” in weakening any impact he might have, according to this Reuters report. Again, in America the BEST return on investment for large corporations is lobbying – it makes the ROI on their actual businesses look like peanuts. For a relatively few millions, oodles of tax breaks, protections, or new contracts can be secured. For an investment bank the sums to buy up politicians direct policy is relatively tiny – effectively for the salary of a handful of vice presidents per quarter, the world is their oyster. $5M annually for Goldman is not even a rounding error. I am pleased to report the more things change, the more they remain the same.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was in good spirits on Friday at his firm’s annual meeting, despite battling some testy shareholders and what seemed to be a cold.

• The Wall Street chieftain sipped water and blew his nose through the two-hour proceedings, and declined to shake one investor’s hand after the meeting for fear of spreading germs.

• Goldman Sachs had its annual shareholders meeting in New Jersey on Friday. So Lloyd Blankfein had the chance to sit in front of a room full of investors and explain why he got a $5.4 million bonus last year even though stocks were down 38 percent. Seriously, this guy must have cajones as big as his bald head. At this point, there are no plans for the CEO to step down.

• Somehow, shareholder compensation proposals that would restrict pay didn’t pass and the directors got re-elected. A Catholic nun, Sister Nora Nash who is part of one of the religious orders that was in attendance, told Fox Business prior to the meeting that the pay “is totally outlandish because of the fact that we live a world where millions are going to bed hungry, they don’t know where their next meal will come from, especially in our inner cities and in the third world.”

• “Never in the history of capitalism has anybody convinced people that a cabal, if you will, of bankers earning obscene amounts of money is good for everybody,” Dezenhall Resources’ Eric Dezenhall told WNYC.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was in good spirits on Friday at his firm’s annual meeting, despite battling some testy shareholders and what seemed to be a cold.

• The Wall Street chieftain sipped water and blew his nose through the two-hour proceedings, and declined to shake one investor’s hand after the meeting for fear of spreading germs.

• But while Blankfein might have preferred chicken soup over the continental breakfast on display, his demeanor remained strong and, some might say, resilient.

• (This report contains items about companies both in bankruptcy and not in bankruptcy. Adds Statistics section, Madoff in Updates and DS Waters in Downgrade.)

• May 6 (Bloomberg) — Vitro SAB, Mexico’s largest glassmaker, argued in a court filing on May 4 that its Chapter 15 case should remain in New York because the bankruptcy judge in Fort Worth, Texas, is ill.

• Separately, Vitro’s official creditors’ committee is asking for a delay in the hearing scheduled to begin today in Texas on a motion to approve sale procedures for the four U.S. Vitro subsidiaries that put themselves into Chapter 11 in the face of involuntary petitions filed in November.

• May 4 (Bloomberg) — U.S. senators formally referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission an investigative report that found Goldman Sachs Group Inc. misled clients about mortgage-linked securities. Bloomberg’s

• Berkshire was paid $5.5 billion for the securities on April 18, the Omaha, Nebraska-based company said late on May 6 in its first-quarter earnings report. The payment by Goldman Sachs includes the $5 billion Berkshire invested in 2008 and a 10 percent premium.

• The top U.S. securities regulator pledged a rigorous review of potentially outdated private securities trading rules, but stopped short of endorsing changes being advocated by Republican lawmakers.

• At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro was pressed to make regulatory changes to help small and medium-sized companies more easily raise capital without going public.

Privacy

• The planned deletion of the DNA profiles of millions of innocent people still lacks a definitive timetable, it was revealed today. Conservative MP Philip Davies asked the government how much time would be required once the legislation has been passed to remove the DNA of people who have been found innocent but whose records remain on the database. Home Office minister James Brokenshire said:

DRM

• Send Reggie Fils-Aime, President and COO of Nintendo of America a strong message that the Nintendo 3DS Terms of Service are unacceptable and that DRM must be dropped. Brick Nintendo before they brick you!

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• At least 23,000 file sharers soon will likely get notified they are being sued for downloading the Expendables in what has become the single largest illegal-BitTorrent-downloading case in U.S. history.

• A federal judge in the case has agreed to allow the U.S. Copyright Group to subpoena internet service providers to find out the identity of everybody who had illegally downloaded (.pdf) the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick — meaning the number of defendants is likely to dramatically increase as new purloiners are discovered. Once an ISP gets the subpoena, it usually notifies the account holder that his or her subscriber information is being turned over to the Copyright Group, which last year pioneered the practice of suing BitTorrent downloaders in the United States.

• ETA 3. Very interesting details in the comments section. It seems like this already exists in similar fashion in Spain and in Chile (I still think that declaring economic rights inalienable is a horrible idea, it barely works with moral rights). I’d like to see if this has ever been applied in those countries, and if so, if it covers licensing. Probably it does not, as in licensing one is not giving the work away, one is simply granting rights to third parties.

• COPYRIGHT CARTELS inspired legislation has forced The Pirate Bay to announce that it is preparing for lobbying and legal battles.

• The Pirate Bay, which might feel somewhat overshadowed by Anonymous, has posted a rallying call to arms on its blog and, channelling the voice of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, announced that its “finest hour” is upon it.

ACTA

• A controversial anti-counterfeiting agreement between the European Union, the US and other countries has come in for fresh criticism after the European Commission failed to address concerns about the treaty’s legality.

• The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was reached last year despite concerns that it would protect ‘big business’ at the expence of the consumer.

• [...]

• ACTA also includes other forms of trademark infringements based on similarity of signs, risk of confusion and the protection for well known trademarks against dilution. This, said FFII’s Wessels, is a clear extension of the EU acquis, which does not cover the criminal measures called for by ACTA.

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