● 05.27.11

● Links 27/5/2011: GNU/Linux in North Korea, Bodhi Linux 1.1.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Whatever, it’s running Linux.

• As far as the operating system, all of the home-grown computers will run Red Star, North Korea’s own Linux distro. Hardware-wise, though, the report is vague: the educational machines have no USB ports, while the business machine have two, and both netbooks have a battery that last two and a half hours.

• Awesomium windowless web framework and engine has been ported to Linux. Awesomium can be used for web page capture, site scrapping, in-app advertising, in-app browsing, web automation, rendering custom in-game web browser and creating HTML UIs for 3D games.

Desktop

• “Measuring market share of open source software is extremely difficult,” Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, told LinuxInsider.

• “The basic problem is that one can use sales data as a close proxy for market share when one is selling a tangible and restricted resource, but for something like Linux, actual product sales probably account for a very small portion of installed systems,” Travers explained. “In the end, it is reasonably impossible to estimate market share in this area with any accuracy. I don’t think anyone has a solid idea of what the actual Linux desktop market share is.”

Kernel Space

• While we have already delivered a number of benchmarks from the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, surprisingly we have not yet published any new file-system benchmarks from this latest stable Linux kernel release. Fortunately, that has changed today with a fresh round of Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS file-system benchmarks on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel and compared to the preceding 2.6.38 and 2.6.37 kernel releases.

• Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, and Linux User’s 100th issue special guest editor chats about the 20th anniversary of Linux, the future of embedded Linux devices, and the current state of the kernel among other things…

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. The world is viewed as a cross-section seen from the side, and your character walks and jumps between solid platforms whilst fighting monsters. It’s a big adventure with all the classic fun – you fight monsters, collect coins, talk to people, and buy new stuff.

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Just a day after the KDE camp pushed out KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1, the GNOME camp has come to the desktop with their stable 3.0.2 release. The GNOME 3.0.2 release, like is usual for GNOME point releases, just brings bug-fixes and translation updates.

Distributions

• With the release of version 3.6, the Tiny Core crew have added a GUI method for hard disk installation. As I have, on previous occasions, banged on about this omission, I thought I’d take a look.

• In the past, I’ve had a love/hate relationship TinyCore Linux distribution. On the one hand, it sports some amazing technology. It’s a lightweight distribution based on a custom core. By default, it gives you a basic desktop with a dock along the bottom and enough GUI tools to begin adding applications and making other customizations. See our overview of Tiny Core circa 3.3 for more details.

• [...]

• On the whole, I think that Tiny Core has now reached the stage where an experienced computer user with little or no Linux experience, could be trained to deploy it. I always thought that Tiny Core had the potential to fill a useful niche, and the addition of a GUI installer now makes it accessible to a broader range of users.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Whenever an anti-Unity discussion happened on the web, users had only one statement “Let’s see what Fedora 15 packs in”! Finally it is here. We had always convinced people to learn to use Unity. Though we are not reluctant towards publishing stories featuring Fedora and other competant distros. (Not a disclaimer! No way! )Now onto some Fedora love. Yesterday, the Fedora community announced their release of new version named Deadlock.

• A long time Mandriva user, I was distro-hopping for the past 6 months. I tried openSUSE 11.3, 11.4 and Fedora 14 – all in their KDE avatars. I couldn’t wait to try Fedora 15, which was released this week. I downloaded the KDE Live CD and copied it onto a USB stick using Unetbootin (I hate booting from a CD/DVD since it is terribly slow). Fedora booted up in less than a minute on my 4-year-old laptop and presented me a clean, pretty and solid desktop. After playing around a while, I decided on replacing openSUSE 11.4 KDE with Fedora 15 KDE.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• We are pleased to announce the release of Bodhi Linux 1.1.0. This is the first of our quarterly scheduled update releases to keep the software on the Bodhi live CD current.

• This will undoubtedly echo many user opinions, but they will fall on deaf ears just as those leveled against early KDE 4. Determined developers with a vision trump public dissent and soon most dissent disappears. [...] they will have to bite the bullet and upgrade at some point.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Many have called sub-$100 Android smartphones Google’s doomsday weapon. Some have also noticed that the onslaught of inexpensive Android devices is killing competition as we speak, resulting in the Android/iOS duopoly. One can buy inexpensive Android phones today the vast majority being white-label Chinese knock-offs. There are a few exceptions, like the affordable Android handsets Huawei’s been shipping to the UK and US.

• The Motorola Droid X2 went on sale today in Verizon Wireless stores for $200 plus contract. Although the Android 2.2 smartphone adds an improved 4.3-inch qHD display and a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 to the original Droid X design, that’s not enough to cut it considering today’s high-end, 4G competition, especially when the performance boost appears to be surprisingly negligible, says this review.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Following Firefox 5 Beta, Mozilla has followed up and filled all other developer channels as well. For the first time, Mozilla is now offering a full and coherent range of nightly builds, developer versions, a beta and a final release. Mozilla plans to release the second public beta this Friday.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• Word Press has announced the availability of the Beta 2 for testing purpose. The Beta 2 is not recommended for the production use but it will help developers to prepare their plug-ins for the upcoming release.

• In this article, I’ll talk about my tryst with WordPress in developing a Progressive Contemporary Issues’ website. These lines are based on personal experiences, and whatever humor, terrific or pathetic, is not aimed at harm or defamation.

Business

• Jaspersoft has announced enhancements to the Jaspersoft 4 BI Suite, including new data analysis functionality and native 64-bit support.

Semi-Open Source

• Business intelligence (BI) is one of those buzzphrases that sound super-cool, but are often misunderstood. What is business intelligence and should you care? Do you need to drop a giant bucket of money on BI?

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Finance

• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is investigating whether Goldman Sachs’ (GS.N) mortgage servicing arm did not conduct proper reviews before denying borrowers the option to lower their payments under a government loan modification programme.

• In its quarterly filing with the SEC earlier this month, Goldman said regulators had sought information on the foreclosure and servicing protocols and activities of its mortgage servicing unit Litton Loan Servicing.

• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has begun an investigation into the mortgage-servicing arm of Goldman Sachs, looking at whether it systematically rejected borrowers’ efforts to lower their loan payments through government programs.

• The inquiry by the New York Fed arose from a letter sent by an anonymous employee, who accused the Goldman unit, Litton Loan, of denying loans without properly reviewing applications.

Privacy

• The deadline for the implementation of a European privacy law on cookies passed with a whimper at midnight last night, after just two Member States issued a full notification to Brussels.

• Meanwhile, 19 of the 27-bloc countries that make up the European Union ignored the 25 May deadline on implementing the full, or indeed partial, set of measures laid out in the revised legislation for the e-Privacy Directive.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Shaw has announced new broadband plans that offer far more data, faster speeds, and better pricing than comparable plans at competitors such as Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Shaw says the plans will be rolled out over the coming months and offer far bigger caps (including some unlimited plans). While the company says the move is linked to a shift away from analog channels, it seems more likely that Shaw is the first of the large ISPs to respond to mounting public and political pressure over the uncompetitive pricing in the Canadian broadband market. Consumer regulation from the CRTC is not likely in the short term, but government officials have made it clear that they are concerned with the current competitive environment.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Yesterday’s post highlighted the recent Access Copyright decision to refuse pay-per-use transactional digital licences (late in the day I received a note that AC appears to have had a change of heart). As I noted in the conclusion, the copyright collective faces an increasingly problematic balance sheet. According to its 2010 annual report, it spent more on itself in the form of administrative costs (including legal fees and board compensation) that it actually dispensed to Canadian authors. Admittedly, these numbers are not easy to find. Indeed, for an organization devoted to collecting licensing revenue and distributing it collective members, the annual report is incredibly vague in providing clear numbers about precisely what gets distributed to Canadian authors.

Will’s Picks

• We’ve written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to.

• They want robust, sustainable, community-driven open source projects in the DoD

• The standards in this area – SIP and XMPP – are excellent, and there are wonderful open source projects like Jitsi that do everything Skype does.

• The FSFE’s intention is to write a paper which shows how widely deployed the applications are, thereby making them as attractive as possible to UK public sector procurers and suppliers.

Science

• The experiment, which spanned more than a decade, suggests that the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 1E-27 cm. This means that if the electron were magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Given that no one actually knows what the statute covers, you would think that Congress would have a hearing on what the law should punish and whether Congress wants to punish the routine computer use of millions of Americans. Instead, the House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing tomorrow on cybersecurity, in which I believe one of the issues covered will be proposed legislation backed by the White House to raise penalties under Section 1030 and add a new aggravated offense statute

• Microsoft Corp.’s revenue in China this year will only be about 5% of what it gets in the U.S., even though personal-computer sales in the two countries are almost equal, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Censorship

Privacy

• “Instead of threatening to shut down flights in Texas, why doesn’t the TSA just show us their statutory authority to grope or ogle our private parts?”

• the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion … Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm. … [intentionally or] inadvertently, due to errors or carelessness.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

Copyrights

• I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property… [try] incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years.

• his conference is one of the most scary I’ve ever seen. It’s finishing up, and the panel, including Eric Schmidt, are summing up all the findings. Schmidt has just pointed out to the panel that copyright is not an absolute right that authors hold, that the law doesn’t say that, that there are fair use rights in the US, for example, and something similar in other countries. The look of surprise on the face of the other panelists was palpable. Go Eric!

• Some 40 percent of the British Library’s copyrighted works cannot be digitized because authors can’t be located, the commission said.

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