● 06.04.11

● Links 4/6/2011: Red Hat Upgraded, GNU/Linux Gets ASUS Preinstalls, Mageia 1 Welcomed by Reviewers

Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Richard Chapman sent me a link to a log of activity for the International Space Station.

• * The server was migrated from that other OS to GNU/Linux * The client was migrated to “T61p”, a Lenovo model that ships with that other OS… The ISS started with Lose ’95 on clients back in the day.

Desktop

• Ubuntu project sponsor Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution will be pre-loaded on new ASUS Eee PC series netbooks. According to Canonical, the Taiwan-based computer manufacturer began shipping three new Ubuntu-based Eee PC models through its sales channels on 1 June.

• Chris Kenyon, VP of OEM services at Canonical told The INQUIRER, “The deal with ASUS is an important one for Canonical which will put Ubuntu in the hands of a larger audience, people who would not necessarily download Ubuntu, but would be happy to buy a computer knowing that it will work perfectly on that hardware. Also, Canonical’s extensive work with manufacturers helps make all future versions of Ubuntu run perfectly on specific machines and individual OEM’s hardware.”

Kernel Space

• This is a very short blog post as both Wim Coekaert and Ewan Mellor beat me by some time in publishing this great news: I was too busy traveling and celebrating. The fantastic news is that Linux 3.0 will have everything necessary to run Xen as both as a management domain and as a Xen guest.

• The Xen team has been working for years to get everything needed to run the Linux kernel as Dom0. Some of the components were added last year, but the final elements have now been added to handle everything.

• Another addition that will make the mainline Linux kernel more Xen friendly is pvops, a mode which will enable the kernel to switch between paravirtualization (pv), hardware virtualization (hvm) or paravirtual-hardware virtualization (pv-hvm).

• Over time, software developers tend to learn that micro-optimization efforts are generally not worthwhile, especially in the absence of hard data pointing out a specific problem. Performance problems are often not where we think they are, so undirected attempts to tweak things to make them go faster can be entirely ineffective. Or, indeed, they can make things worse. That is a lesson that the kernel developers have just relearned.

• On the forums, reaction to the news has been mixed, with some wondering if Linus is falling prey to the current trend of large major version number jumps to give the impression of significant progress.

Graphics Stack

• It was back in May of 2009 that DisplayLink began providing open-source Linux support for their USB-interfaced graphics processors in the form of documentation and code. Shortly thereafter, frame-buffer and X.Org drivers for DisplayLink USB hardware arrived and it quickly matured. By early 2010 it was possible to produce interesting results with these USB graphics adapters doing things like driving nine monitors over USB from a single computer.

• There was some initial thoughts that the Wine developers would be interested in the D3D state tracker as this natively implements the Direct3D 10/11 APIs where Wine’s existing Direct3D implementation largely lacks 10/11 support for now. With Wine’s Direct3D implementation, they’re also translating the Direct3D calls into OpenGL. The benefit of this is that it’s more platform agnostic and doesn’t place a requirement on the graphics driver being based on Gallium3D. The downside of translating the Direct3D calls into OpenGL is the associated overhead placed on the processor. In the future it could also be of use to the ReactOS in their development of a free software operating system that is Windows API/ABI compatible.

Applications

• In a former article I’ve talked about the XMPP:Jingle protocol to find a good replacement for Skype. Some people asked me about Ekiga, is this a good software or not ? and how you can use it ?

• Aupeo, a Pandora-like music streaming service, has just rolled out its first smartphone app for iOS and Android devices. Although its wide range of music, genres, subgenres, and preference-tuning features are impressive, Aupeo’s eye-candy-rich smartphone app is frustrating to use.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Or was it ‘Day One’? I can never quite decide… Either way, it was Wednesday, though after spending Tuesday night awake in the airport I was a little disoriented.

• The WebWorld Sprint has begun at the Linux Hotel near Essen in Germany. All the attendees arrived throughout Wednesday and – in contrast to conditions in Randa the sun has been shining on us. Yesterday evening we had a barbecue in the hotel garden, enjoyed some evening sun and then got to the first of the meetings about the extravagant number of KDE subdomains and our plans for the sprint.

• This functionality did not come out of the box with Kubuntu 11.04, but a little investigation revealed that it was added when I tried out the latest release of Muon Suite (The awesome Package installer which should replace kpackagekit on the next version of Kubuntu) I must have installed a package called plasma-runner-installer and probably forgot all about it.

GNOME Desktop

• Another article about the GNOME Shell. Nothing really to see here, it’s just opinion, and yours is as good as mine. If you are bored however, read on.

• Recent trials with GNOME 3 using the Fedora Live CD’s did not go so well. They always dumped me into fallback mode which is, despite some claiming it to be a solution for GNOME 2 lovers, nowhere near good enough as a tide me over, and it looked unfinished. To be fair these were all before Fedora 15 final arrived, or were built on Fedora 14 but at that time GNOME 3 was still in development.

• [...]

• At present GNOME 3, with or without Shell, does not look like a serious desktop for serious work.

• I’m amazed what GNOME team accomplished with GNOME 3.0, this is just an amazingly modern, slick and very usable desktop and at the same time original and not going after OSX or any other desktop. GNOME 3 is far from perfect but for a first release it’s a really solid one.

• Only downside so far I found is that GNOME 3.0 makes usage of Compiz impossible and incompatible, so you can wave goodbye to great usabillity and eyecandy from plugins like Cube, Wobbly, Expo, Wall and Zoom Desktop. Hopefully GNOME 3 development team will provide some layer of compatility between mutter and compiz so that compiz plugins could still be used with GNOME 3.

• Allan, who is working for several gnome applications, posted an update to the recent gnome status about the development of gnome 3.2. One of the updates planned for the latest version of the desktop is a modified overview mode. There are two important changes to the overview mode compared with the version 3.0. One is a modified buttons (windows/applications) that allow you to view the appropriate category.

Distributions

• Gnome 3 looks to the future without fear. It even looks like the future, when everybody will have hooks implanted in their foreheads so they can look at their smartphones while they’re walking down the street. I’m getting old, and I’ve been kind of cranky for a while now. I don’t especially want to learn a new human interface. My phone is dull—borderline retarded, even—but I can usually make and receive calls on it, most of which are on the order of “this is Dr. Proctologist’s office confirming Edward’s appointment”. I don’t hate Gnome 3, but that’s because I don’t hate anything about Linux, and I don’t let myself hate anything in (or out of) Linuxland until I’ve used it for a couple of weeks, and I’m not a hateful sort of person anyway, and I haven’t managed to find the time to use Gnome 3 very much yet.

• [...]

• But Foresight’s my favorite. Since I installed it, I’ve been gravitating to it: given a choice (all three of my computers are multi-boot, and two have Foresight), I’m going into Foresight more than any other distro

• After some useful feedback from visitors to my GNU/Linux & BSD Logo Zoo, I made version 2.0 at last. This time I included Plant distros, too. With them, I tried to take into account as many other distros as I could, but let me apologize if your favorite distro is still missing.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Decision was made to replace *buntus, but there was no decision so far about the replacement system.

• Overall, I think Mageia is a good, solid distribution.

• I have been watching the Mageia development since it was first announced. As soon as I saw that Mageia 1 had gone from a release candidate to a final release I started the Transmission torrent download of three of the ISO files to keep and used one of them (mageia-dvd-1-i586.iso) to check it out with VirtualBox.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• Piper Jaffray currently has an Overweight rating on Red Hat and a price target of $57.

• Santos developed TurboVNC so it could enable its geoscientists to work on reservoir models using light clients, with all of the processing being done in central servers.

• Also competing for the award were Nissan, DreamWorks, Verizon and Emirates. The award winner was chosen by voting by the open source developers at the summit.

Fedora

• My laptop is IBM ThinkPad Lenovo X200 which uses an Intel graphics card.

• The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that Ricky Elrod is the recipient of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its fourth year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. Elrod has spent significant time working within Fedora’s Infrastructure Team, a group of volunteers that manage the servers and applications that run Fedora. He was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to continue his education at the University of Akron this fall and major in Computer Science.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• uGet is a GTK+ download manager that runs on both Linux and Windows. The latest uGet 1.8.0, released today, brings support for Torrent and Metalink files (by using aria2), Ubuntu AppIndicator as well as GTK3 support.

• For six years I spent my professional career using and supporting Linux on the desktop. Outside of work and subsequent employment with Imagineer Systems & Memset I’ve been using Macs. A few days ago I decided to head back to Linux.

• [...]

• Ubuntu is a marvellous operating system. It’s clean, consistent and does what it says on the tin.

• The first alpha of what will become Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” has been released by the Canonical and Ubuntu developers. This development milestone is the first on the roadmap which sees another two alpha and two beta versions before the final release on 13 October. The Alpha 1 is specifically aimed at developers as an early snapshot of ongoing work after the major system-wide changes have been made.

• Oneiric Ocelot is based on Linux kernel 2.6.39 and uses Gcc 4.6 as the default compiler. Network-manager version 0.9 has also been introduced in Alpha 1, which the release notes point out has broken API compatibility. GNOME 3 has also been brought into the system, and some components have been changed, while other desktop elements are in transition, to make use of GNOME 3′s APIs; this does not mean that the controversial Unity desktop is going away, just that underpinnings are moving from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. Packages in transition, and their impact, are now being tracked. Progress, planned development and specifications are documented in the Blueprints for Oneiric web page.

• Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot alpha 1 has been released today and it comes with GNOME 3 (the GNOME application stack such as Gedit 3, Nautilus 3, etc. – but it doesn’t come with GNOME Shell by default; however, GNOME Shell is available in the official Ubuntu 11.10 repositories) like we saw in our previous Oneiric post and of course, Unity by default. Also, the classic GNOME session has been replaced with Unity 2D so starting with Ubuntu 11.10 alpha 1, those with hardware that doesn’t support the regular Unity will be logged in to Unity 2D.

Devices/Embedded

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Barnes & Noble NOOK Color is turning out to be a ridiculously versatile device. Originally positioned as a color eBook reader which just happened to run Google Android, it didn’t take long for hackers to figure out how to root the tablet and install their own apps. Now another hack shows that it’s possible to run a completely different operating system on the eReader: MeeGo Linux.

• MeeGoExperts spotted a demo of a NOOK Color running MeeGo at Computex in Taiwan. The responsible party is a company called Nomovok which develops MeeGo and other open source applications.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).

• One of the unresolved issues in the Oracle v. Google case is whether certain Oracle in-house counsel, including their general counsel, will be given access to documents produced by Google which Google has declared as “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL – FOR ATTORNEYS EYES ONLY!”

BSD

Programming

• So because the code’s open, I was able to fix my problem and the rest of the world gets to benefit from it. Everybody wins.

• And the fact that I was able to make those changes, and then share them with everybody else, really is quite an amazing thing.

Leftovers

• If smartphones progress significantly in the ergonomics, they could slice into the netbook market chunk. Tablets also pose a risk, as they blend phone use with netbook size and comfort, although they remain pricey and not as good as the competition, yet.

• Currently, it looks as if the netbook is not going to die anytime soon. Half across the globe, it is still the most cost-effective computing device, in terms of price, size, capabilities, and overall usability. Not quite a high-end gaming rig, but then, it has some ten inches of screen equity, a decent resolution and enough hard disk space to store a handful of data. Internet connectivity can also be quite good. But all this may change.

• Netbooks will hold as little as 5% market and as much as 30%, all depending how the competition with the smartphone turns out. This will mainly be dictated by the giants like Intel and AMD. The big CPU vendors may eventually choose to leave the smartphone market dominance to ARM and focus on other segments.

Cablegate

Reader’s Picks and Comments

• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Windows 8 would would launch sometime next year. His firm says otherwise. “It appears there was a misstatement,” a Microsoft spokesperson recently said

• Microsoft has delayed its Windows 8 program after vendor outrage over the extremely tight restrictions that it would have placed on chip vendors and OEMs developing Windows 8 devices. DigiTimes is reporting that Microsoft has postponed its Integrated Development Program (IDP) for Windows 8 over the next two weeks.

Defence/Police/Aggression

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Censorship

• the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services. Internet monitoring firm Renesys reported that starting around 7 a.m. EDT today, close to two-thirds of all Syrian networks were suddenly unreachable from the global Internet. In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys’ chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post. The shutdown has affected all of SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks as well as several of the country’s ISPs

Privacy

Civil Rights

• [under the expanded cable theft bill it is] a crime to use a friend’s login — even with permission — to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody. … services that believe they are getting ripped off can go to law enforcement authorities and press charges. … Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

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