● 06.24.11

● Links 24/6/2011: Linux 3.0 is Fast, Lots of Android 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Eric, stop making up random letter combinations that make sense to NOBODY but you. Ok?

• If you can’t be bothered to write a few more letters and make things readable, why would you expect anybody else to bother spending the time looking at your emails?

• Linus

• 3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39 due to the other changes made (ie the read-ahead), so yes, the regression itself is fixed.

• The XFS filesystem has taken a beating for being a big, complicated, foreign filesystem since it’s introduction, and there is no doubt that there is a fair bit of code in there. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the Linux Kernel v3.0.0 – XFS developers have steadily reduced lines of code, while other up and coming filesystems such as Ext4 and BTRFS are steadily growing in LOC and complexity. And XFS has been under constant improvement at the same time as well.

Graphics Stack

• The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the “classic” Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren’t convinced that it’s the appropriate choice and they aren’t interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that’s required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.

Applications

• Every year or so, I need to convert a printed page to text. It’s not oftener, because, while I do have a collected letters project that would benefit from optical character recognition (OCR), I only work on it sporadically. When I have to sign a publisher’s agreement or some similar document, I can generally just send a scanned image.

• But every year or so, only OCR will do for one need or other, and I plunge into a quick survey of the available free software tools. The results have always been fairly dismal and more trouble than they’re worth. However, with the 2.0 release of KBookOCR, a base-level reliability and convenience is now available.

• If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and if you have questions related to your ubuntu system post question to our forums. Thanks for visiting!

• BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn’t know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.

• Photographs are wonderful. Digital photographs are even better. We can take, archive and share as many of them as we want, at the smallest possible cost… if we pay the right price. A digital archive of many thousands images (which takes surprisingly little time to happen!) doesn’t tolerate carelessness. If you don’t build and manage it properly from the beginning, it will be worse than not having it at all. Here are a few quick tips to keep normal Jpeg digital photographs under control, with GUI or command line tools that work in any Gnu/Linux distribution. If you generate and store high quality raw pictures you’ll have to follow some extra steps, but that’s stuff for another article.

Proprietary

• Adobe is preparing to supplement its popular-but-proprietary Flash product with a standards-based animation tool based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Supporting imported bitmap and vector graphics, Adobe Edge produces output compatible with browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, and the Safari versions used in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, the company says.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Out of the Park Developements have announced that OOTPB 12 is now available. OOTB is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and is priced at $39.99.

• About 4-5 days back, I came to know about this awesome project Indie Game : The Movie, a documentary movie about indie games and life of developers. The project had reached $12,000 goal out of $35,000 fund raising target, so I thought I would write about it. But, then I was not able to finish it on time due to office work.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• During the past weeks, we’ve been kind of silent around Plasma Active. This doesn’t mean we’ve just been sitting on our lazy bums, but that we’ve poured a lot of work into various aspects of the Plasma Active user experience. Let me details these changes to give you some idea of where we are. But first off, …

GNOME Desktop

• If you’re using Fedora 14 and want to switch to BlueBubble, there’s currently no easy way to do this. I recommend you proceed with the regular upgrade, try Gnome 3 for a few days and if you’re not convinced, follow the guide below.

Distributions

• Nothing like seeing a reddit post, saying you’ll spend a few minutes looking into something, and then realizing you spent multiple hours on it. Today that time sink was Gephi, a pretty cool desktop application for generating graphs from a variety of data sources. It is available in the AUR if you are an Arch Linux user.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• We spoke about this some weeks ago, it’s now done! Thanks to Arnaud Patard (aka rtp) the Mageia ARM port is available for a first preview. The port’s code name is “arm eabi”, as a future port should be “arm eabihf”. It will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors.

Red Hat Family

• How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues.

• American Linux distributor Red Hat has announced that the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has gained 65 new members, a nearly ten-fold increase in membership since it was first established last month. Brocade, Dell, EnterpriseDB, Fujitsu Frontech, FusionIO, Gluster, Groundwork Open Source, MontaVista Software, Univention and Vyatta, for example, are among the group’s new members.

Debian Family

• Joining the ever-growing list of Linux distributions jumping the sinking OpenOffice.org ship for the safety of LibreOffice is the irreplaceable Debian. LibreOffice has been in testing since March, but as of today it’s available for stable 6.0 as well.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• For years, Nokia had been working on Linux as a future operating system for its smartphones and mobile devices. Then, the firm did an about-face and chose Windows Phone. Having had no luck with the penguin, the recent release of the N9 smartphone marks the end of an era.

• In 2005, Nokia was a pioneer when it produced the 770 Internet Tablet: the first mobile device in its regular product portfolio with a Linux operating system. The unit was a small 5.5 by 3.1 inch tablet computer that would just fit into your trouser pocket; the touchscreen had a sufficiently large diagonal of just over four inches, with a resolution of 800 by 480 – quite high at the time. Linux developers who bought the 770 Internet Tablet, which normally cost €350, received a €250 discount with no strings attached.

Android

• Archos announced two high-end Android 3.1 tablets that use Texas Instruments dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4 processors. The eight-inch Archos 80 G9 and 10.1-inch Archos 101 G9 are both offered with a 250GB hard disk drive option, available 3G, as well as standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and HDMI.

• Google has selectively released Google TV 2.0 “Fishtank” beta code based on Android 3.1, featuring the ability to run an Android app and stream TV at the same time, says a Geek.com report. The company is said to have sent out a Fishtank developer’s system to about 50 developers, while another report says Logitech will offer a 2.0-based system in late summer.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• More details have surfaced about Android 3.2, including support for seven-inch screens and Qualcomm processors. The release may appear on Amazon.com’s Android tablets, which are rumored to be arriving in August bearing Texas Instruments processors and could hasten the fall of the monochrome Kindle.

• Google and its Android tablet vendor partners face a double-edged sword in their epic struggle against the almighty Apple iPad. Android 2.x is both functionally and aesthetically lacking on larger screens, especially beyond seven inches. Meanwhile, Android 3.0 solves this problem and introduces some cool features not found on the iPad, but is widely criticized for being buggy and complex.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Eclipse Indigo release train is now officially available, delivering 62 projects covering 46 million lines of code. According to Eclipse, there were 408 developers and 49 organizations that contributed code and collaborated for the Indigo release.

• “We’re continuing to refine the release process and it’s already quite scalable,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. “Even though we’re getting more and more projects and code, we’re finding that we’re able to leverage our history in moving the release train forward each year.”

• Milinkovich noted that from a Java developer perspective the Indigo release offers a number of interesting new projects. One of them is the WindowBuilder GUI project, which just became part of Eclipse this year. Google donated the technology to Eclipse in December of 2010, after first acquiring the technology from developer tools vendor Instantiations in August of 2010.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• In a clear challenge to Web calling clients like Skype, Google is building its open-source voice and video chatting software into its Chrome browser, according to CNET.

• Google acquired the open-source technology, known as WebRTC, last year when it bought out VoIP software provider Global IP Solutions. The search engine giant is now looking to hand the royalty-free software over to developers for browser-based applications.

Mozilla

• Three months ago, when we saw the Firefox 4 release, there was a hell lot of buzz surrounding it, and the news trended in Twitter for hours as people felt that, it had been quite a while since they got a new Firefox, unlike the case with Chrome(the direct competitor). Some may admit that, a huge release with a lot of new features is better than frequent releases with not so important features!

CMS

• Acquia’s Commons 2.0 community management tool provides Facebook-style activity feeds with like and share buttons for the open source content management system.

• Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.

BSD

• BatteryMonitor for GNUstep now has support for NetBSD acpi too now! Support languished because decent acpi support in NetBSD is relatively recent and reading it requires checking a property list (which is of course more complex, but at least consistent and clean compared to the maze of files linux provides). To manipulate it libprop sports handy functions, yet I always had some problems here and there, until I realized something very cool. Property lists are familiar to GNUstep and Cocoa users.

Public Services/Government

• As one of the country’s leading open source outfits had abandoned Bristol, one might begin to question the City Council’s commitment to open source. Indeed, your correspondent, cunningly disguised as a member of the public, emailed council leader Barbara Janke about the council’s commitment to open source, highlighting the reliability, lack of licensing fees and lower support costs of open source. Another point I raised with Barbara Janke was the fate of Cllr Mark Wright, the cabinet member with responsibility for IT in the last council and a firm open source advocate, as he did not feature in the new cabinet after the May 2011 council election.

• Barbara Janke’s reply is reproduced below.

• So there you have it. Bristol City Council remains committed to open source. Perhaps someone less trusting of the City Council than your ‘umble scribe should file a FoI request to ask the council just how far their commitment stretches.

• As regards the fate of Mark Wright, Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly has done some fine investigatory work and discovered that Wright’s ousting from the cabinet was a result of internal party politics, not part of a conspiracy to do down open source wherever it reared its head in the public sector.

• Bristol City Council’s seven year campaign to use open source software has been sent reeling after the shock departure of two lead architects of its ICT Strategy.

• Councillor Mark Wright, the computer expert who pushed Bristol’s pioneering ICT strategy through the council chamber just last September, was voted out of his post as ICT portfolio holder a month ago, after a private vote of Liberal Democrat members.

Licensing

• William Theaker recently started working at the FSF as this summer’s licensing intern. In this post, he writes about what brought him to free software, and the goals for his internship.

• Hi! My name is William Theaker; I’m a college student from Connecticut interested in free software and copyright law. This summer I will be interning with the FSF; I will be working on various free software licensing issues by answering questions about licensing, investigating possible GPL violations, and working on my biggest project this summer, organizing the drafting archives for the GPLv3. My first interaction with free software was when I started using “Linux” in 2003, though I was unaware of the actual origins of the software in my computer. What I referred to as “Linux” is, in fact, GNU/Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system, made useful by the GNU core libraries, shell utilities, and vital system components comprising a full operating system as defined by POSIX.

Programming

• The maturing Web development industry is inextricably intertwined with a constant companion: complexity. Gone are the days of assembling a few simple database-backed PHP-driven pages and calling it a website; these days clients expect rich JavaScript-based user interfaces, cloud-backed data stores, and tight integration with third-party APIs. To accommodate such challenges, developers have put a great deal of time and effort into devising tools and techniques which help to identify, track and resolve bugs. One such technique is continuous integration, which facilitates the merging of code changes made by various members of a development team by automating tedious processes such as testing, documentation generation, and deployment.

Leftovers

• The software giant’s cloud computing service went down for over three hours.

Hardware

• AMD has publicly announced it is withdrawing its support from BAPCo, a non-profit consortium which develops and distributes a benchmarking program called SYSmark, refusing to endorse the latest version of the suite because its results are allegedly unrepresentative of the workloads used in everyday computing. The company also believes there’s a bias in favor of Intel.

• The suite uses a number of application-based benchmarks to recreate usage patterns in the areas of office productivity, data/financial analysis, system management, media creation, 3D modeling and web development. Among the applications used in SYSmark 2012 are Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others. But AMD argues that BAPCo is not taking advantage of GPUs for general purpose computing tasks, despite the fact that many applications support it, and instead solely relies on performance of CPUs.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• Paris, June 23rd, 2011 – The Mexican Senate approved a resolution calling on the government not to sign the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. La Quadrature calls on French and European Members of Parliament to do the same.

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