● 07.12.11

● Links 12/7/2011: Pardus 2011 Released, New President of Executive Board at Mandriva, Firefox 8 Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• My name is Lateef Alabi-Oki. I’m a software developer, IT consultant and computer technician. I’m modestly known in the Free Software community as the maintainer of Scribes, the esoteric, unconventional, unorthodox text editor for Linux and Unix-like systems. I also maintain less popular projects like Striim (the Internet Radio Player), Germinal (the terminal emulator designed to be used with a terminal multiplexer like Tmux), gomodoro (a pomodoro timer) among others.

• Soon the task of re-installing and re-installing Windows got so frustrating I decided to get rid of Windows altogether and install Linux in its place. So began my search for a Linux distribution that works with my old hardware and my wireless card, and I have tried plenty of distributions with no luck. I tried Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, and a bunch of others. They were either too demanding on my resources or didn’t work well with my wireless card. After some more searching I have finally found a nice flavor of Linux that’s perfect for my needs, and it’s the one I’m using right now.

Desktop

• With a 15.6″ screen, a dual-core i5 processor and 8GB of DDR3 RAM German company Rockiger‘s Satchbook might read like a MacBook Pro, but it comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.

• It can run also on Windows 7, even though it has the base of Ubuntu.

• Linux Desktop articles are all over the place. I can hardly open up a browser without tripping over one. Most of them are negative whine-fests, complaining that Linux is too hard for new users, or has become too dumbed-down for technical users, or the fonts are ugly, or the next generation desktop environments are too different, or… well I could go on, but I think you get the point. So today, I feel like whining about the whiners. Give em’ some of their own medicine, and bring something a bit different to the table: A positive viewpoint on the state of the Linux Desktop. Don’t look so shocked, just keep reading.

• We have what we need folks! The Linux Desktop has arrived. The solid foundation of GNU’s tools and the Linux kernel; topped with many desktop environment choices and all the wonderful Linux desktop applications has got us there. Due to the hard work of the entire Linux developer community there is now a viable, open, free, full desktop computing alternative for those who seek it out. There are user friendly distributions out there for non-techies, and highly technical ones for those who prefer to build a custom desktop experience. Available in your favorite distribution’s repositories are three modern and beautiful desktop environments to choose from. Ubuntu’s Unity is becoming more polished and user friendly. KDE is mature and highly configurable. And Gnome 3 takes the minimal, “get out of my way so I can get stuff done” desktop philosophy to new heights. For those that prefer more classic desktop experiences there is the fast, stable, fully featured xfce4; and the super-fast lxde desktop. For the nerdiest of the nerds there are multitudes of fully configurable window managers out there; from tiling powerhouses like Xmonad, to flexible floating window managers like Openbox. Linux users have never had more choice and quality available for their desktops.

Server

• In the hope of continuing the System z upgrade boom that started last summer, Big Blue has rounded out its lineup with a midrange – what IBM calls “Business Class” – mainframe, the System zEnterprise 114.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Germany wants to outlaw “Facebook Parties”, lots of social networking talk (including three years of identi.ca and Google+), half a million Android devices are activated daily and HP releases the TouchPad.

Kernel Space

• gDEBugger, a program developed by Graphic Remedy for debugging, profiling, and analyzing OpenGL (and OpenCL) applications, was a very useful tool for graphics developer. gDEBugger worked with GPUs from all major vendors, is capable of locating graphics pipeline performance bottlenecks, allowed dynamically editing GLSL shaders in real-time, and had many other capabilities. This powerful utility was even made free of charge to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users. Graphic Remedy was acquired by AMD last month and already the non-Windows users have been shafted with their OS support being dropped.

• One of the items I’ve been working on recently for Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand is new ways to visualize performance result data generated by the many test profiles and suites available via OpenBenchmarking.org. Here’s one of the new ways that was committed over the weekend to the Lillesand Git code-base.

Graphics Stack

• XreaL, the heavily modified Quake 3 game engine that its developer says is the most advanced open-source game engine, is still in-development even without an official release for this project that’s been around for years.

• Back in 2009 when we first featured XreaL, the graphics were incredibly impressive with many advancements made to the ioquake3 engine not found in other incarnations of the game. The feature-set was incredible. Back then the attempt was to turn XreaL into a full-fledged game, but the artists and engine developer parted ways and it turned into more of an effort just to make the best game engine possible.

Applications

• Well, it has been a (relatively) long wait, but it looks like it’s finally here, an application like Couch Potato and Sick Beard, but for music! Headphones is a very young project (first commit was posted on May 20, 2011), but is already showing significant promise!

• For those that aren’t familiar, Sick Beard and Couch Potato (and now Headphones) are programs that function similarly to a Personal or Digital Video Recorder (PVR/DVR). These programs can be configured to monitor certain shows, movies, or artists (respectively) and will actively search for any relevant and desired content. Once a show, movie, or album is found it will be sent to SABnzbd+ so that it can be downloaded. Once downloaded, Sick Beard, Couch Potato (and soon, Headphones) will take the show, movie, or album and rename it properly, fetch any relevant meta-information (posters, fan art, trailers, lyrics, etc), move it to the proper directory for storage, and then tell XBMC Media Center to update its library with the new content.

• Getting things done (GTD), an organization method created by productivity guru David Allen, has gained a lot of reputation amongst many folks who are enthusiastic about managing their time. The essence of this method is to take the task-taking process out of the mind and onto an external medium like a paper or a text file. Since its detailed mention in Allen’s bestselling book by the same name, Getting Things Done has been incorporated into many organization web apps and software.

• The Ardour digital audio workstation is a first-rate multi-channel audio recorder, editor, and mixer. It runs on Mac OS X and Linux, which are both superior audio production platforms. It supports a wide range of audio file formats, has non-destructive editing with unlimited undo, and unlimited tracks and buses. (Limited only by your computer when it reaches its limits and keels over.)

• In the first level, I created a free-play mode, where the user can chose the size of the piano (one octave or two). From the second level, the tutor mode starts, the user will be given a sequence of notes to be played with delays indicated for each song. The initial tutor levels had C major, D major, Pentatonic scale. The rest of the levels had fun-filled songs like Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle. Though I can make it more complex, should keep in mind that this is targeted for the kids in the age group of 2-10. I created the .wav formats of all the music file using the python library – pysynth.

Proprietary

• Opera 12, codenamed “Wahoo” (yes after the fish), is designed to run alongside version 11.5, so users who wish to give the alpha version a try can feel free to do so, without ditching the most recent stable release. Currently the Opera 12 alpha is little more than a series of bug fixes and performance improvements, but we expect to see more as the weeks roll on.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Wolfire Games has announced the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 6 Fortuna, as their latest development version of this ancient warfare game that’s long been in development. This latest open-source update has lots of terrain texture updates and other new game assets for your summer fighting pleasure.

• Until recently, I had presumed that a Clonk was the sound that my hard drive made just before I realized that I hadn’t backed it up properly. However, in this case, a Clonk is a tiny chap who can jump, climb and fire weapons in the service of reaching his goal. OpenClonk runs on Linux and is the latest in a series of side-view platform games that started life as a DOS shareware series.

• It cannot be denied that there remains a paucity of games for Linux produced by the large well known gaming companies. It is sometimes perceived that part of the reason rests with Linux gamers themselves. Given the number and variety of addictive high quality open source games, it is perhaps understandable that many Linux gamers might not appear to want to pay high ticket prices for games. Further, it is a fact that the markedly smaller Linux user base means that sales of commercial titles will inevitably be lower than games released on many other platforms, making ports to Linux less financially attractive.

Desktop Environments

• LXDE, the Lightweight X11 desktop environment, has gained quite a following over recent years seemingly coming from nowhere, and many distribution spins are now using it for their user interface. This is really a follow-up to my previous post about beautyfying Xfce. Because both are using gtk+ the same themes will work and the same engines are needed to make them look as intended.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• In my old company long standing employees get an iPod when they leave. I’m happy with my Sansa Clip+, but since my wife wanted one I was very ok with that. Since it’s currently not possible to set up an iPod Nano (6th gen) with Amarok as I was told on IRC I finally installed iTunes. And I must say I was impressed.

• One of digiKam’s lesser known features is the ability to link scripts to notifications. At first sight, this may seem like a rather obscure functionality, but it can be put to some clever uses. Say, you want to keep a portfolio of selected photos on a mobile device. Resizing multiple photos to a specified size to make it easier to view them on the mobile device and transferring the processed photos from digiKam to the mobile device manually is not very practical. And this is where the ability to trigger scripts via notifications can come in handy. You can attach a simple Bash script to the Batch queue completed notification, so it’s triggered automatically when the Batch Queue Manager tool is done processing photos.

GNOME Desktop

• Last week we’ve posted about changing the GNOME 3 login screen background / GTK3 theme via command line but if you want to use a GUI for this, you’ll be glad to know that one already exists: GDM3Setup.

• GDM3Setup is a simple GUI tool to tweak GDM3 (GNOME3 login screen). Using it, you can change the following GDM3 settings: wallpaper, GTK3 theme, icon theme, logo, disable the login screen user list or restart buttons.

• At our latest Linux Users Group meeting, I was given a copy of the May 2011 issue of Linux Format magazine. In the midst of an article about convincing Windows users to switch to Linux, was a sidebar about XpGnome. It’s a script that customizes the Gnome desktop to make it look like Windows XP.

Distributions

• I’ve described how to refurbish mature computers in several articles. The emphasis has been on machines in the four to ten year old range — Pentium IV’s, D’s, M’s, III’s and Celerons. But what if you have a really old computer, like a Pentium II, I, or even a 486? Can you use it for anything worthwhile? A vintage distro named Damn Small Linux answers “yes.” This article describes DSL and tells how to make 1990′s computers useful again. Screenshots follow the article.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• In the quest to find the perfect Linux distribution, we often hit an obstacle that makes the grass look greener on another distro’s lawn. When we reach that point, the first instinct is to turn to another distribution and hope that something fresh will also be something better. This time around, I decided to see if PCLinuxOS was indeed greener.

• Time and time again, I have learned that something new is not always something better. Take Ubuntu’s switch to a new desktop shell with Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. This switch has left a number of Ubuntu users pondering other distributions in search of more familiar territory.

• The realm of remote, scalable and automated computing, also known as Cloud Computing, is currently progressing at a very fast pace.

• CompatibleOne is a research project, under the aegis of the two competitiveness clusters System@tic and SCS, aiming at facilitating the deployment, the configuration and the administration of public, private or hybrid Clouds using open standards and interoperable open-source technologies.

• Dominique Loucougain will replace Arnaud Laprévote in the position of President of Executive Board (Directoire) for Mandriva France.

Red Hat Family

• We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.0 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.

• The CentOS development team, through Karanbir Singh, proudly announced last evening, July 10th, the immediate availability for download of the CentOS 6.0 operating system.

• The new CentOS 6.0 operating system is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 distribution, and it brings all the features that are present in the RHEL distro, with which is 100% binary compatible.

• Jim Whitehurst sees user collaboration as the wave of the future, not only for technology companies but for the business world at large.

• His company’s business model is built on it: He’s chief executive and president of Red Hat Inc., the only publicly traded open-source software company. With open-source software, users in addition to vendors make changes and share them. Red Hat provides technology consulting and sells services and updates for its core product, the Linux operating system.

• Just over two weeks after the official release of Scientific Linux 5.6, the Scientific Linux (SL) developers have announced the arrival of the LiveCD and LiveDVD variants of version 5.6 of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. The LiveCD/DVD versions allow users to run the distribution directly from a CD or DVD drive without having to install it. Alternatively, it can also be installed to the local hard disk or users can run the LiveCD image from a USB flash drive.

Fedora

• AUSTRALIA continued to be an important engineering base for Linux provider Red Hat despite the strong dollar.

• Global chief executive Jim Whitehurst said it was committed to its Brisbane engineering hub that serves a global market and employs about 150 people.

• Australia is the second-largest market for Red Hat after Japan in Asia-Pacific, considered the company’s fastest-growing region.

• In recent months, security software firm Symantec was forced to close its enterprise research unit, citing the currency factor, but Mr Whitehurst said Red Hat was not in the same boat.

• Ailurus is a great little program to add on to a fresh installation of Fedora 15. I would compare it to something along the lines of Ubuntu Tweak, in which the user is presented with a set of clean up tasks, system information, a package manager, and even a good solid set of repositories to choose from. I only wish I had found it a little earlier than I did as it would have made adding the initial repositories a breeze when I first installed Fedora 15.

Debian Family

• Linux Mint 11 GNOME was released nearly two months ago. Some of us have been waiting for the KDE version to test (and possibly use) and wonder where it is. Today a blog post by Clem gives a clue.

Derivatives

• Compared to MEPIS 8.0, the 11th release by number is somewhat better, but I can’t say how much of that is technology and how much actual progress in the mindset and the execution. In its current form, MEPIS deserves around 7/10, maybe 8/10, but not more. Its huge potential is still waiting to be unleashed, but it won’t happen in this release.

• While several of my colleagues and students are having a great time fighting viruses and malware or trying to get their mainstream, highly-reputed systems to work again, both my mutant penta-boot netbook and my grotesque hepta-boot desktop have been working fine. Thus, more out of boredom than for any other reason, I decided to check for and install their corresponding updates. Since it had been a few months since my last update, I thought things could get complicated and thus I could join my colleagues’ frustration…let’s see:

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu over the years has grown to be easier and easier, so easy that I would probably put anyone on it now days. Unfortunately for me as Ubuntu has grown easier I have grown softer. And I never realized how much Ubuntu had moved away from the standard Linux installation because the changes were implemented so slowly. A new installer here, some new GUI configuration tools there. Gradually I was point and clicking more than I was using CLI.

• I decided to abandon Ubuntu on my home desktop after the upgrade to 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I knew there were some things that I couldn’t like, but I didn’t know it would cripple the very base of the operating system. These are the things that went bad:

• * The upgrade finished with obscure errors. * can’t log in graphically without safe mode. * system console (CTRL+ALT+F1 etc.) appears as a white background and unreadable characters. * packages have been left in an unclean state.

• Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 2 was recently released for the brave and adventuresome to test. I did not do much of a testing, but ran the system in a virtual environment to see what it looks like. Aside from the kernel, there is really no major change, as far as I could tell, from the last stable release, which is Ubuntu 11.04. (See Ubuntu 11.04 review.)

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Developer Week! We will have one week of action-packed sessions from July 11th 2011 to July 15th 2011!

• Ted Gould’s debate with Bradley Kuhn and others about the Canonical Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA) is quite illustrative and one of Ted’s remarks provides a good launching pad for me to express why I find the CAA so objectionable.

• I am looking to hire a new member for my team (the Community Team) here at Canonical. I am looking for a bright, motivated, and experienced person to build, maintain and develop a cohesive, productive and effective Ubuntu QA community.

• This role will be full-time working at Canonical, you will be working from home with regular travel to various events (such as UDS and team sprints), and you will be working in a fast-paced, productive, and energetic environment. This is a really exciting role that is designed to bring huge value to the Ubuntu community in the area of quality by refining, optimizing, and growing our QA community participation.

• If you’ve used Ubuntu’s Unity interface, which (for better or worse, depending on whom you ask) became the default with the appearance of Ubuntu 11.04 last April, you probably noticed that the scroll bars in most windows looked different. Departing from the decades-old paradigm that most computer users have known for decades, Ubuntu now compacts scrollbars into a smaller unit intended to be more functional.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi Linux is yet another attempt to convince users that you don’t have to pay 54£ (Windows 7 Home Premium) in order to use your computer for basic tasks like writing emails and browsing the Internet. Based on the ever-so-popular Ubuntu Linux, Bodhi pushes the boundaries a bit further in ease of use, resources required and “ohhhh prettyyy” factor.

• On thing I would like to mention about Bodhi, before starting the actual review, is their website: http://www.bodhilinux.com/. It’s not often that a Linux distro (especially an “indie” one like this one) has such a well rounded and useful website. Their QuickStart section is more than useful if you’ve never used Linux before. Check it out here: http://www.bodhilinux.com/quickstart/quickstartEN/.

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• I’m quite impressed by this distro, it’s pretty, it’s fast, it’s light, I… I just can’t find a fault…

• At the end of the week, I find myself in agreement with the people who told me that Kubuntu, in avoiding the innovation of Ubuntu, had created a solid desktop experience.

• Linux Mint 10 (Julia) was released Nov 12, 2010 which feels like eons ago in Linux land. But hey I wanna play around with it before I jump to Linux Mint 11.

• Overall feel is good, installation was uneventful. The interface is pretty clean and well structured. This is what I like best with Mint. Anyway, this is old news but would like to keep a log of how the installation screen looks like. Below are the screen captures.

• For many advanced Linux enthusiasts reading this, I doubt that any recent changes to the Ubuntu desktop swayed you very much. Most of you already have had plenty of time to select alternative distros — from Fedora to Arch Linux — should you decide you want to.

• Each distribution has its own set of advantages and differences. But for those people who cannot bear to part with some features that are considered to be unique to Ubuntu, Linux Mint might be a viable option to look into.

Devices/Embedded

• I was looking for information on what products HP is releasing with WebOS and found this at the foot of a page about printers: “WebOS products do not run Windows”. In a world where many OEMs “Recommend” that other OS, that is really strange wording. It could be a way to assert branding:

• * WebOS is not that other OS

• What a warped world we live in that things like that have to be communicated…

Phones

• Now I’m exited to read that Nokia will release a MeeGo phone, the N9 one.

Free Software/Open Source

• What is an “open source company”? What is the real differentiation element introduced by Open Source? These and more questions were introduced by a great post by Matthew Aslett (if you don’t follow him, go and follow now. I’ll wait. Yes, do it. You will thank me later.), called “The decline of open source as an identifying differentiator“. It is an excellent analysis of how companies mostly stopped using the term “open source” in their marketing materials, and has a follow up (here) that provides a summary of the main responses by other analysts and observers.

• Recently, we’ve covered the many debates going on surrounding whether organizations that use open source software are properly giving back to the development communities that they benefit from. According to some observers, the disparity between using and contributing doesn’t matter, while others feel strongly that organizations that use open source software should help develop it or invest in development. On this topic, Simon Phipps has an interesting post up on the Brazilian government’s decision to invest in OpenOffice and LibreOffice, based on its usage.

• When I first began using Linux as my primary operating system, I did so to try to solve some problems I was having with Microsoft Windows. My computer had begun to feel like it was not under my control. Updates were being downloaded and installed during inopportune times and they were requiring me to completely shut down my computer nearly every time, or nagging me to do it anyway. I was running anti-virus software that was buggy and bloated and slowing down my computer. In order to maintain all of the recent security updates, I had to literally hand over the contents of my hard drive to Microsoft on a regular basis to prove that I had not hacked Windows (Windows Genuine Advantage). My music, videos and even the font files on my computer were told what they could do by Microsoft’s DRM efforts. Being a lover of liberty and a bit of a security freak, I was rubbed the wrong way with many of the issues that Microsoft had taught me I just had to live with.

• I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I’ve admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.

• I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code, while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source–transparency, participation and collaboration–and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which commercial open source companies help create success.

• Free software and open standards have always been a point of debate for the confusing line between hardcore tech world and the whole other world of users. However, very recently, tech pundits have beaten a retreat on the issue, claiming that free software and open standards do not really matter much. This can only be understood better if one understands the factors that have always been taken in to account in the face off between free and proprietary software or open and close standard hardware.

• A U.S. nonprofit consortium is hoping the prospect of a US$20,000 cash prize will help spur the creation of open-source software tools companies can use to work with the XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) standard for financial reporting.

Mozilla

• Firefox 8, which only just appeared on the Nightly channel, is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering. The memory footprint of Firefox 7 (and thus 8) has also been drastically reduced, along with much-needed improvements to garbage collection.

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• Firefox might be fast, but Chrome feels fast.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The VirtualBox development team has released a second beta of version 4.1.0 of its open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. The latest development preview brings a number of changes over the previous beta, including fixes to the experimental WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) graphics driver support for Windows guests that was added in Beta 1.

CMS

• Acquia, the leading provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, announced today that Twitter selected a Drupal-based community solution for its new Twitter developer website at dev.twitter.com. The site, which was developed with support and guidance from Acquia, launched today.

• Starting today, Twitter’s developer community lives and breathes on Drupal! Check it out at http://dev.twitter.com.

• This is a big deal for Drupal — it’s not every day that one of the hottest technology start-ups switches one of its sites to Drupal. At Acquia, we have been working with Twitter on this site but couldn’t talk about it for the longest time. I’m glad we finally can because it’s a great use case for Drupal.

• Twitter has 750,000 developers who have created nearly a million apps, making 13 billion API calls per day. Those are some astonishing figures! A population that big requires a lot, as we in the Drupal community know.

• When it comes to sharing your images on your website in the form of a web gallery, the CMS options for managing the same are many. Whether you wish to create an online portfolio, or simply want to share some photos, choosing the ideal CMS for your web gallery goes a long way in effectively managing the gallery! In this article, we bring to you some of the best known CMS options for web gallery management.

Project Releases

• The new release is available to download and all Selenium projects are licensed under the Apache 2.0 Licence.

Public Services/Government

• The Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies, Version 2.0 has now been revised and finalised following the public feedback.

• Anton Borisov interviews Oliver Altehage, Change Manager for LiMux-Project to understand the options and deployment of GNU/Linux and open source in the Bavarian Government of Munich, Germany.

• Anton: Oliver, the City of Munich is famous for its open-source initiative, when Microsoft products must be substituted to Linux and open-sourced applications. Could you please shed some light on this idea, because I know it has original roots in 2000′s. Oliver: That is true. First idea was created in 2001, first concept appeared in 2002. Decision for migration of the city parliament was taken in 2004, and migration itself was started in November 2006.

Licensing

• In opting to follow the maximalist model of contributor agreements, Harmony inherits, and thereby legitimizes, all of that model’s problems. There is growing awareness that the maximalist approach can impair the effectiveness of the open source community development model, creating unnecessary barriers to contribution. Rather than attempting to address those problems, Harmony merely hides them in attractive packaging.

Programming

• A few weeks ago there was an article about how GitHub surpassed SourceForge as the #1 hosting site for open-source projects. Why did that happen?

Standards/Consortia

• Even before the introduction of the WebGL standard for rendering 3D graphics in a browser, it was already clear that a browser can be a suitable platform for graphically complex games. To demonstrate the browser’s potential capability in this arena, Mozilla has released the Flight of the Navigator demo and the Opera developers are working on a technology preview of what they think can be achieved. The question though is what is practically possible now if, say, an entire game were to be implemented using currently available web standards. Now, an Opera developer can answer that question.

Leftovers

• Unix systems may not be all the rage that they were two decades ago, but in nearly eight out of 10 data centers based on them, their use is either holding steady or increasing.

• That’s the assessment of a recent survey of the HP, IBM, and Oracle Unix customer bases by Gabriel Consulting Group, which has just finished up its fifth annual slicing and dicing of Unix customer sentiments.

• Unix systems have successfully colonized their neighborhoods in the data centers of the world, and are resisting the onslaught of Windows and Linux on those systems’ relatively inexpensive x64 iron. The Unix colonists are also resisting all of the marketing muscle and money that is dedicated to evicting them.

Health/Nutrition

• On behalf of Grigor and Hilda Sarkisyan, I would like to invite Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia to attend the 21st birthday celebration of the Sarkisyans’ only daughter, Nataline, this coming Saturday, July 9, in Calabasas, California.

• Gingrey could consider it a legitimate, reimbursable fact-finding mission. He clearly needs to have more facts about the U.S. health care system before he starts talking about death panels again.

• Gingrey seems determined to keep alive the lie that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare) will create government-run death panels in the Medicare program.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, said shareholders re-elected the company’s directors and approved a compensation plan for top executives.

• Directors were re-elected with 90 percent of the vote and the pay awards for named executive officers were approved by 73 percent in a so-called say on pay vote, General Counsel Greg Palm said today at the New York-based bank’s shareholder meeting in Jersey City, New Jersey. None of the proposals submitted by shareholders was approved, Palm said.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) mortgage traders tried to manipulate prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in May 2007 for their own benefit, according to a U.S. Senate report.

• Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Media mogul Rupert Murdoch moved quickly to shut down one of his oldest media holdings — a 168 year-old, best-selling weekly British tabloid newspaper called News of the World — amid charges that the paper’s journalists hacked into the telephones of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, murder victims and their families, and bribed police in exchange for information and tips. News of the World was Britain’s best-sellling Sunday newspaper. Its last issue will be this Sunday, and will not carry any commercial advertisements.

• The campaign was a true netroots effort. An online petition sent to Beck’s advertisers was signed by 285,000 people, and the number of advertisers who responded by dropping their ads from Beck’s show exceeded 300.

• Just two months into the boycott, Color of Change announced that it was costing Fox News $600,000 per week. Fox remained in denial, and two months later, Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, recently involved in his own scandal for breaking into the cell phones of crime victims and dead service members, supported Beck by saying he was right when he made the offensive comments.

Reader’s Picks

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• protesters have been stopped in their tracks after Facebook aided Israel in cracking down on the group of activists from the UK, France, and Belgium who planned their event using the popular social networking site. Facebook allowed government agents to track the activists activities and then create a black-list of people who participated in the planning of the protests. The black-listed group was then forwarded to airlines with instructions to prevent the activists from boarding air flights to Israel. Over 200 activists were prevented from flying after being added to the airlines terrorism watch list,

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Privacy

• Employees must clearly understand that casual review for personal interest of patients’ protected health information is unacceptable and against the law.

Civil Rights

• [the] U.S. Boat to Gaza activists decided to carry cargo of a much different sort than earlier Gaza-bound boats: 3,000 letters from American citizens addressed to the citizens of Gaza as a symbolic act of solidarity. … That cargo, they reasoned, couldn’t be construed as material support for a designated terrorist group, Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip after being democratically elected in 2006.

• studies throughout the country show that private prisons are only marginally less expensive than public prisons and are often substantially more expensive. The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart conditions.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Nations with fewer civil liberty protections, including China, use “deep packet inspection” to search all Internet traffic for viruses — as well as anti-government content …

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

• we consider software patents a threat to Free Software and we believe they provide no advantages in promoting software innovation … If you do become aware of a patent that concerns you, it is best that you speak to an attorney, rather than share such knowledge or speculation in a public forum. … it is better for developers and contributors not to read patents … If you are contacted by anyone threatening to assert a patent against you, contact the Software Freedom Law Center or another qualified attorney as soon as possible.

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