● 07.14.11

● Links 14/7/2011: More Linux in Cars, Wine 1.3.24

Posted in News Roundup at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Will Toyota’s membership in The Linux Foundation spur it to contribute to FOSS? Thoughts on Technology blogger Jeff Hoogland hopes so. “At the very least I think it is a sign that Meego will be appearing at some point as an in-car operating system,” he said. “Here is to hoping Meego can eventually give the pseudo-Linux Android a run for its money.”

Desktop

• The move, when it was announced, was seen as strategic shift in policy at Asus.The Ubuntu Linux-laden notebook that has appeared on the site is the Eee PC 1215P that boasts of features such as a 12.1-inch display, an Intel Atom N570 dual core processor, 2GB of memory, and a 320GB hard drive.

• If you follow this link to have more details of the notebook, you will find that the device has a 1.5 GHz chip. But as far as we know, the Atom N570 is actually a 1.66 GHz chip.

• That makes us wonder about why there is a mismatch on that front. At the moment, we are tempted to go by what is being elaborated on the website.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that four new members are joining the organization: basysKom, Codero, Gluster and Nixu Open.

• These four companies represent the diverse environments in which Linux is accelerating technology innovation. The Linux operating system today powers the majority of the world’s stock exchanges, websites and supercomputers. It is also the foundation for next-generation mobile devices and embedded systems, while enabling new innovations such as the smart grid and highly visible technology advancements such as IBM’s Watson Supercomputer.

• The IOGear GWU625 wifi USB stick was so easy to install in Ubuntu it was just plain silly. Gone is the worry of modifying config files that scare Linux newbies away and the performance of this device is very good.

Graphics Stack

Applications

Proprietary

• As we have been expecting since May, the next Adobe Flash Player release finally re-syncs the 64-bit build with the Flash updates in the mainline code available to 32-bit users. This is the first public beta release of the Adobe Flash Player 11 that offers both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries to Linux users, along with 64-bit binaries for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X users.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer developers, has released the sixth alpha version of the open source cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game 0 A.D. Curiously, the update includes brand new P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft that can fly around the map attacking targets on the ground and in the air. The developers say that the WW2 fighter planes were added “just for fun” and “to show that the game engine can support flight”.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The reason for this is that we were hard at work to get KDE 4.6.90 (aka 4.7rc1) packaged.

• Sorry for writing blog after long time. Some details of what so far have been done in Plasma Media Center for which people are waiting smiley

• Now, We have a dataengine named mediacentercontrol which updates and provides data to all applets which are connected through it e.g mediacontroller, mediaplayer, etc. There is a containment(Plasma Mediacenter Shell) written in qml (thanks to my mentor Marco Martin) which holds all applet within at specified position and dimension. Snapshot of Plasma Mediacenter Shell

GNOME Desktop

Distributions

New Releases

• Now that kernel 2.6.39 and KDE 4.6 have entered the archive and stabilised in sid after the “squeeze” release, we have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the final aptosid 2011-02 “Ἡμέρα” release, shipping in the following flavours:

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Today the Mandriva Security Team sent out a message to users that versions 2010.1 and 2010.2 have reached the end of their desktop support. “They will be supported in Base support mode for additional 6 months.”

• The usual lifecycle for Mandriva desktop system is one year for most userland software such as KDE or Firefox and an addition six months for base systems such as the kernel or Apache. Mandriva 2010 was released November 3, 2009 and reached its end of life May 3, 2011. The following incremental updates, 2010.1 and 2010.2, were released July 8 and December 23 respectively. Both have reached the end of their desktop support and have only six months of base support remaining, ending January 8, 2012. Most enterprise class systems enjoy five years of support.

Red Hat Family

• Free and open source software company Red Hat has launched JBoss Application Server 7, which touts Java Enterprise Edition 6 Web Profile certification, easier deployment and a smaller memory footprint among its key developments.

• A recent Oracle Support note has some Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers wondering about Oracle’s future support of Red Hat. But one expert says it’s more a statement of Oracle’s plans for its own database storage management features.

• The note, released this spring and updated earlier this month, has to do with ASMLib, a support library for the Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature of Oracle Database. According to the note, the support library “allows an Oracle Database using ASM more efficient and capable access to the disk groups it is using.”

Debian Family

• AVADirect now offers the option to have Debian, the GNU/Linux-based operating system, pre-loaded on practically every configuration offered. Debian was originally created to offer a free operating system to those who do not want to purchase an advertised operating system just to use the hardware they have invested in.

• In terms of what runs under the hood, the M300 takes a different direction from Dell KACE’s larger K1000 appliance. The K1000 uses an open source FreeBSD operating system as its base. In contrast, the new M300 uses a Debian Linux operating system.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A sneak peek for LightDM ” Light Display Manager ” which replace GDM ” Gnome Display Manager ” in Upcoming release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Let’s check few screenshots and video preview.

Flavours and Variants

• I’ve got to say that Pinguy is a pretty good distribution. It has a nice dock and menuing system which pops up if you scroll to the left of your screen in order to not have a cluttered desktop and does not implement the much talked about Ubiquity menu that currently is in use in Ubuntu and Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Devices/Embedded

• The fabled Amazon tablet: Oh how you tease us so. You come from the maker of the world’s most beloved ereader and are said to run the versatile Android OS. (hopefully skinned, though) But there’s just so much we don’t know about you. When are you coming? How much are you going to cost. What’s your name? Are you even real?

• I wish Amazon would stop being coy about its plans for an Android Linux-based Kindle tablet and just announce it already. While Amazon still won’t tell me that they’re building one, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is planning releassing an iPad Rival.

Phones

• The Finnish company will continue to support the operating system in the years to come, and various apps will offer users a full multimedia and business experience, Strom tweeted.

Android

• Google overhauled the Android Market user interface for Android 2.2 and 2.3 phones with faster checkout, improved showcasing of top titles, and horizontal swiping to flip through “top” lists. In addition, U.S. users can now buy or rent thousands of movies directly from Android phones, then watch them offline, as well as directly purchase from a selection of three million books.

• Android 3.2 has begun rolling out to selected tablets, starting with the Wi-Fi only Motorola Xoom, bringing support for seven-inch displays and native hardware support for SD cards, says an industry report. Android 3.2, the source code of which has been partially released, also features an automatic zoom-to-fit resizing feature tipped by Google earlier this week.

• MADRID–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–Andago, an innovation services and solutions global company of fully interoperable ecosystems based on Open Source and PaaS technologies for mHealth, eGovernment, eTourism, and Smart Energy Systems, today announces it has joined the Open Handset Alliance™.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Sony offered the press a glimpse of its upcoming S1 and S2 tablets, which will enter an already-crowded market at an unannounced point later this year. Both run Android, but the S1 features a single 9.4-inch display, while the foldable (and pocketable) S2 features a hinge connecting a pair of 5.5-inch screens.

• Most of you must have heard about PinguyOS already, one of my favourite among Ubuntu derivatives. Now, they have released another version of PinguyOS called Ping-Eee OS which is supposedly optimized for small screen netbooks. Interestingly, the release coincided with my purchase of Linux pre installed Acer Aspire One D260 netbook.

• HP will push out a webOS 3.0 update for the HP TouchPad tablet in around ten days time, according to personal systems group chief Todd Bradley. Speaking on the shift of ex-Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein from his role as webOS lead to a more general position at the helm of product innovation, The Boston Globe reports, Bradley suggested that the TouchPad’s July 1 release was, in fact, a “soft launch” for the slate, and that advertising and other efforts will be redoubled from next week.

• New laptops running Google’s Chrome operating system offer a new approach in portable computing: Games, productivity tools and anything else you might need are handled by distant computers connected to the Internet.

• With this method, you don’t store data on a hard drive inside the computer. That streamlines things, at the cost of having stronger, standalone applications that normally handle these tasks. But the trade-off might be worth it for the more casual consumers of online content.

Free Software/Open Source

• Africa is the world’s second-least developed continent–after Antarctica. If you look at a world map of computer science and open source contributions, you will be struck by the blank canvas that is Africa. We are quite isolated over here and don’t really have the habit of open source participation. A few dedicated souls spend inordinate amounts of time in basements and campus computer labs adding their efforts to the open source community, but the distance that separates us from the developed world is one that is as much about technology and access to technology as it is about physical distance and finances.

• Open Source is so utterly opposite of proprietary software that corporations have to go to great lengths to pretend that the buyer is getting any value at all. Typically, government and other high-profile contracts, usually a result of bribery AKA lobbying, are what seals the deal for these big companies. Yet, after 20+ years of iron-fisted control of software patents, government regulations, and suing the hades out of everyone it can, Microsoft couldn’t stop Open Source from stomping it to the ground. Android is about to become the most widely used Operating System in the world, and is already far ahead of Redmond based MSFT.

• SOS Open Source analyzed Zarafa, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, maintained by the homonymous company headquartered in the Netherlands (Delft) with offices in Germany and Brasil. The Zarafa Summer Camp 2011was the perfect venue to share our findings around Zarafa (presentation), if you missed our keynote read below to know more this open source messaging and collaboration platform.

• As a writer, I am more comfortable reporting the news than making the news. For that reason, I’m reluctant to encourage the discussion started by my article, “Tech Pundits Surrender: The Retreat from Free Software and Open Standards” about the use of proprietary software when it’s convenient. At the same time, I can’t help wondering when idealism became a dirty word in free and open source software (FOSS).

• Singh has had varied experiences having worked on Android application development, MySQL database, C++, and PHP / Apache / MySQL /PostgreSQL (LAMPP). He embraced PostgreSQL during his stint with Mavenir Systems, and was so impressed with it that he started using it extensively in other projects. The first project Singh used it on was for NextGen, a telecom services group.

• That’s right folks, another ten best! But this time I’ll wager you’re not familiar with any of them, or at best one or two. The free/open source software world is vast and full of excellent applications for all occasions. An interesting trend is the growth of large distributed projects such as OpenTox and AMEE. FOSS presents a natural platform for building large distributed projects because of the low barrier to entry– open code, open standards, and freely-available robust, high-quality high-performance software.

Mozilla

• The debut of Firefox 5 today, just about three months after the much awaited Firefox 4 was released, testifies to the open source organization’s sense of urgency in the face of increased competition from Google and others.

SaaS

• Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding. The round was led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating. Lars Leckie from Hummer Winblad, and Puneet Agarwal from True Ventures will join Piston’s board of directors.

Databases

CMS

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• My name is Jonathan Nadeau and I’m a husband, a father of three, and a blind GNU/Linux user. I’m also the host of three podcasts about free software. I interview project leaders of free software and GNU/Linux distributions. This summer I’m interning with the FSF’s campaigns team.

• [...]

• Once I started using a free screen reader with a free operating system, I had freedom in my own computing, and realized the importance of free software for accessibility — it is important for people who depend on accessible software to understand the freedoms that come with using free software, and no longer be stuck in a world of relying on nonfree accessibility software.

Project Releases

• About two month ago we have released a beta version of the new CUBRID 8.4.0 which proved once again that it is a powerful database with great optimization for Web applications. It featured twice faster database engine and over 90% MySQL SQL syntax compatibility. We had greatly

• PuTTY developer Simon Tatham has announced the release of version 0.61 of his cross-platform, open source Telnet and SSH client. The latest version comes more than four years after PuTTY 0.60: Tatham says that the project has received “quite a lot of email asking if PuTTY was still under development, and occasionally asking if we were even still alive. Well, we are, and it has been! Sorry about the long wait.”

Public Services/Government

• Capaware is an open source 3D geographical multilayer framework which allows to obtain realistic images of land and to navigate a given area virtually. Based on the environmental conditions of the area (humidity, vegetation and wind, among others), Capaware “gives a real-time forecast which allows to know the evolution and intensity of a fire.” said José Pablo Suárez, Professor at the Department of Cartography and Engineering Graphic Design, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Licensing

• Controversial in certain circles, the work of a loose grouping of people to create a set of standardised contributor agreements for open source projects at “Project Harmony” has reached its 1.0 milestone. At the website you’ll find a release version of the agreements.

• Contributor agreements are used to accumulate copyrights into the hands of a single organisation. They are especially associated with open source projects like MySQL which use a “dual license” or an “open core” business model, but are also used by projects like Apache to provide flexibility and by the FSF to allow them to prosecute companies who fail to abide by the license.

Openness/Sharing

• One of the highlights at this year’s E3 was Rayman Origins, a 2D platformer that features beautiful hand-drawn visuals. Ubisoft designer and series creator Michel Ancel says the underlying framework that powers it, dubbed UbiArt, will go open-source eventually.

Open Hardware

Programming

• UCOSP (Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects) brings together students from all across Canada to work together on open source projects. Students learn first-hand what distributed development is like. Each team has students from two or three schools, and uses a mix of agile and open source processes under the supervision of a faculty or industry lead. Heading into our fourth year, we believe we have developed a good model for introducing students to open source projects during the regular academic year.

Standards/Consortia

• The sixth ODF plugfest will take place in Berlin on July 14/15 2011, and will be hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Economy & Technology.

• The conference is about the results of an R&D project “Developing a software quality assurance service package for applications of OpenDocument Format”. The project is supported by the Hungarian National Techology Program and its main objective is to establish sound quality assurance procedures for ODF applications.

Leftovers

Cablegate

• Yesterday — more than a full year after it first released selected portions of purported chat logs between Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo (representing roughly 25% of the logs) — Wired finally published the full logs (with a few redactions). From the start, Wired had the full chat logs and was under no constraints from its source (Lamo) about what it could publish; it was free to publish all of it but chose on its own to withhold most of what it received.

• Last June — roughly a week after Wired’s publication of the handpicked portions — I reviewed the long and complex history between Lamo and Wired Editor Kevin Poulsen, documented the multiple, serious inconsistencies in Lamo’s public claims (including ones in a lengthy interview with me), and argued that Wired should “either publish all of the chat logs, or be far more diligent about withholding only those parts which truly pertain only to Manning’s private and personal matters and/or which would reveal national security secrets.” Six months later, in December, I documented that numerous media reports about Manning and WikiLeaks were based on Lamo’s claims about what Manning told him in these chats — claims that could not be verified or disputed because Wired continued to conceal the relevant parts of the chat logs — and again called for “as much pressure as possible be applied to Wired to release those chat logs or, at the very least, to release the portions about which Lamo is making public claims or, in the alternative, confirm that they do not exist.”

Finance

• In Chicago, it’s the sale of parking meters to the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. In Indiana, it’s the sale of the northern toll road to a Spanish and Australian joint venture. In Wisconsin it’s public health and food programs, in California it’s libraries. It’s water treatment plants, schools, toll roads, airports, and power plants. It’s Amtrak. There are revolving doors of corrupt politicians, big banks, and rating agencies. There are conflicts of interest. It’s bipartisan.

• Rupert Murdoch’s got problems. His employees are being arrested, he’s losing his latest acquisition, and he’s just been called to testify before Parliament. But there’s an easy way for Mr. Murdoch to protect himself from these inquiries and save his company at the same time: Turn the News Corporation into a Wall Street bank. There won’t be any prosecutions, and the government will even sweeten the deal with billions of dollars in easy money. And if Murdoch follows the trail blazed by bankers like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, soon they’ll be begging him to acquire more companies.

• Murdoch and Dimon. One runs an organization that, as we now know, broke the law so many times it could be called a criminal syndicate. And the other is Rupert Murdoch. Yet Murdoch’s fighting for his corporation’s future while Dimon’s name is being floated as a possible Treasury Secretary. Murdoch’s losing his chance to expand market share, while our government helped Dimon’s bank become more too-big-to-fail than ever by grabbing up Morgan Stanley.

• Now that’s juice. Murdoch’s been a power broker on three continents and his Fox empire has reshaped this country’s political landscape, but Dimon’s taken the power game to a whole ‘nother level.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Counterfeits … steal demand from low-end authentic products, but [have] positive spillover effects for high-end authentic products.

Copyrights

• Editors’ note, Thursday 5:06 a.m. PT: Spotify’s Web site now says that the service has arrived in the U.S. Our story on the actual launch is here: “Spotify (finally) launches in the U.S.”

• Following up on last week’s announcement that it would soon be opening up to U.S. users, popular music-streaming service Spotify said Wednesday that its stateside launch is happening Thursday morning.

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