● 07.19.11

● Links 19/7/2011: Ubuntu 12.04 Event Planned, GParted 0.9.0 Out

Posted in News Roundup at 7:06 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Now why would a car company want to join a nonprofit consortium made up of mostly technology companies dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux? The answer is, it makes business sense.

• Their online application was three pages long. Even though I saw the above block on the first page I had a small hope it wasn’t a strict requirement because after I checked “no” to having Windows I was able to select that I used “Linux” from a drop down menu. Tutor.com then proceeded to waste another ten minutes of my time while I filled out the next two pages. Immediately after hitting the “submit” button I was informed that my application had failed.

• I understand they have certain system requirements, but why they felt it was necessary to waste my time filling out the last two pages after I already marked that I did not use Windows is beyond me. What is also beyond me is why they choose to develop their browser based software for the Windows only Internet Explorer instead of any of the cross platform browsers that exist. Oh and did I mention that they opted to support iOS before they added support for non-Windows desktop operating systems?

Desktop

• Chrome OS is also theoretically much more secure than standard laptops. Because Chromebooks are designed to be connected to the Internet, little data is stored on the machine itself. And because everything is focused on the browser — which Google updates frequently — there’s less chance of a malicious program running in the background.

Kernel Space

• Torvalds announced back in May that the Linux 2.6.40 kernel will be rebadged as the Linux 3.0 kernel. The projected release date of Linux 3.0 was supposed to be today, but in a post on Google+, Torvalds explained that the discovery of a “subtle pathname lookup bug” has delayed the release.

Applications

• Are you still taking screenshots? That is sooo last decade. Today if you want to showcase your application, your gaming skills, or even your astonishing new desktop wallpaper collection, you need a screen recorder (or screencasting tool) to capture full-motion video and audio of your desktop. You’ll find several solid options, but which one works best for you depends a lot on the type of content you need to capture, and what you intend to do with it.

• For starters, the output produced by the tool varies considerably. Some alternatives give you a wide choice of video and audio codecs, others just one. But if that one (say, Flash) is the one you need, producing it directly is much quicker than having to save an intermediary file and crank it through a video editor. It also may be important to select just a portion of the screen rather than your whole display, or to choose a specific frame-rate (high for games, low for bandwidth-saving demos). Finally, there are always special features that vary between utilities, such as whether or not they can capture OpenGL content or be started remotely by script.

• Today i present you some programs, not installed by default, that i use in my day by day work and in my free time on my Linux computers.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• There remains a scarcity of commercial games available for Linux with the big game companies rarely venturing into the Linux world. The main reason cited continues to be that its market share does not warrant high ticket-price games being ported over to Linux, let alone releasing an exclusive title. Also there is a perception that Linux gamers are more reluctant to put their hands in their pockets (not literally). However, the recent Humble Indie experiment, where gamers chose the price they wanted to pay, showed that this is far from the truth. The game bundles were available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. It was Linux gamers that were, in fact, prepared to pay (by donation) more for the same games than their Windows and OS X counterparts. How refreshing to put to bed that myth.

• Why Chakra? Simple. Because Chakra seems to perform better in playing games. Thanks to Jeff for his benchmarks that made me do this choice! (http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-linux-distro-for-3d-performance.html). Are you ready? Let’s start with a beautiful game from Lionhead Studios… Black & White 2!

Desktop Environments

• Compiz is no doubt the best compositing manager for Linux. It has been a part of Ubuntu for a long time and is actively maintained as well. Since the addition of the contentious Unity plugin, Compiz has become the most popular and reliable compositing manager easily surpassing GNOME 3′s Mutter.

• Being a part of a big project like Ubuntu, developers are coming up with amazing new plugins like Modal dialogs. This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any useless plugins for Compiz. Here are 5 such plugins that find no practical applications whatsoever:

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• hree years ago, KDE was the innovative desktop, and GNOME the conservative one. Today, KDE is the conservative desktop, doing incremental releases, while GNOME is divided between GNOME 3 and Unity, each as innovative and as controversial as the other.

Distributions

• ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution, which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the Openbox Window Manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date. (Source: ArchBang front page)

• I like fast, stable and up to date distros. But of course most of them say that.

New Releases

• I am writing to announce the release of my Linux RAM disk kernel module. Yes, the Linux kernel has the brd module already integrated into it, and also the zram module it the staging tree. And yes, you can instead utilize ramfs or tmpfs for RAM based file systems. But RapidDisk or rxdsk is a bit different.

• The most significant change in this release is the ability to compile and link with libparted 3.0.

• GParted retains full functionality when compiled and linked with libparted versions prior to 3.0, for example libparted-2.4.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Two years ago, when I first entered this vast world that Linux is, I came to realize that there was a distribution that was mentioned over and over: PCLinuxOS. I became curious and followed some old posts in multiple threads. To be honest, being a total newbie, I felt sort of intimidated by the vocal followers of this distro and my aversion grew stronger when I visited the forum and was greeted by the rules. Boy, did I ever read something harsh!

• [...]

• From all of this, my biggest conclusion is that I, because of my lack of experience with Linux, acted unfairly. However, as Ezra Pound said of Walt Whitman, “I am old enough now to make friends”. Yes, PCLinuxOS… I owe you an apology.

• Following the releases of PCLinuxOS 2011.6 and PCLinuxOS 2011.07 MiniMe KDE comes PCLinuxOS Phoenix XFCE Edition 2011-07 Final. As you can probably gather, it features the low-weight high-performance Xfce desktop which makes it perfect for machines a few years old. It also can be quite pretty and configurable.

Red Hat Family

• Overall, I was pretty pleased with Scientific Linux 6.0 “Carbon”. It recognized all my hardware correctly, software worked well on it, and it was fast, recognizable, and easy to use.

Fedora

• Due in major part to Ian Weller’s extensive work on expanding Fedora’s logo usage guidelines, we now have updated logo usage guidelines that cover the usage of the Fedora logo in more detail, including:

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As expected, the second Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) event for 2011 has been officially announced a couple of minutes ago by Jono Bacon in an email. The Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit event will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA from 31st October to 4th November.

• Canonical has announced that it will be changing its commercial certification programme in order to make it simpler for consumers to understand. The certification programme allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to apply for their systems to be validated and endorsed to work with the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Flavours and Variants

• The idea to make a personal operating system, flashed in my head for quite some time, but for one reason or another I never managed to get to work seriously on such a project. In these days I decided to commit myself “full time” to it and I did it, also pushed by the wave of news that are coming in the world of the penguin! I did not, initially, planned to make UbuBox “SalentOS” public. Then, along the way, thanks to the advice of some friends and the realization that the system satisfy me, I said “Who knows … maybe this could satisfy someone else too. Why not make it public?”.

Devices/Embedded

• The underlying operating system in the MX50, MX60 and MX70 router is a customized Linux base that Meraki has enhanced.

• Lantronix is now shipping a wireless device server module with a Timesys LinuxLink software development kit (SDK). The PremierWave EN includes a 400MHz Atmel ARM9 processor, an Ethernet port, and a dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n modem, and ships with Linux-based Lantronix firmware — offering secure tunneling, configuration, diagnostics, LAN bridging, and remote access applications.

• Plustek Inc., the leading manufacturer of the innovative Linux-based standalone Network Video Recorder (NVR), announces today a notable upgraded to its Centralized Management Software “MultiManager.” This version introduces powerful enhancements and new features to further improve monitoring effectiveness and efficiency. The new “Smart Cycling Control” tool brings added convenience to multiple-channel monitoring. Additionally, alert notification functionalities are improved to assist users in staying on top of alarms and to better respond to emergencies. User permissions also are better refined, providing more control and flexibility to the system. Last but not least, several other developments to image and video output file types, video recording performance, and user operations are made.

Phones

• China’s second cellco will debut its own Linux-based software platform, six months behind schedule, with six handset partners lined up

Android

• Google has put Android 3.2 developer kits into the hands of app makers, which could help spur the creation of a new generation of Android tablet apps. Android 3.2 is optimized for a wider range of tablets, and it has a new compatibility display mode that gives users a new way to view fixed-sized apps on larger devices.

• Looks like another round of roman candles are in order. After already setting off the celebratory fireworks for its previous user install milestone, CyanogenMod 7′s done it again — this time reaching past the half a million mark. The highly customizable Android homebrew is arguably the biggest aftermarket OS in the ROM-flashing campus, and it has the numbers to back it up.

• The rivalry between Google and Apple continues to heat up as the two tech giants reported progressive development for Android and Apple App Store. Apple holds the lead with over 15 billion downloads while Android grew rapidly with over 4.5 billion. The increased number of Android smartphone and tablets flowing into the stores will attempt to even the playing field with Apple’s iOS devices.

Free Software/Open Source

• Non-profit consortium in the US offering cash prize to encourage development of new software resources

Events

• The Blender Foundation has announced that registration for 2011 Blender Conference is now open. The 10th annual event will take place from 28 to 30 October at the De Balie in Amsterdam.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has detailed the non-profit organisation’s plans for the engineering behind Firefox, as it looks to make the browser spread even more of its workload between multiple processes. Blizzard notes that, although the multiple process model for Firefox is not a panacea, “it does gives us a leg up on some of the more systemic problems”.

• Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has published a blog entry that outlines the goals of Mozilla’s renewed effort to bring multiprocess browsing to the Firefox Web browser. The post highlights the key advantages that deeper process isolation will bring to Firefox and addresses some of the underlying requirements for Mozilla’s implementation.

• Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are. To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.

SaaS

• OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• According to Oracle, it is not stepping away from the SPARC server line. MacDonald said that the company would not favour x86 over SPARC. “We will continue to treat x86 and Sparc equally, the same as Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux,” MacDonald said. “We are a two chip/operating system [company] and we will continue to foster those [offerings],” MacDonald said.

• Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice’s competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation, says ComputerWorld.

CMS

• The WebAPP-Dev Perl development team has released its edition of the “Web Automated Perl Portal”, also known as WebAPP-Dev, version 1.0.

Semi-Open Source

• There are also several new functions, such as ‘dynamic templates’ – changes to a dynamic template are automatically incorporated into all mailshots which use that template. The new activities log provides administrators with a better overall picture by allowing them to trace all user actions. A detailed list of all new functions and of bug fixes can be found in the change log.

• For example, the Android open-source project is open to anyone who wants to join. There are no admission processes or membership fees for Android — just the desire to join the project and contribute. By harnessing the capabilities of a larger community, open-source developers can deliver solutions that are often superior to proprietary ones.

Funding

• Piston Cloud Computing, a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating.

Public Services/Government

• On Friday, July 1, at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre – Brazil, the Brazilian Government’s Free Software Implementation Committee has signed, along with the communities of the LibreOffice and OpenOffice projects, maintained respectively by the The Document Foundation and Apache Foundation, a Letter of Intent which signals the mutual interest of cooperation with the FLOSS office suites.

Licensing

• Licensing is an important component of every free software and open source project. This is especially true as an increasing number of corporations are adopting and distributing open source applications and code. This track considers various legal and licensing aspects of open source, both from a community and a corporate perspective.

Openness/Sharing

• WAN Optimization vendor Silver Peak Systems is opening up its technology with a new strategy called the Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA).

Open Data

Programming

• Google has added native support for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, to its Google Code project hosting site. Now, when developers create a new project, they can choose between Git, Mercurial and Subversion as their project’s version control system – support for Mercurial was added in April 2009. The long awaited change also applies to Eclipse Labs, a Google-hosted portal launched in May 2010 for open source projects based on the Eclipse platform.

Standards/Consortia

• Five years after being adopted as an official ISO standard, the Open Document Format (ODF) still appears to have a long way to go, despite the support it has received from politicians and administrative agencies. Andreas Kawohl from the civic centre and IT processing department at Freiburg City Council told Friday’s session of the ODF Plugfest in Berlin: “ODF is a long way from being able to function as a standard format for exchanging documents”. According to Kawohl, 2000 administrative staff in Freiburg are now using both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, with 70,000 OpenOffice documents generated over a six month period, but hardly anyone outside of the organisation is able to use them.

Leftovers

Security

• If you really know how Skype works, you know it’s about as safe as juggling firecrackers. Skype, the popular VoIP program, relies on every PC running Skype between you and who you’re calling to serve as stepping stones for your conversation. That’s bad. What’s worse is when Skype doesn’t check to see if Skype calls are actually sent, or received, by the right people.

• Or, to quote Levent “Noptrix” Kayan, the security researcher that uncovered this hole, “Skype suffers from a persistent Cross-Site Scripting [XSS] vulnerability due to a lack of input validation and output sanitization of the ‘mobile phone’ profile entry. Other input fields may also be affected.”

Finance

• Michael, I read the in the newspapers that the great recession, so-called, has long since ended, but unemployment remains stubbornly high with only a measly 18,000 jobs created in June. I believe the term that was coined some time ago is a jobless recovery. What is a jobless recovery?

• We call that a depression – in this case, caused mainly by debt deflation. Just because the stock market is being inflated by the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that the economy itself is growing. It’s shrinking – from a combination of families and businesses having to pay off debts rather than spend their income on goods and services, and the government’s shift of taxes off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry.

Censorship

• I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Two of the leading issues before the CRTC – over-the-top video and usage based billing – have come together as Shaw has announced plans to launch a new online movie service designed to compete with Netflix. Subscribers to the service, which will cost $12 per month, will be able to watch on their TV and computer. Most notably, Shaw says that the service will not count against subscriber data caps. Given the problems users of over-the-top video services have encountered with the caps, the Shaw approach places the spotlight on the CRTC net neutrality guidelines and undue preference rules. [Update: Shaw now says that watching movies via the Internet will count against user caps]

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• And what are these “offending works?” Well, looking at the DMCA notice (full notice embedded below), he appears to be claiming that both the header and the footer from his law firm’s legal correspondence, as well as the header of Magellan Capital Advisors LLC, are copyrights held by him. If you don’t recall, Magellan Capital Advisors was supposedly Pascazi’s “client,” in the attempt to trademark Bitcoin, and a letter sent from Magellan with the header in question was available on the USPTO website as Pascazi’s “evidence” for Magellan’s use of “Bitcoin” in commerce. You can see this part of the DMCA notice identifying “the works” here…

Copyrights

ACTA

• The analysis is based on the December 2010 text, the “Final ACTA text following legal verification”. The later 2011 version does not contain substantial changes other than: “This Agreement shall remain open for signature by participants in its negotiation,17 and by any other WTO Members the participants may agree to by consensus, from 1 May 2011 until 1 May 2013.”

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