● 07.20.11

● Links 20/7/2011: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release Schedule, Linux-powered HP TouchPad Competitive With iPad, New OLPC Surfaces

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

Server

• After strutting its stuff on Jeopardy! earlier this year, IBM’s Watson will be included at LinuxCon in a special exhibit August 17-19, 2011. We got some time with the IBM Power Systems Product Marketing Manager Ian Jarman to better understand what we can expect and what Watson and its IBM team have been working on since their very public victory earlier this year.

• IBM (NYSE:IBM) reported second quarter fiscal 2011 earning on Monday, with both revenue and income growth, as multiple segments of its business expand. Part of the growth is fueled by IBM’s expanding presence in growth markets and some is coming at the expense of rivals HP and Oracle, especially in the Unix space.

Kernel Space

• Some UEFI systems that are shipped with Windows always use a secondary installation of the bootloader which is intended as a fallback; this prevents a correctly installed UEFI Linux from starting up. Also: Google has released its BadRAM patches after all, a Linus Torvalds has appeared on Google+, and Lennart Poettering has posted further material on systemd on his blog.

Graphics Stack

• While S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) is widely used by many games and applications since its inclusion into OpenGL 1.3 and Microsoft DirectX 6.0, these lossy texture compression algorithms have not been implemented in the open-source Linux graphics drivers. This lack of open-source support is due to S3 Graphics holding the patent rights to this technology that they actively license to major hardware vendors. There long has been an external library that can be loaded and will work with most Mesa / Gallium3D drivers for advertising S3TC support, but it’s not found by default and it’s not included in leading Linux distributions due to these legal fears. There may now be a new solution for the S3TC Linux problem thanks to the advent of a new (and simpler) texture compression algorithm that can serve as a drop-in replacement.

• While NVIDIA’s proprietary driver for their GeForce/Quadro hardware still lacks RandR 1.2+ support (that will hopefully change when RandR 1.4 is finally out), NVIDIA has proposed extending RandR to support over-scan compensation. This support isn’t for their mainline NVIDIA binary driver but rather their TEGRA Linux driver.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Two Indie Linux Games, Atom Zombie Smasher and Snapshot have made in the PAX 10 list this year and will be featured at the PAX Prime from August 26-28 in Washington. The PAX 10 is a showcase of independent games to be exhibited at the event.

• OnLive, the cloud gaming platform where games are rendered and stored on servers, already has Windows and Mac OS X clients, but a Linux client is in the works. Back in March there was a job posting by OnLive where one of the responsibilities dealt with feature design and development for multiple platforms, including Linux. There’s also been other signs of OnLive for Linux in the works. The latest sign is a new job posting yesterday for the Linux client.

Desktop Environments

• LXDE: LXDE is a light environment with the traditional layout. It does not have that much customizability, but it is perfect if you just want a simple, easy to use and complete environment. LXDE uses the Openbox window manager, so any themes for Openbox will work in LXDE. Many pieces of LXDE will also work in other environments, and are available in individual packages. LXPanel is a very useful panel as it contains an automatically updating menu. LXAppearance can manage GTK themes, icon themes, fonts and, with a plugin, Openbox themes. PCManFm is a light file manager although I prefer Thunar. Leafpad is a light text editor, and LXTerminal is a good terminal.

• Xfce: Xfce is a more complete replacement for Gnome 2.X, although it is still missing some features. There are some nice xfwm themes, but Metacity themes often look better. Xfce 4.8 can now use Alacarte to edit it’s menus and, with the help of xfapplet, can use many Gnome applets such as Dockbarx and MintMenu. Xfwm contains it’s own compositor, making Xfce great for those who want to use Docky or AWN without Compiz. Xfce is admittedly not as light as it once was, but it is still lighter than Gnome 2 and is a suitable replacement.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

• We will try to make the migration as much comfortable as possible. We have to let GNOME 2.32 go to its destiny. R.I.P.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• As you know, release of Mandriva 2011 is coming. After that our developers continue to upgrade and polish mandriva build system. We receive many requests from community, that new build system must have new features. So, for example, new policy to add/upgrage packets, new functionality to create own “spins”/distributions or just for building existing package but with other defaults, etc.

Gentoo Family

• This article presents a review of the latest stable release, Pardus 2011.1, which was made available for download on July 12, 2011. It is the second this year and judging from the distribution’s recent release history, there should be one more before the end of the year.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is gearing up to host a major North America Partner Conference (Oct. 26-28, Miami). The event signals a shift for Red Hat, which previously lumped partners and customers together at the annual Red Hat Summit. Here’s the update along with some insights from The VAR Guy.

• Yes, the annual Red Hat Summit and Jboss World conference continues to grow, attracting hundreds of partners and customers alike. But Red Hat is finally prepared to put a dedicated spotlight on its North American partners. The October partner conference is expected to include distributors, system integrators, VARs, solutions providers, ISVs and OEMs. Attendance will be invitation only. More information is expected to reach partners this month.

Fedora

• This is my second day with Fedora 15 Lovelock installed on my laptop. If you’ve missed the post about the first day you can find it here. Below are my thoughts about the Fedora experience

Debian Family

Derivatives

• aptosid might sound like a package management tool, but it’s actually a desktop-orientated (KDE4 or XFCE) Debian derived Linux distro. It’s more than a mere respin of Debian, but does it have what it takes to distinguish it from all of the other desktop distros?

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2012.

Flavours and Variants

• I discovered Mandriva in the wake of a catastrophe…but that is a story for another day, one which I shall spin when I write up my review of Mageia. I bring up Mandriva because in my life, the most usable desktop I’ve ever found has been in the Gnome variant of Mandriva 2010. Mandriva 2010.2 is still a go-to installation on the laptop, but that one (and 2010.1) gave me a little trouble with sound on the “Fun Computer”. Otherwise, they were perfect, but a little less perfect, so to speak. But the combination of the Mandriva Control Center and the cool, crisp Gnome design is hard to beat.

Devices/Embedded

• Open source hacker community Gizmo For You is developing a Linux-based controller and separate receiver device to remotely control a model airplane or other vehicle. Starting at $670, the battery-operated Open Source RC (OSRC) runs Linux on a Gumstix Overo SBC and includes a 4.8-inch display, a smaller monochrome status display, a 2.4GHz RF radio, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth for external thumbstick control.

Phones

Android

• One of the reasons Android has grown like no mobile platform in history is the open nature of the OS. OEMs, developers and buyers have flocked to a platform that allows modifications across the board, creating the ability for anyone to make Android look and work in many ways. The looseness of the Android platform has been its biggest draw, but there is such a thing as too much openness, and it is beginning to impact customers in ways that Google surely didn’t intend to happen.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• One Laptop Per Child is developing new functionality and protection features for its upcoming XO-3 tablet with the hope to attract more interest in the device.

• OLPC is designing rubber covers intended to protect the tablet but that could also integrate solar charging, satellite Internet or external keyboard capabilities, said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child.

• The tablet was originally announced in late 2009 with a projected price of under US$100. The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.

• When HP bought Palm last year I was hoping we would see less confusing messages and a more targeted focus for webOS with lots of resources to turn out great products. Instead, we end up with a rather lame tiny smartphone and then a tablet that was put on sale and then “officially launched” almost three weeks later. Yes, in case you didn’t know HP’s official launch for the HP TouchPad webOS tablet was yesterday, 17 July. I guess the 1 July release was just a practice run or something.

• HP was right not to fear invidious comparisons with the iPad.

Free Software/Open Source

• Has it been a year already? It must have because Packt Publishing (news, site) is launching its annual Open Source Awards, formerly the Open Source CMS Awards, designed to recognize and support promising open source projects . This year’s awards will be very similar to the awards in previous years, but there are a few changes.

• An interesting new project on Kickstarter is raising money to support the creation of a small, cheap pulse sensor. The device is being developed on the open source Arduino platform so that it can be easily integrated into other projects.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

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.

• Yahoo is a well-known user of, and contributor to, open source projects. The company is most closely associated with Hadoop, and rightly so, as it is this open source project’s biggest contributor. Last month, it sponsored the Hadoop Summit 2011, in which its internal Hadoop experts, and others, ran a collection of workshops on the distributed workload operating system. It even announced that Yahoo had collected some top Hadoop engineers and spun off a new company, Hortonworks. Hortonworks hopes to sell Hadoop consulting services to enterprises.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle today released VirtualBox 4.1, a new major release. Introducing VM clones, this mean the ability to clone virtual machines via the GUI and VBoxManage, the New Advanced wizard for creating new virtual disks and virtual disk copy also for 64-bit memory limit is up to 1 TB. For guest Additions, status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends, Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts

• Oracle released a new version of its free virtualization software, now offering an easy way to clone virtual machines (VMs). VirtualBox 4.1 also includes a memory limit increase to 1TB for 64-bit hosts, guest support for Windows Aero, a new UDP networking tunnel for interconnecting VMs, and support for SATA hard disk hotplugging, among other cited new features.

• VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a desktop virtualization tool on the client side and as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivery server side.

• The open source VirtualBox hypervisor for PCs and servers got a major release on Tuesday when Oracle – which controls the VirtualBox project – kicked out version 4.1.

• Six weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apache Software Foundation. Two weeks after that, Apache voted to accept the proposed project for incubation. Now, one month later, IBM is announcing that it will offer the Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice incubator for consideration. Why and what does this mean?

CMS

Business

• consilium1, a specialized information technology consulting services company, announced today that Mark Lugert has joined the c1 executive team as Vice President, Professional Services. In this role, Lugert will be primarily responsible for driving the expansion of the company’s burgeoning Open Source Adoption practice.

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• During November 2010, I travelled around Europe, meeting various free software developers on my way to FSCONS, the annual free software conference, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Leftovers

• Hasan and Burns analyzed three computers: a MacBook laptop, a desktop running Ubuntu Linux and a Fedora Linux fileserver in the University Library (Linux is a variant of the Unix operating system used primarily at educational and research institutions).

Security

• A group of computer hackers has tampered with the website of the Sun, owned by News International.

• At first, readers were redirected to a hoax story which said Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden.

• A group of hackers called Lulz Security, which has previously targeted companies including Sony, said on Twitter it was behind the attack.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• As the first half of 2011 has revealed, Wisconsin is not a moderate “purple” state, but a state divided between staunchly “blue” progressives and righteous “red” right-wingers. That rift is particularly apparent in legislative conflicts over the criminal justice system, a debate spurred by corporate interests represented in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and perpetuated by ALEC legislative members, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

• Wisconsin’s history and public policy reflects the red/blue divide. It is the state that gave birth to the Republican Party, which supported slavery abolition, and the John Birch Society, which opposed the civil rights movement. In the first half of the 20th Century, the state elected both progressive hero Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and right-wing extremist Joe McCarthy. It is the state that elected both former Senator Russ Feingold (D) and Representative Paul Ryan (R).

• Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

• In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing — from energy and water utilities to Social Security — to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

Censorship

• Data smuggling software could help citizens in countries operating strict net filters visit any site they want.

• Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.

• The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.

• So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.

Reader’s Picks

Health/Nutrition

Defence/Police/Aggression

Anti-Trust

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Civil Rights

• The Food and Drug Administration policy, implemented in 1983, states that men who have had sex — even once — with another man (since 1977) are not allowed to donate blood. … jToday, all donated blood is tested for HIV, as well as for hepatitis B and C, syphilis and other infectious diseases, before it can be released to hospitals. This is why gay activists, blood centers including the American Red Cross, and even some lawmakers now claim the lifetime ban is “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

• Ohio Homeland Security fired its Muslim liaison officer because he objected to its use of tax dollars to create programs “asserting that all Central Ohio Muslims and Arabs were terrorists or terrorism sympathizers … [and] included a picture of plaintiff as an example of a terrorist sympathizer,” … His problems apparently began when OHS and ODPS began receiving public criticism about his work – or the fact that they had hired someone to do such a job at all.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

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