● 07.23.11

● Links 23/7/2011: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is Out; Linux Distribution From DoD

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Passionate Linux advocate and local IT pioneer Manny Amador was found dead by authorities on Friday in his rented house in Cebu where he had relocated to work for open-source firm InfoWeapons.

• Linux 12.82%

Desktop

• The operating system used is Linux (exact distro is unknown) and the kit includes a 74W solar panel with charge controller, SMF battery and AC inverter.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The latest version of the Linux kernel, Linux 3.0, was pushed out last night, marking the end of the 2.6 kernel series.

• As most people in the know understand, this does not represent a big sea change, since the new version numbering was really just a way to discontinue the 2.6 numbering, which would have been 2.6.40 for the kernel today, had not Linus Torvalds announced in late May that the time had come for a new numbering scheme.

• There have also been improvements with how the kernel works with the still experimental Btrfs (B-tree file system) and the now standard ext4 file system. This, in turn, should lead to faster and, in the case of Btrfs, more reliable, file systems.

Graphics Stack

• This article presents these Linux graphics results for eight configurations.

Applications

• Think back to the last time you wanted to look at a newer, unstable release of some app. Was it easy to do? Or was it a compilation from source full of mystical errors, booting a newer OS release from a live CD while fighting black-screen-on-boot bugs, or a terribly slow and awkward virtual machine installation (which still didn’t make much sense because you couldn’t try it with your real data)? I’ll guess it was closer to the latter.

• ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Recently at, we’ve been setting up several new instances of OpenERP for customers. Our server operating system of choice is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Installing OpenERP isn’t really that hard, but having seen several other “How Tos” online describing various methods where none seemed to do the whole thing in what I consider to be “the right way”, I thought I’d explain how we do it. There are a few forum posts that I’ve come across where the advice is just plain wrong too, so do be careful.

Games

Desktop Environments

• In case you missed them, there have been a couple of exciting announcements around the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• I really like the ability to quickly see route information with times and associated alerts for my home station, and with multiple instances of the Plasmoid I can keep track of several stations quite easily at a glance. The journey features are also indispensible.

• Using it with Contour, which is getting support for random Plasmoids in addition to the Nepomuk-derived resources that are associated with an activity, is going to be very, very nice for someone like me who travels a fair amount: I’ll end up with one Activity on my tablet per trip with all my files, contacts and even transit information agregated in one place that I can switch to with a simple thumb swipe. Oh, yeah!

• Plasma uses a lot of files from disk, particularly when using QML and scripted Plasmoids, but also whenever something requests an image from the theme. The Package class is responsible for the former functionality and the Theme class for the latter. We already cache the results of the Theme rendering, but not the results of looking around on disk for the requested image. There is essentially no caching at all for Package: every request for a file sends it looking on disk for it.

• Due to KDE’s Plasma extensive use of the hard disk for Plasmoids and other activities, and thinking about KDE’s performance on mobile device, Aaron Seigo has been working to make the library consume less memory. He has achieved at least partial success in this effort.

GNOME Desktop

• It must have been my curiosity that drove me to exploring Arch Linux a few weeks ago. Its coming on a Linux Format DVD and a few kind words about its being a cutting edge distribution were enough to set me installing it into a VirtualBox virtual machine for a spot of investigation. In spite of warnings to the contrary, I took the path of least resistance with the installation even though I did look among the packages to see if I could select a desktop environment to be added as well. Not finding anything like GNOME in there, I left everything as defaulted and ended up with a command line interface as I suspected. The next job was to use the pacman command to add the extras that were needed to set in place a fully functioning desktop.

Distributions

• A while ago I received an invitation to view a video presentation giving 10 good reasons to review VectorLinux, and it’s true that I cannot recall to have read a review of it in years. This venerable distribution has been around for a long time but has also garnered some controversy around offering a paid for Deluxe version, introducing a paid for members club, and has been accused of not making source code freely available and thereby infringing on the GPL. It seems the club did not take off as I cannot find any mention of it anymore on the web site.

• All that aside, VectorLinux 5.0.1 was my distribution of choice when returning to Linux in 2005, and a nice experience it was. Basically what I had been looking for was something like Mandrake Linux back in the late 90′s but based on Slackware, and Vector did just fit the bill.

• It had and probably still has a very enthusiastic, helpful and polite community, and the forums were a great resource. I still remember the names and the fact that all these people are still actively involved as you can see in the credits during installation speaks volumes.

• The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a unique Linux distribution designed to be a secure option for people, such as telecommuters, who need remote access to internal government and corporate networks from potentially insecure desktops.

• Created by a collaboration between the DOD and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) can be booted from a CD or flash drive onto nearly any Intel-based PC or Mac, according to information posted on the project’s website.

• In my last article, ArchBang: A small review I was a bit unfair to the distro. I did not want to see these distros (ArchBang and Arch Linux) for what they really are and I consider that to be very wrong. Therefore, I bring you a few thoughts on Arch Linux after playing around with it for about 2-3 days.

• Arch is not your average, over-dressed, underpowered and over-popular Linux… as I so wrongly tried to see at as. Arch has the ability… no, gives you the power…

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

• In a week peppered with massive exposure for Apple’s new OS X release Lion, open source converts will hopefully be more interested to read that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is now here.

• Key “extra toppings” in this iteration centre on features that enhance the flexibility, security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments.

• Red Hat has updated Enterprise Linux 5.7, which now includes several features from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

• The operating system processors supports deployments on Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z architectures.

• Red Hat also offers a security framework based on the OpenSCAP Security Content Automation Protocol, including a library and set of utilities, giving a standardised approach to validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux security.

• Oracle is dropping support for the leading open source operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux. The company made this announcement post its acquisition of Ksplice, the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux.

• The main improvements to the latest release of RHEL series 5 are optimised virtualisation with KVM and Xen, as well as new and revised drivers. Slowly but surely, the series is nearing the end of the first and most active phase its lifecycle.

Fedora

• Shortly said, it’s not very impressive. But what are the options we have? Can we improve it? Well, there are some font settings that are available. See e.g. this blogpost about making fedora fonts look Ubuntu-like. Although I personally see that as making things worse, there are people who think otherwise. What I decided to do was to skim through most of the hinting options we have and decide for myself what looks best. And of course, provide my readers with some images so that they could decide for themselves.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Android Market now lets developers mount multiple Android Package (APK) files optimized for different devices and releases, instead of selling the optimized versions separately, says Google. Meanwhile, security firm Dasient reports that eight percent of Android apps are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers, and some Android malware is specializing in “drive-by downloads,” leaving users unaware of what’s being installed.

• Toshiba’s Thrive is a decent, if unspectacular, entry to the trundling Android “Honeycomb” tablet market, according to this eWEEK review. However, the availability of multiple ports will please enterprise users, who might also like the removable battery better than did author Clint Boulton.

Free Software/Open Source

• Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd., (THBS) is one among them who are actively embracing open source solutions and contributing to open source community.

• “Being a player in the software services space, Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions,” says Karthik T S, head of CoE SOA, Cloud and OSS, Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd. in an interaction with CIOL.

• The technology industry in India has developed significantly in the last few years and India has evolved relatively well to the idea of open source software and adoption rates are remarkably good.

• With many companies embracing for open-source technologies, the role of open source in IT has been changed in many companies.

Events

• During the first meeting of the Open Source Focus Group 2011, held in May at the ForumPA, I have been interviewed by the organizers to take stock of how Linux and Open Source are doing in the Italian public administrations.

• The Eclipse Foundation has announced that, in collaboration with Oracle, it will be presenting a Java 7 Summit at this year’s European EclipseCon conference. EclipseCon Europe 2011 will take place from 2 to 4 November at the Forum am Schlosspark in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has announced the release of version 6.0 of Thunderbird – its open source news and email client – into the Beta Channel. While a final release date for Thunderbird 6.0 has yet to be confirmed, a production version will likely follow shortly after Firefox 6.0, which is scheduled for 16 August.

• Google has decided to drop support for Firefox for the Google Toolbar.

• No, that’s not a bad thing at all. The toolbar is a relic of any older era. An era when Firefox Sync didn’t exist, an era when the awesomebar wasn’t truly aweseome.

• Apparently however, Mozilla is seeing the Google Toolbar issue as being a potential barrier to adoption for Firefox 5.

SaaS

• Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we’ve seen how in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud of VMWare’s Cloud Foundry have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies.

• The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offer is very simple. These platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, MySQL among dozens of others.

• As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a long way in just a year. But it’s only one of a growing number of open-source projects challenging expensive and proprietary incumbents across the IT industry. From storage to networking, open-source projects are emerging that offer viable alternatives.

• Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

• Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

Databases

• EnterpriseDB is proud to introduce Postgres Enterprise Manager, the first enterprise-wide architected management tool for database professionals who are looking to efficiently manage and monitor Postgres servers throughout their organizations.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle released VirtualBox 4.1 on July 19 with a slew of improvements ranging from usability improvements to rasing the ceiling for RAM to 1TB for 64-bit hosts. With 4.1, we decided to take VirtualBox out for a spin and see how it handles.

• I’ve been using desktop virtualization since the early days, when VMware was a scrappy little company shipping a nearly unheard-of product — a desktop virtualization tool that would let you run Windows in VM in Linux. No more dual-booting for those folks who had to have access to Microsoft Word or QuickBooks but wanted to enjoy Linux as their desktop of choice.

CMS

• The specialist in commercial support for open source content and community management will use the money to gain share in the social software market.

Semi-Open Source

• The community has created the Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA) which is a group of senior community members who are working to evolve Zenoss core and the community to better serve the needs of the community and the entire Zenoss ecosystem. To this end, the board of ZCA has provided the following agenda…

• Business intelligence software maker, Jaspersoft, announced yesterday that it raised $11 million dollars in funding. The round was lead by existing investors Red Hat and SAP Ventures in addition to including newcomer Quest Software.

• Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• 2011-07-19

• nginx-1.0.5 stable version, nginx-0.8.55 and nginx-0.7.69 legacy stable versions have been released.

• And in May, BonitaSoft upgraded its open source BPM suite which is also developed in Java and available under the GPL.

• We are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004. If you look back a little further, there were various “0.x” releases made as early as December of 1999… my, how time has flown!

• We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes. Each of them has also included substantial new functionality for Asterisk users. Along the way, we’ve been asked by many people in the community when we are going to start working on (or release) “Asterisk 2.0.” Typically, we’ve responded by saying that will not happen until we can really justify such a significant change in the version number. Many open source projects have gone through similar progressions, and quite a number of them have in fact undergone complete (or nearly complete) rewrites resulting in new ‘major’ versions.

Licensing

• The Linux Foundation strives to provide relevant, useful guidance to organizations setting up their free and open source software (FOSS) compliance programs. Last month, we released a white paper titled “A Five Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review.”

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Open Access/Content

• A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

Programming

• PostgreSQL, Python 3 and Additional Core Services Added, Opens Testing Group Further

• Google has published “a few more interesting statistics” from this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event; in May, a statistical breakdown of accepted students was published. According to a post by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, 202 (18.1%) of this year’s 1,115 student participants took part in last year’s programme. Of those students, 35 were also part of the 2009 programme, meaning that 3.1% are three year students.

• The last four Java Specification Requests (JSRs) required for Java 7 have received the blessing of the Java Community Process (JCP). JSR 292, support for dynamically typed languages, JSR 334, small enhancements to Java language and JSR 203, more new I/O APIs (NIO.2), all passed with unanimous support in the final approval ballot. The only note of dissent was from Google in the final approval vote for JSR 336, the umbrella JSR which incorporates all the JSRs required for Java 7.

Standards/Consortia

• Earlier this month the United States Department of Justice admitted what many of us have suspected: we will not be seeing web accessibility regulations in the United States for commercial and public entities any time soon. Some time in 2013 at the earliest.

• In July, 2010, the Department issued what is called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making indicating that it was planning to issue regulations about web accessibility. The step after an “Advanced Notice” is a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” (NPRM). After that is the rule itself. In its semi-annual regulatory agenda for Spring 2011, however, the DOJ called the NPRM for Web Accessibility a “Long Term Item” not expected until December, 2012. That’s well over a year from now. And it is close to two years after the public comment period on the Advanced Notice closed, and almost two and one half years after the DOJ announced the possible regulations in July, 2010.

• But now, it seems that what we are doing is obsolete. In May 2010, Google set free the WebM format which was quickly adopted by major web browsers in addition to the largest online video provider, YouTube. 99% of what people watch on YouTube is now available in WebM and thus playable without Flash or any other unfree technologies. (Well, in addition to the fact that I have not posted any entry in many months, which meant that there was no itch anymore!)

• Now is the time to move on to other projects (or to college life, who knows? ). By July 15th, TinyOgg entries URLs will be automatically redirected to the original video page and I will run the service for at least eighteen months more.

Leftovers

• The U.S. government is aiming to pull the plug on hundreds of unneeded data centers over the next few years in an attempt to save taxpayers some hard-earned cash.

• Recently I’ve had some discussion with colleagues about Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in comparison to each other. Generally, I’ve found that most people agree that Mac OS X is more stable than Windows, and those that are familiar with Linux feel that it too is more stable than Windows. But after that being said, they come back with an apology for Microsoft stating that they (Microsoft) have to get Windows to run on fragmented hardware, whereas Apple standardizes the hardware and can therefore provide a more stable operating system for it, because there aren’t nearly as many variations in hardware configurations.

Cablegate

• Julian Assange, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have added their names to a new online petition in support of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks.

• They join scores of other signatories, including Greens MP Adam Bandt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak and Overland Journal editor Jeff Sparrow. Overland released the online petition on July 21.

• In Murdoch’s empire, talking points from above dictate the news delivered to the masses. Yet Rupert’s writers need only scan the front pages to discern how best to please their boss and get prominently featured. It’s a culture of corruption, as countless recent articles have documented, designed to maximise profits and political power.

• But the media landscape is changing. Why should we ordinary citizens of the world keep paying for news, when we can get it online for free? But then, if media organisations are not making a profit, how can they afford to keep supplying news for free? This remains the great unresolved Catch-22 of the C21st Fourth Estate.

• News Corporation is planning more firewalls to protect media content, despite the previous failure of such models at organisations like the New York Times. The UK Independent newspaper is now running an online survey asking readers to tell them how the paper can deal with the shifting media paradigm. The Economist prominently features an on-going debate on the subject.

• Meanwhile, I suspect The Guardian’s apparent anti-WikiLeaks crusade may be motivated by a desire to “own the space” that WikiLeaks has staked out (namely, the safest place to publish leaks in this new globalized, digital world). Yes, all the big media organisations are scared, even Murdoch’s dreaded nemeses at The Guardian.

• The Library of Congress says it was not responsible for categorizing a WikiLeaks-related book as “extremist” and that it has decided to removed that label.

Finance

• According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street and the financial services lobby spent an eye-popping $1,400,000,000 between 2008 and 2010 to kill financial reform. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a whole unit dedicated to killing it. This year, the those same forces spent $156 million on lobbying in the first quarter. The big banks are fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill with a stable of willing Congressmen and an army of lobbyists fanned out across a dozen federal agencies where Dodd-Frank rulemaking is underway.

• Virginia’s governor is livid that his famously tight-fisted state could face higher borrowing costs to build roads and schools. Maryland has put off a $718 million bond sale for three days because of the current financial uncertainty. And California plans to borrow about $5 billion from private investors next week to ensure it can cover day-to-day operating expenses should the federal government default on its debt.

• The House greeted the official opening Thursday of the new agency to protect consumers from financial abuse by voting to change its structure and reach.

• Republican sponsors said they were trying to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau more transparent and accountable. Democrats said Republicans wanted to cripple the agency before it gets on its feet.

• At Morgan Stanley, even a loss can be a win.

• Although the financial firm reported a second-quarter loss of $558 million on Thursday, three crucial divisions posted significant gains, a promising sign that the turnaround plan Morgan Stanley embarked on after the financial crisis was taking hold.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally opened for business on Thursday, much to the consternation of Congressional Republicans.

• But as conservative lawmakers step up their attacks on the new regulator, aiming to undermine its structure and authority, champions of the bureau are pushing back.

• Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four more bankers with Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group with conspiracy in what they say was a long-running scheme to help U.S. taxpayers hide as much as $4 billion in assets.

• Prosecutors originally charged four people in the scheme in February, so the charges announced Thursday bring the total number of people charged up to eight. Charging documents filed in the case do not specify what bank the group worked for, but The Associated Press previously reported its identity.

• Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate will vote Friday on the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, a bill backed by conservatives that he called “weak and senseless” and “perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.”

• The Senate had been expected to vote Saturday on the House-passed bill, which has little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled upper chamber. But Reid expedited the vote so the Senate can quickly move to a backup plan he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are hatching to raise the debt ceiling and avert a financial default by the Aug. 2 deadline, a Democratic aide said.

• The economy could lapse even further if Congress and the Obama administration fail to reach an agreement on raising the nation’s borrowing limit in the coming week.

• NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fraudulently misleading it about risky debt it expected would tumble in value.

• In a decision made public on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones in Manhattan said the plaintiff, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, failed to sufficiently show that its investment in the Timberwolf 2007-1 collateralized debt obligation was a “domestic” transaction, entitling it to sue in a U.S. court.

• The window shades were lowered to block out the sunlight soaking lower Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in June as 14 students in Eric H. Kessler’s executive MBA class gathered in a conference room to present their analyses of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s leadership.

• The firm’s management shows “resistance to change” and is “doing business in a bubble,” one of the three student teams explained in a PowerPoint presentation. Another recommended creating an “ethics role” within Goldman Sachs’s securities division. Kessler, who teaches management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, peppered the students with questions. Could cohesive culture be a weakness as well as a strength?

• There are plenty of good reasons to work at Goldman Sachs; we’ve written about them before.

• But inspired the bank’s miserable earnings report this morning, we realized that the negatives are piling up considerably.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.

• In 2004, I created Outfoxed to expose Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism. Focusing on Fox News, we examined how NewsCorp has long blurred the line between corporate interests and journalistic integrity. The film presented an in-depth look at the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. Those dangers were shown to include ethic-less journalism, as well as the role of public relations spin in replacing the honest presentation of facts.

• On Tuesday, as Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before parliament, this theme was repeated. Their testimony was less about true and honest answers and more about the script of a public relations firm, and an attempt to spin the public debate on issues of corporate disgrace.

• If their testimonies presented any information at all, it would be how much the Murdochs want to promote the spin of willful ignorance. For two incredibly involved businessmen, their testimonies would lead you to believe that they have long had absolutely no idea about what happens within their company.

• Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel had a “black ops” department that may have illegally hacked private telephone records, a former executive for the station has alleged.

Censorship

• 109 MPs have now signed Julian Huppert MP’s EDM 1913, which called for the Government to reconsider policies such as website blocking, in light of the recent UN Special Rapporteur Report that was expressly critical of blocking on freedom of expression grounds. More recently, the Organisation for Security an Cooperation in Europe released a report that reached similar conclusions about disconnection and website blocking jeopardising rights to freedom of expression. Over 8,600 people have written to their MPs about this issue.

Civil Rights

• While politicians are convinced that Murdoch’s press has over-stepped the mark by routine hacking of citizen’s phones, let’s remember that plans for mass, pervasive hacking of our phones and emails is still sat waiting for revival by the Home Office.

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