● 08.05.11

● Links 5/8/2011: KDE 4.7 Reviewed, News Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 10:42 am by Guest Editorial TeamContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Code 42 Software Inc., creators of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe, continuous data backup for home and business, today reported new data about the rapid growth of Linux use in enterprise. Only halfway through 2011, Code 42’s CrashPlan PROe sales have grown 10 times 2010 levels. The company expects to end 2011 with a 14,000 percent growth in Linux revenue year-over-year. Since 2009, Code 42 has experienced substantial Linux growth. In 2010, the company recorded 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth of CrashPlan PROe for Linux.

• There’s actually a pretty wide range of languages/tools used, but Linux is the ‘default’ OS…

Desktop

• It seems like it wasn’t that long ago when Windows was an exclusive part of my computing life. Ever so slowly, I began to move away from Windows XP into some of the popular Linux distributions of the time.

• I found myself falling in love with a specific Linux distribution made popular by its ability to “just work” without a ton of configuration. At the time, this held a great appeal to me. After all, I had other things to do throughout my day besides having to configure everything on my desktop PC by hand.

• In this article, I’ll look at the benefits of both corporate and community supported distributions and how they might best fit into the enterprise space. In addition, I’ll offer suggestions as to which option might make the most sense in each type of enterprise scenario. I’ll also take a look at specialized Linux distributions.

Kernel Space

• Ah vacation. It was a week of blissful lounging around a breezy beach side and playing in a water-filled world where I was no longer at the top of the food chain. There were no computers, no talk of networking this, security that, or anything in between. But then the hard reality of the world wormed its way back into my mind and I now find myself trying hard to get back into some sort of groove…an open source kind of groove (of course).

• And although it’s officially next month (the month of my forty-fourth birthday, thank you very much) Linux is about to turn 3.0. And although Linus Torvalds himself has said this is not a big deal, it is. Why? Because of the very fact it is not a big deal.

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• These assumptions occur whether they are true or not — even if it has been made clear there are no deal making/deal breaking changes in the kernel. After all, look at the major feature list in the 3.0 kernel:

• * Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation * XEN Dom0 support. * Unprivileged ICMP_ECHO. * Wake on WLAN. * Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering. * A memcached-like system for the page cache. * A sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls. * The setns() a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers. * New hardware support such as Microsoft Kinect and AMD Llano Fusion APUs.

Applications

• SuperCollider is composer/programmer James McCartney’s gift to the world of open-source audio synthesis/composition environments. In its current manifestation, SuperCollider3 includes capabilities for a wide variety of sound synthesis and signal processing methods, cross-platform integrated GUI components for designing interfaces for interactive performance, support for remote control by various external devices, and a rich set of tools for algorithmic music and sound composition. And yes, there’s more, much more.

• LiVES 1.4.5 has been released! the new release comes with many news features and fixed many bugs, it add -tmpdir startup option, Stop PAL formats reverting to NTSC in x264 encoder., Fix bug to add fewer blank lines to ~/.lives file, Do not show “Loaded subtitles” message when subtitles are not loaded, Instant opening of some .flv files, Move correct pointer (start or end) when the timeline is clicked in longer files, Add video fade in/out effect, Fix frames being cut after applying effects in virtual clips. more info about this .

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• FPS games seem all the rage these days and after playing a few of them you would be forgiven for thinking there’s very little variety. Can you honestly remember vividly an FPS you played from a year ago on say the PS3, when all too often its the same generic gameplay albeit with different gfx and sound?

• As the Humble Indi Bundle, Minecraft et al showed, there’s a massive market for games which do not rely on the proven (and popular) FPS format. There are so many success stories that being an indi developer no longer means that you are resigned to selling only a few copies of your product – The Internet and word of mouth advertising mean that a decent product can be very lucrative.

• A new version for popular Linux FPS game Red Eclipse has been released. Codenamed ‘Supernova Edition’, this release sees many new features and changes.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform that provides the foundation for KDE software. Version 4.7 of these releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance.

• I tested KDE 4.7 in Kubuntu 11.10 on an HP netbook and in VirtualBox.

• For me, it (still) feels very unnatural to talk about us as KDE. I’m still thinking in terms of the KDE community; and the KDE Project releases the KDE Desktop (or just KDE). I’m also fine with the KDE Workspace and other specialized variants. However, the login manager now also shows the term KDE Plasma Workspace. In my very own humble opinion, this is already too much of buzz words.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Let me put this straight: I’m not blaming PCLOS at all. The installer performed the actions I commanded, nothing less, nothing more. Granted, I might be a non-technical Linux user, but I’m also beyond that childish stage in which users blame Linux when something does not go as planned. I should have paid attention to the small voice telling me that it was not a good idea to use a free HD space BEFORE my Mandriva partition and that it was an even worse choice to install the PCLinuxOS GRUB to the main sector of the partition table, but I stubbornly ignored the still small voice of wisdom.

• A couple of days ago, I described how I had an unfortunate experience while I attempted an install of PCLinuxOS. Because of lack of time, I had to remove the distro to recover my PC and finish my work, promising to get back at PCLOS later.

• Well, time has come: a kind reader of my post, to solve the problem of the multiple boot, recommended me to visit the PCLOS forums and find the wise sage, who goes through forum-land under the name of Old Pollack.

Red Hat Family

• CentOS 6 is a very beautiful, polished product.

Debian Family

• Welcome to this year’s eleventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community.

• I’ve heard two popular reasons for running a GNU environment on top of a FreeBSD kernel. One is script compatibility. The idea being that if a person needs a FreeBSD kernel (for whatever reason) they may still want to run GNU-specific scripts. I can see the reasoning behind this, though kFreeBSD does have a few quirks to it (such as the device names I mentioned above) which may introduce new incompatibilities. The other reason often cited is ZFS support. Though I didn’t find ZFS tools installed by default, ZFS utilities are available in the kFreeBSD repositories. This brings together great file system technology with an environment which will be familiar to GNU/Linux users. A third, and often overlooked, reason for running kFreeBSD is because we can. There is something compelling about running a mash-up of technologies from two different open source camps. For people who just like to tinker with computers kFreeBSD is right up there with trying MINIX or running NetBSD on a toaster.

• Given the problems I ran into with the installer and issues I ran into trying to login to a graphical environment, I have to say kFreeBSD isn’t a project I would recommend to many people, certainly not novice users. Given the defaults it appears as though the project is aimed mostly at people running servers who have an interest in both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. And, though certainly not without rough edges, it is an interesting operating system. It has got warts and it can be a pain to get up and running, but the fact that it can exist — does exist — is, well, is pretty cool when you think about it.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I have made no bones about my opposition to unpaid copyright assignment in any quarter. Least understandable was the old Canonical contributors agreement, Mark wrote another of his personal defences in his blog on Friday; of what I consider to be unreasonable and assumptive. But this isn’t about that blog post.

• I’m looking at the Canonical Individual Contributor License Agreement (pdf here). In contrast to the previous copyright assignment, it merely grants a broad set of rights to Canonical, including the right to relicense the work under any license they choose. Notably, it does not transfer copyright to Canonical. The contributor retains copyright.

Flavours and Variants

• Joli OS is a perfect combination of ease of use and good looks.

Devices/Embedded

• Game developer David Braben caused geeks to get excited back in May when he announced plans to develop and release a $25 PC. It is called the Raspberry Pi, and takes the form of a USB stick that can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display ready to act as afully-functional PC.

• The thinking behind the super-cheap PC is to get it into the hands of school kids and let them start experimenting and programming. The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output. It will run Linux in some form, but importantly it’s only $25 and will allow access to the wealth of free tools Linux has access to.

• Two months on and the spec of the PCB layout has been finalized and an alpha release has been sent to manufacture. Any doubts this PC wasn’t going to happen should now disappear as this alpha board is expected to be almost the same as the final production unit.

• We learned in May that Amazon.com had dropped the price of Logitech’s Google TV system (aka the Logitech Revue) 33 percent, to $199. Now, Logitech says it’s dropping the Revue’s price to $99.

Phones

Android

• Canalys tracks smartphone sales in 56 countries around the world, and released a summary of its data for Q2 2011 on August 1. According to the firm, Google’s Android operating system led in 35 countries and achieved a global market share of 48 percent.

• Android, “the number one platform by shipments since Q4 2010,” was shipped on 51.9 million phones during the quarter, a year-over-year increase of 379 percent, Canalys says. It put in a particularly strong performance in the APAC (Asia Pacific) region, garnering a 85 percent share in South Korea and a 71 percent share in Taiwan, the firm adds.

• THE 3D TREND is once again being foisted upon punters as Huawei has announced the launch of its first 3D smartphone.

• Aptly called Vision, the handset features a 3D user interface and a “carousel display”, by which we think Huawei means a revolving set of home page icons, or images, or something. With it Huawei will join the Korean handset maker LG in the 3D smartphone market, which – to be honest – hasn’t exactly taken off yet.

• HTC has released two ‘Facebook phones’ of late – the Qwerty-packing ChaCha and the Salsa, the latter being a compact bundle of fun, which wears its dedicated Facebook button just beneath its screen.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Content consumption rules for consumers and tablet sales will overtake consumer PC and notebook sales. That’s the view of Dr Joseph Reger, Fujitsu’s chief technology officer.

• Asus is taking the netbook back to its roots, with two devices intended to sell for as little as $200. The low-cost EeePC R011PX and EeePC X101 come with the Ubuntu and MeeGo operating systems, respectively — but will also run Windows if you insist.

• MAKER OF GADGETS Binatone gave The INQUIRER a look at its budget 7in tablet, the Homesurf 705.

• Binatone has jumped into the tablet party with its Homesurf 705. It has a 7in resistive touchscreen with 480×800 resolution, 2GB of internal storage, WiFi, microUSB and a microSD card slot.

• SCATTER CUSHION HARDWARE, the tablet computer, will make its way into most homes with the Android operating system in place, according to a report.

• Informa Telecoms and Media said that despite its considerable hold on the market Apple’s IOS based machines will start to fall out of favour with users over the next four years before being completely swept aside by Android devices.

• BITTER RIVALS Khidr Suleman and Chris Martin fight to the metaphorical death over the best 7in tablet currently on the market. This video face-off features three 7in tablets that are assessed on their various merits, and a winner is crowned.

Free Software/Open Source

Mozilla

• Mozilla has announced a new experimental project called Boot to Gecko (B2G) with the aim of developing an operating system that emphasizes standards-based Web technologies. The initial focus will be on delivering a software environment for handheld devices such as smartphones.

• When Mozilla announced the Webian Shell last month, many wondered if Mozilla too is planning to launch its own version of a web-based operating system. There was no definite answer then, but there is now.

• Mozilla has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”. The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google’s version of a web-based OS – the Chrome OS – Mozilla’s version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan.

• Mozilla is plotting to join the operating system fray with an “open Web” twist.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit” is, it’s the people who have been developing a large part of what was OpenOffice.org and before that, StarOffice. I remember the company when it was a privately owned entity called StarDivision. I have contributed and interacted with these people for over 10 years. I guess I will see some of them working for different employers; sometimes as competitors, sometimes as partners. But we will see us again one day or another, and I look forward that day. I have made a few friends there; these are bright people, and they have played an instrumental in the expansion of Free and Open Source Software, and dare I remind it? ODF and Open Standards as well. I sincerely wish them the best for the future, whatever road they choose to take. This “business unit” has been known under many names during all these years, and I understand very well that the present days must be sad and sorrowful days.

CMS

• Every IT person, developer, and programmer has an opinion when it comes to the various open source content management systems out there. It often comes down to functionality and ease of use, but even then the lines are often blurred and there is rarely a clear-cut victor. WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla – which is really the king of open source CMS?

Programming

Reader’s Picks

• Gmail will serve as the email interface for most Harvard undergraduate accounts by the middle of next month, replacing the webmail client currently designated for those addresses but used by a fraction of those students.

• The interface of the streams and the hangouts enable me to get to know new people in a more human manner. Comparing it to Twitter, there is a not this matrix-like stream of symbols and bit.ly codes flying by my eyes. Here, I see photos, visual thoughts, videos, and the sorts of retinal stimulation that humans expect.

• Over a 3-year period, an open virtualization solution can cost less than half of a proprietary alternative. Also, open virtualization efficiently supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux. In fact, we think that one of the major uses of KVM is going to be by customers who want to virtualize mixed Linux / Windows environments, and have a common hypervisor.

• some keep pushing every step of this litigation as doom for Google, what has happened so far? Well, for starters, Oracle has had most of its patents found invalid in the reexaminations. And the judge has told it to reduce the number of its claims. So right there, Google has won a great deal. If there are any damages at all, they won’t therefore be in the stratosphere. And the judge yesterday told Oracle its $6B-expert was all wet in how he came up with that ridiculous figure. … In other words, this case is now a lot smaller than when it started, and if there is a settlement, it could only be on terms Google doesn’t mind. … at the beginning, almost the whole world was saying that Android was doomed, that Google was going to be found liable, that this was a slam dunk for Oracle, blah blah blah. Was any of that true? Obviously not. And may I point out that there are no patent counterclaims in this case, and yet Google is winning? Duh. Time for the media to notice that they got spun.

• If the tiny but powerful Veer and the absolutely rabid yet organised fan community is any indication of the direction WebOS is heading, the OS could make a rapid recovery under HP’s stewardship.

Security

• The battery has its own processor and firmware and I wanted to get into the chip and change things and see what problems would arise … By analyzing a couple of updates that Apple had sent to fix problems in the batteries in the past, Miller found that password and was able to put the battery into “unsealed mode.” … a second password was required to move the battery into full access mode … That password is a default set at the factory and it’s not changed on laptops before they’re shipped.

Defence/Police/Aggression

Anti-Trust

• Nokia, struggling to hold onto its place as the world’s number one mobile phone maker, slumped Thursday to only its second quarterly loss since 1998 as sales continued to fall. Having pinned its hopes for recovery on a tie-up with US giant Microsoft, Nokia reported a three months to June a net loss of 368 million euros ($520.5 million), compared to a profit of 227 million euros in second quarter 2010. Analysts had expected a net loss of 104 million euros

Civil Rights

• Five Supreme Court Justices–Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy are entrenching, in a whirlwind of judicial dictates, judicial legislating and sheer ideological judgments, a mega-corporate supremacy over the rights and remedies of individuals. … the decisions are brazenly over-riding sensible precedents, tearing apart the state common law of torts and blocking class actions, shoving aside jury verdicts, limiting people’s ‘standing to sue,’ pre-empting state jurisdictions–anything that serves to centralize power and hand it over to the corporate conquistadores.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Impulse Technology filed the suit in federal court in Delaware, accusing Microsoft and several game makers–including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and THQ–of violating patents related to, among other things, tracking and assessing movement skills in multidimensional space

• [Carlos Anzola], an inventor, tinkerer, and self-ascribed geek from Bogotá, Colombia, had been working for years on a nearly identical gesture interface for the PC. His creation, the Human interface Electronic Device, or HiE-D – pronounced ‘Heidi’ – was capable of gesture recognition years before Microsoft would release the Kinect.

More Reader’s Picks

• I’m using Xfce. I think it’s a step down from gnome2, but it’s a huge step up from gnome3. Really.

Security

• I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact. In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.

• This massive breach of security, and loss of possibly highly-sensitive information, was all down to two things: the abiding thoughtlessness of people opening attachments, and a range of flaws in Microsoft’s software. So the statement that “the only organizations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing” is not true; another class would be those wise enough not to allow any of their personnel to use Microsoft products.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• This border search had nothing to do with the border and everything to do with the feds using a questionable opportunity to seize data that it could not otherwise get access to via legal means. If House’s laptop were really crucial to the case, then the Justice Department should have gotten a warrant to view it. … the reason given for having to keep House’s laptop for so long … the laptop ran both Linux and Windows and the tech geniuses at Homeland Security had trouble understanding how to deal with that.

• Crooks can be heard yelling in pain while Colling can be heard telling him to “shut up” and telling him his decision not to turn off the camera put him in “a world of hurt.”

Cablegate

• “I know this guy very well, and at no time have I thought this is someone who’s inappropriate to have in my house. None of us believe he’s a rapist.” … Does he think Assange is a hero? “Certainly by some measures, yes.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Tepco said it found another spot on the ventilation stack itself where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour, a level that could lead to incapacitation or death after just a short period of exposure.

Finance

• China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute—through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions. … “We see really vertical integration and control of the markets [by investors] who will be able to both influence prices and also decide on what the production will be,” warns Oakland Institute Policy Director Frederic Mousseau. “We have the food chain, which is pervasively and quite rapidly in recent years being under the control of financial groups.

Anti-Trust

• VanRoekel previously served 15 years at Microsoft where his final position was as Microsoft’s Windows Server and Tools Division, followed by a year+ stint at the FCC starting in 2009, ending at this newest appointment.

Censorship

• In this case, the government has presented the novel and dangerous theory that the use of a public communication service like Twitter to criticize a well-known individual can result in criminal liability based on the personal sensibilities of the person being criticized. … “While true threats can and should be opposed, public speech about prominent people must be vigorously protected.”

Privacy

• Randi Zuckerberg [of Facebook] doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all … Not only is uncivil discourse alive and well in venues with real name policies (such as Facebook), the argument willfully ignores the many voices that are silenced in the name of shutting up trolls: activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out. … An Internet in which everyone has to use their real name is not necessarily going to be any more polite, but it is guaranteed to be a disaster for freedom of expression.

Civil Rights

• The surprising conclusion from all this is that, leaving out the impact of the biofuel boom of the 2000s, global consumption of both cereals and edible oils is actually slowing down. All the more tragic, then, that speculative forces are still allowed to run amok in global commodity markets and global food prices are kept so high as to increase the deprivation of the millions of hungry people in the world.

• Newlywed shoppers claim Wal-Mart’s false accusation that they tried to steal $2.90 worth of chicken neck bones caused the wife to be falsely arrested and lose her job, her husband to be deported, and both to lose their car, all their possessions and their house – though Wal-Mart’s security video showed they had paid for the damn chicken bones.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It’s possible that one consequence of first-to-file is that you’ll have a rush of more patents … The bill’s new review process inside the PTO does provide a cheaper way to challenge silly patents than the current court process, but tech firms aren’t likely to take advantage of it. Monitoring patent applications is nearly impossible, and challenging a patent alerts its holder to a potential lawsuit target if the challenge fails.

• Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents. … A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. … the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means – which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop. … We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio.

• it’s obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.

• This recent episode of Planet Money, “When Patents Attack”, is an informative and entertaining primer on the way America’s patent system squelches competition, slows innovation, and enables egregious predation through the legal system. Please listen to this. And then tell me that Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures is not our age’s authentic villainous robber baron, making a fortune gaming America’s dysfunctional patent-law system to shake down would-be innovators.

Copyrights

• The Solicitors Regulation Authority has suspended two lawyers and fined them £20,000 each for sending out thousands of letters accusing people of illegally sharing files…. Davenport Lyons passed the work onto ACS:Law and Andrew Crossley in 2009 when it got sick of the bad publicity. Crossley was declared bankrupt in June

• Now, it is finally paying defense lawyers, even if it can’t quite manage to send a check to the proper location.

• [Their argument] reveals the abiding and ingrained sense of entitlement that pervades all the creative industries. They are not content to be paid once like most people, but want to be paid again and again.

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