● 08.11.11

● Links 11/8/2011: Desktop Summit, More Linux Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For those pursuing a Linux career, is Linux certification a must have or an indication that you lack the real world experience that employers demand?

• In the ever fast-paced and dynamic context of information technology, IT professionals need to be on their toes, constantly staying abreast of changes in the technology platforms on which they work. Operating systems are refined and improved in newer versions of technology, mandating systems administrators to constantly be on a learning curve to keep up with the changes.

Desktop

Server

• CA Technologies has responded to what the company says is a growing market for Linux-based mainframe applications with the release of a new mainframe Linux management portfolio named CA VM: Manager Suite.

• Naysayers who belittle the importance of mainframe technologies in 2011 should perhaps remember that since the start of the decade, IBM, Unisys, BMC, Centrify and CA itself have all made significant augmentations to their mainframe technology propositions.

Kernel Space

• I get it Broadcom, you hate Linux Users, and I’ve always been able to hate you by installing akmod-wl, while giving you the middle-finger, but apparently even that doesn’t seem to work on 2.6.40, which means I have to hate you loudly now.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the recipients of its 2011 Linux Training Scholarship Program.

• This is the first year of the program, which awards five scholarships to computer science students and Linux developers who show incredible promise for helping to shape the future of Linux but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses.

Applications

• PiTiVi may not have quite the same variety of features and functions found in certain other open video editing applications. However, more complex video apps can be downright intimidating to use, and PiTiVi’s interface is simple enough for newbies to handle. The application’s motto of “anything in/anything out” is a good clue to the degree of flexibility this film editor provides.

Instructionals/Technical

• Tweak the way Ubuntu behaves, easily. Whether you want to stop Ubuntu from locking your screen or change your 3D desktop settings, Ubuntu Tweak is the easy way to access the Ubuntu settings that are otherwise buried in hard-to-reach places. We profiled Ubuntu Tweak back in 2008, but a lot has changed since then. Ubuntu is over three years older, and even sports a new user interface now called Unity.

Games

• A while ago I’ve posted about the Color It By Numbers Series, recently it got a new addition – Color It By Numbers – Flowers.

• Imagine a flower garden that is home to the most beautiful, fragrant flowers in the world. You walk around this garden, admiring their splendor and inhaling the subtle fragrances of lilies of the valley, roses, tulips and violets. This splendor covers your heart with a sensation of warmth and harmony. It is as if summer has come knocking on your window…

• Anyone pre-ordered Achron? The real-time strategy game with time-travel mechanics is due to drop soon, and version 0.9.5.0 has been released for pre-ordering customers.

• Indie strategy game Atom Zombie Smasher developed by Blendo Games is now available in Ubuntu Software Center. The game had received critical acclaim and was a part of recently concluded Humble Indie Bundle 3. The game was also selected into PAX 10 Indie games list.

Desktop Environments

• The 2011 Desktop Summit is coming to a close at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. This was the second time that GNOME and KDE developers joined to host a Linux desktop summit of around 1,000 participants.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• I’ve been to the Desktop Summit in Berlin for the past few days, we’re now around the middle of the event, after the conference, before the workshop and BoF sessions, so I thought I might share some thoughts I’ve gathered in idle moments in the past few days.

• The third and final ‘traditional’ conference day began with Mirko Boehm, Claudia Rauch, Stormy Peters, Karen Sandler and Cornelius Schumacher meeting with members of the Berlin City authorities. The city officials wanted to get acquainted with the free and open source leaders involved in the Desktop Summit, because open technology is important to the local government (more below).

Distributions

• As Linux continues to re-define its role in the mobile and cloud sectors, there is still demand for using the operating system on “traditional” platforms like the personal desktop, the enterprise server, and even laptop devices. With so many Linux distributions available, which one is the best for each of these varied platforms?

• Because of these platform differences, there never can be one best Linux distribution for everyone. Also, the needs of each user are unique. Telling someone who’s looking for a good introductory distribution to try Gentoo, for instance, would be a mistake because for all its positive qualities, Gentoo is decidedly not a beginner’s distro.

Red Hat Family

• In an open letter of sorts, Red Hat is warning U.S. policy makers and government leaders about so-called cloud lock-in — the use of proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) and other techniques to keep customers from switching cloud providers. The open letter, in the form of a blog entry from Red Hat VP Mark Bohannon, contains thinly veiled criticism of Microsoft and other companies that are launching their own public clouds.

• OpenShift is a free PaaS for developers who leverage open source. Developers looking for a faster on-ramp to the cloud with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities can use OpenShift so they can focus on coding mobile, social and enterprise applications while leaving stack setup, maintenance and operational concerns to a trusted hosted service. First announced at the Red Hat Summit in May 2011, OpenShift redefined the PaaS space by offering a broad choice of supported languages, frameworks, databases and clouds, including Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java EE, Spring, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, MemBase and Memcache, all open source, helping developers avoid getting locked into any particular technology or platform.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) sees opportunity in providing an integrated platform as a service (PaaS) offering for the cloud that enables Java developers. To that end, Red Hat today announced that its JBoss Application Server 7 is now integrated with the OpenShift PaaS, providing an easy on-ramp to the cloud for Java.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• I am a big fan of the Linux Mint Debian distributions, both the “original” Gnome version and the newer Xfce version. I have had LMDE loaded on several of my laptops and netbooks since it was first released at the end of last year, and it has been the distribution that I use most often for six months or so now. But there is another key factor about it, and my use of it – I have kept it updated since I first installed it. I have recently wanted to install or re-install it on a couple of other netbooks, and the experience has been disappointing.

• The advantage of “rolling distributions” is that they send out updates frequently, both major and minor updates to the operating system itself and to the packages installed on it. That means no waiting around for the next periodic distribution cycle to get a new version of the Linux kernel, or Firefox, or whatever. The disadvantage is that these updates accumulate pretty rapidly, so before long you end up in a situation where doing a fresh installation actually requires a lot of updates. Add to that the fact that rolling distributions often don’t update their base all that often, and the total number of updates required after doing a fresh installation can be quite large.

• When I’ve reviewed #! before, I’ve always stuck with the Openbox edition, because when #! started, it only had an Openbox edition. It wasn’t until version 10 “Statler” that it gained an Xfce edition as well, but I always wanted to review just “the original” #! anyway. Fast forward to the last few days, and I haven’t really been able to think of much to write. Then, I realized I had never checked out the Xfce edition, so I did so.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We have a strong preference for inclusivity in the way we structure the Ubuntu community. We recognise a very diverse range of contributions, and we go to some lengths to recognise leaders in many areas so that we can delegate the evaluation process to those who know best.

• For example, we have governance structures for different social forums (IRC, the Forums) and for various technical fields (development, translation). We quite pointedly see development and packaging as one facet of a multi-faceted project, and I think Ubuntu is much stronger for that approach.

• Few days back we reported that a new login theme for Ubuntu 11.10 has landed in repositories. The Unity Greeter theme for LightDM has been finally made default. It looks almost same as in the video below but sound menu has been removed.

Flavours and Variants

• With the launch of the Chromebook, a new breed of cut-price laptop running Google’s Chrome OS software, the interest in so-called ‘cloud computing’ has never been higher. It’s easy to forget, however, that before Google came along, there were other companies offering remarkably similar software packages that can be installed – for free, even – on existing hardware.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Pandigital began selling a $170, seven-inch Android tablet called the Nova Digital Reader, a lighter spinoff of its previous Novel color e-reader. This follows a similar, $180 “Planet” device the company launched two weeks ago, with both tablets featuring seven-inch, 800 x 600 touchscreens, 802.11n, and front- and rear-facing cameras.

• WIMM Labs announced an Android-based wearable device reference platform and open SDK designed for applications including sports and health monitoring wristwatches. The tiny WIMM One Module features a 1.4-inch capacitive touchscreen, up to 32GB memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and motion tracking capability, and will be made available with a WIMM One Developer Preview Kit in the third quarter.

• Latte has begun shipping a five-inch, Android 2.3 portable media player (PMP) tablet for $190. The Latte Ice Smart uses a Telechips 8903 ARM11 processor to deliver 1080p video to an HDTV via a mini-HDMI port, and offers Wi-Fi and a USB On-the-Go (OTG) port, says the company.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Pierre Cardin is shipping a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet billed as “the … first designer tablet.” The Pierre Cardin Tablet PC offers a 1GHz Samsung “Hummingbird” processor, a front-facing webcam, Wi-Fi, and a tailored carrying case, and sells for 275 U.K. Pounds ($449).

Free Software/Open Source

• Can you revitalize a city and attract businesses using open source principles? David Diaz, president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance thinks so. In fact, I got a chance to sit down with David to discuss how economic development organizations are interacting with their local and state government, citizens, businesses, and landlords. Diaz and his organization apply the principles of transparency, participation, and sharing to their economic development programs.

• There’s a lot to like about open source software. It can help your business by cutting costs and producing better software. It’s open, auditable, and customizable, and free of the restrictive, invasive licenses and EULAs that infest proprietary software. You can build a community around an open source project, one that incorporates contributions from both staff and outside developers. If you’re wondering how to start up and manage a genuine open source project, here are four fundamental tasks to get you started: start small, build trust and social capital, start smart, and build for the future.

Events

• Ohio Linux Fest: There’s some big to-do up in Vancouver next week, something about twenty years of a widely used operating system that puts Windows to shame, a guy named Linus who doesn’t like GNOME 3 and other luminaries in the Linux constellation of stars, blah blah blah. But for those who can’t make that, you might want to head to Columbus, Ohio, to discover the Ohio Linux Fest next month. The event runs from Sept. 9-11 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus. The keynoters are Cathy Malmrose, of ZaReason fame, and Bradley Kuhn, of Software Freedom Conservancy fame. As this is the last big event of the year now that Utah Open Source Conference is in mothballs this year until next spring, it might be a good chance to get in a show before the year’s out.

Web Browsers

• Ever heard of WebKit2 and wondering what it means from a Qt perspective? Here’s an attempt to explain QtWebKit and QtWebKit2 in simple terms. I make no attempt to be completely technically correct, it’s meant to be able to explain terminology to the WebKit uninitiated.

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser’s memory leaks, a company developer says.

• Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the “MemShrink” project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox.

SaaS

• It’s come to the point that I was asked to explain what I consider necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach towards what is often called “The Cloud” or also “Software as a Service” (SaaS).

• To be honest, it took some time for me to make up my mind on the matter, and I considered many of the inputs that I’ve seen so far, in particular the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services to be good enough for some time.

• Clearly I’m sympathetic to the fundamental ideas behind Diaspora, ownCloud and so on. In fact, I myself am currently dedicating my life to the creation of a solution that should empower users to take control over some of their most central data – email, calendar, address books, tasks, see “The Kolab Story” – and thus to provide one puzzle piece to this picture.

Databases

• As you may know, in July 2000, Borland Software Corp. (formerly known as Inprise) released the beta version of InterBase 6.0 as open source. The community of waiting developers and users preferred to establish itself as an independent, self-regulating team rather than submit to the risks, conditions and restrictions that the company proposed for community participation in open source development. A core of developers quickly formed a project and installed its own source tree on SourceForge. They liked the Phoenix logo which was to have been ISC’s brandmark and adopted the name “Firebird” for the project.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Public Services/Government

• Reports from Switzerland say that proprietary software companies are complaining about government plans to release open source solutions it has developed on the grounds of cross subsidy. A report from OSOR.EU says the issue emerged early in July as the IT department of the Swiss federal court was planning to release OpenJustitia.

• In 2007, the Swiss federal court began development of its own internal document management system, OpenJustitia, designed to make it more efficient to search through court decisions. In 2009, the court’s IT department announced it would release the system as open source under the GPLv3. This summer, it was expected that OpenJustitia would be released to allow other courts to make use of it.

Openness/Sharing

• A new platform designed to help software developers find money and resources for their projects has been launched in Brazil. The makeITopen site is Brazil’s first and only crowdfunding platform aimed at helping those involved in the development of free software.

Programming

• With multiple new Perl books in progress as well as some fiction and other books, I’ve spent a lot of time lately working on our publishing process. Part of that is building better tools to build better books, but part of that process is improving the formatting based on what those books want and need to do.

• It’s a good thing I know how compilers work.

Leftovers

Privacy

• US laws such as the Patriot Act require companies based in the country to make even data that is stored abroad accessible to the US authorities. In June, Microsoft had already admitted passing on European customer data from its Office 365 cloud service to US government departments.

• EFF has joined civil liberties and consumer organizations in publicly opposing H.R. 1981, a bill that would threaten online privacy and anonymous speech by requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain logs of customer-identifying information that can be tied to the web sites that you read and the content that you post online.

• The U.S. House of Representatives is currently considering H.R. 1981, a bill that would order our online service providers to keep new logs about our online activities, logs to help the government identify the web sites we visit and the content we post online. This sweeping new “mandatory data retention” proposal treats every Internet user like a potential criminal and represents a clear and present danger to the online free speech and privacy rights of millions of innocent Americans.

Civil Rights

• I was invited to speak at the annual technical conference of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, http://nnedv.org/. Over the past few years, I’ve been personally involved with helping victims and survivors of abuse. In many cases, it has been education and helping them understand what’s possible on the Internet, methods to protect their privacy, and methods to control what data trails they leave behind. I’ve been deeply disturbed after meeting survivors of sexual slavery, human trafficking, and child abuse. The realities of life for these people while they were being abused, and the systematic failures of the systems set up to protect and help them, is shocking. The law enforcement officers and those offering services and direct support to these victims often suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Everyone involved with the results of abuse seems to need help all around.

DRM

• American book retailer Barnes & Noble have launched the third model of their Nook ebook reader. We’ve previously written about the Nook, but until recently the Nook did not get much attention due to the limited options available.

• Things have changed and now the Nook represents a real threat to users because of its invasive DRM, close relationship with DRM champions Adobe, and because of its use of the Android operating system — which might lead many to think the Nook is not defective by design.

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