● 08.17.11

● Links 17/8/2011: Linux 3.0.2, KVM 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Can you believe Linux has been going strong for 20 years now?

• It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds first announced that he had built his own operating system. He released it as an open source project that’s captured the effort of developers, both professional and casual, ever since.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bradley and Karen play and comment on a talk recording of Aaron Williamson’s and Karen’s presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Legal Basics for Developers.

Roundups

• The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: Tiny Core Linux 3.8, Gentoo Linux 11.2 LiveDVD, Monomaxos 6.0 and Network Security Toolkit 2.15.0. In other news: Softpedia prepared a Top 5 Ubuntu Alternatives article for newbies in Linux; Canonical announced the it will replace Evolution Mail and Calendar with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client as default for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot); Canonical implemented the new login manager for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system. For this week we’ve prepared an interesting review for the AssaultCube 1.1.0.4 game. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the new and updated Linux distributions, and the development releases.

Kernel Space

• This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

• Among the most important advancements of Linux 3.1 are improvements for all major Wi-Fi drivers and virtualisation optimisations.

• This week the Linux community celebrates the 20th anniversary of Linux at LinuxCon.

• With three full days and six concurrent tracks there is no shortage of Linux content to take in. While I personally have often wanted to be in more than one place at the same time, there are certainly some really key presentations that attendees should not miss.

• The Linux kernel development process may be getting a little tweaking if a proposal by -stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is accepted; tweaking needed to meet growing commercial interest in Linux.

• The proposal is simple, on the surface and all the way down: Currently, the 2.6.32 kernel is maintained as a -longterm kernel, a kernel release that is maintained as a stable release with bug fixes and patches for a relatively lengthy period of time. This is opposed to the official -stable release of the Linux kernel, which is the kernel release most suitable for general use, and is dropped when the next release is moved into the -stable category. (The current -stable release, for example, is the 3.0.1 kernel.)

• While Linux has supported WOL (Wake-On-LAN) for wired network adapters, the Linux 3.1 kernel prepares support for WWOL, or Wake On Wireless LAN.

• The annual LinuxCon event is taking place this week in Vancouver. The Linux Foundation is taking the opportunity to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel. The week will include festivities, serious keynotes from open source industry leaders, and some technical panels with prominent Linux developers.

• All keynote sessions from the LinuxCon 2011 conference held in Vancouver this week are being made available for free public streaming today through Friday (Aug. 17-19). However, the sessions are streaming on a fixed schedule, as detailed in this post.

• oday is a big day for the Linux community. I’m writing this from Vancouver, B.C. where Users, SysAdmins, developers and business executives have gathered for the third annual LinuxCon and the official celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux.

Graphics Stack

• Intel’s Eric Anholt and Ian Romanick have each published a large number of patches to the Mesa development list. Eric dropped a series of 37 patches that implement his MapTextureImage work for OpenGL while Ian Romanick has nine patches today for his Mesa IR cleaning.

• Outside of the direct X.Org / Mesa / Linux work being done this year as part of Google’s Summer of Code, one of the more interesting projects is work by a student developer with GIMP who is bringing OpenCL support to the graphics program’s GEGL image library.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The developers of the Hacker-Evolution series (and other games) Exosyphen Studios is proud to announce the release of their latest and biggest game Hacking Evolution Duality !

• Also the developer of the game, Robert Muresan kindly offered LGN 5 licenses to our readers, so I’ll need to think of a contest and hope that this time it will not fail

• Survivors of Ragnarök, a city building game by French Rice Games Studio is coming soon to Linux. The game is inspired by legendary Dwarf Fortress game. Still under development, Alpha 8 of the game was released recently.

• Unfortunately, only Windows installer is available for Alpha 8. Both Linux and Mac installers are in the works and hopefully they will be available in upcoming Alpha builds.

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Suddenly, many are saying loudly what they have been whispering for several months: GNOME 3 is a desktop that (to put it mildly), they don’t want. For instance, for others in the same thread in which Torvalds held forth, GNOME 3 is “completely unusable,” “a mess” a piece of “brokenness” that “finally pushed me over the edge” and “a killer of GNOME.” You can find similar views wherever Torvalds’ comments are mentioned, and no more than perhaps one comment in four that protests that GNOME 3 is not that bad when you learn it, or can be tweaked until it is tolerable. Only isolated comments show any enthusiasm for it.

• Brasero is an easy to use CD or DVD burning tool created for the Gnome desktop environment. Brasero supports many different CD or DVD formats, as well as disk images. Brasero is excellent for burning data CD’s or music, you can even erase disks that are rewritable. There are a number of unique features that make Brasero one of the best choices for your burning needs. This short guide should help explain the common uses for brasero, how to burn your projects, all about the menu structure, and how to erase your discs.. This is how you can install Brasero on your Linux system from the command line.

• William Jon McCann: Yeah, I’m definitely proud of what we accomplished. There’s always things when you look back that you wish you would have had a little more time to finish or polish. But with GNOME 3.2 we have the opportunity to get to some more stuff that we wanted and six months after that as well.

Distributions

• PartedMagic does so much more than just partition hard drives. It is a specially crafted Linux distro designed to diagnose and repair broken stuff short of replacing hardware. With PartedMagic as a complete solution to work with GParted, I have a relatively safe and reliable tool to partition a fresh disk or repair a broken partition table on a working computer.

Red Hat Family

• Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is kicking out the first beta of its Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 hypervisors for servers and desktops. This brings the free-standing hypervisor up to par with the KVM hypervisor that was embedded in the company’s Enterprise Linux 6.1 distro for servers , which came out in May.

• KVM is an open source alternative to the Xen hypervisor for x64-based machines, which Red Hat took control of when it bought Qumranet in September 2008 for $107m. Qumranet took the QEMU hardware emulator and paired it with a Linux kernel module to virtualize x86 and x64 machines (with the intent originally being to create virtual desktops) and paired it up with a .NET-based management console that ran on a Windows server called Solid ICE. Since acquiring Qumranet, Red Hat’s customers had to use a Windows-based machine to manage their free-standing RHEV hypervisors, somewhat embarrassingly.

• With the next release of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has finally rid itself of one of its most notorious dependencies, namely the use of Microsoft’s Windows Server and SQL Server.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• THE TechCentral Web site recently ran a Q&A with Mark Shuttleworth, head honcho at Canonical and the man behind Ubuntu Linux. The interview was insightful, because Shuttleworth talked, not only about the future of Ubuntu, but also tackled the state of tablet computing as well as the dangers of software patents.

• Amid the backdrop of a flurry of patent lawsuits involving mobile phone software from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and HTC, Shuttleworth argues that the legal tool originally designed to encourage technology transfer isn’t working the way it should.

• “The patent system is… sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all,” he says.

• We’ve moved from the idea of “Places” to a richer set of “Scopes and Lenses”. Scopes are data sources, and can tap into any online or offline data set as long as they can generate categorised results for a search, describe a set of filters and support some standard interfaces. Lenses are various ways to present the data that come from Scopes.

• Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot Alpha 3 was released few weeks ago. I decided to properly install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric in my netbook along with Ping-Eee OS this time around instead of just experimenting it with a USB install. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 as my primary OS for almost 2 weeks now and this is how I feel about it. Read on.

• Kate Stewart: I’m the Release Manager for Ubuntu. I am very fortunate to get to work with the inspiring members of the Ubuntu Release Team, along with all the very talented Ubuntu and upstream project developers, and the testing teams to get images of Ubuntu and the various flavors published and available on timely basis.

• A lot of people have made the assertion that MeeGo could thrive without Nokia’s presence in the collaboration. And, there’s some potential for traction there as Android lawsuits and patent claims mount. However, as they mount, Google has shown their willingness to acquire as many patents as possible to thwart those lawsuits.

Flavours and Variants

• Try a lightweight, beautiful Linux distro that works on very old hardware. Bodhi Linux can run on processors with only 300 mhz so imagine how well it will work on your machine. With the Enlightenment desktop environment, Bodhi looks great and runs light. With the Ubuntu repositories, Bodhi has access to a plethora of quality free software. With a little work, it can become your perfect desktop.

• You’ll need to install your favorite software of course, and you might want to spend some time tweaking things. In many ways Bodhi reminds me of time spent tweaking early versions of Ubuntu to make everything work just right. We’ve shown you visually pleasing Linux distributions that use Enlightenment, and those are worth checking out. Bodhi Linux is different because it’s up to date, completely free to use and compatible with the Ubuntu repositories.

Devices/Embedded

• The Genivi Alliance says the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) project is the fifth Linux distro that has been confirmed as Genivi compliant. Earlier this month, the open source automotive consortium announced a Genivi Compliance Program, listing Canonical’s Ubuntu IVI Remix and Mentor Graphics’ Embedded IVI Base Platform as compliant along with the more established MontaVista and Wind River IVI distributions.

Phones

Android

• It seems like just yesterday when only the slickest kid on the block had a smartphone, but now, this revolutionary gadget is selling like hotcakes in the developing world. Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya’s telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies. Thanks to low-cost Androids, the geographically-untethered smartphone is here to stay, and it simply cannot be stopped.

Free Software/Open Source

• Why spend thousands or even hundreds or thousands of dollars on a closed source application when you can get a comparable open source app for free? Even if you need commercial support, many open source programs now offer paid support that costs much less than the alternatives.

• For this list, we looked for quality, open source alternatives to software that has a reputation for being expensive. Whenever possible, we included MSRPs for the expensive software, though in some cases, the pricing scheme is so complicated that it’s nearly impossible to pin down.

• We published a similar list last year, and we’ve updated and expanded the list for 2011. If you have suggestions for next year’s list, feel free to note them in the comments section below.

• With the leap ahead this year of tablets, as well as cloud computing and virtualization, it may be easier to overlook important contributions by the open-source communities of real, production-quality technology and innovations for IT. But developers for platforms ranging from Ubuntu to Libre Office to Android have made broad leaps that will have significant impact moving forward.

• A forthcoming paper in Marketing Scienceby Columbia Business School Class of 1967 Associate Professor of Business, Brett Gordon, in collaboration with Vineet Kumar, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Kannan Srinivasan, Heinz College Professor of Management, Marketing and Information Systems at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, finds that commercial open source software (COSS) results in high-quality products, and that despite the free-riding that is inherent in the industry due to information-sharing, the market creates spillover benefits for both consumers and producers. The study features a two-sided model of competition between commercial open source software (COSS) firms, which allows the research to determine the benefits of COSS.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• There aren’t any major interface tweaks in Firefox 6; you’ll pretty much be seeing the same browser you’re used to already. Some of the user-facing changes include a highlighted URL in the address bar, easier access to Firefox Sync and some performance enhancements. The new release also gives users a new permissions tool that lets them set permissions for saved passwords, pop-ups and cookies on a site-by-site basis.

• Though many tech sites, including PCMag, published news of its release over the weekend, Mozilla had only made code available from its FTP servers, a standard practice leading up to a release. But in accordance with Mozilla’s recently adopted rapid release schedule, version 6 debuts only 8 weeks after its predecessor and only includes whatever updates are ready for that schedule. Whereas in the past, a new full-number Firefox version meant almost a completely new browser, Mozilla’s new approach means there’s a lot less in the way of new features with each increase in version.

• It’s been a little while since we checked in with web browser Mozilla, but a lot has happened in a short time. Faced with a surging Chrome browser from Google Inc. (GOOG), Mozilla has altered its strategy somewhat. Perhaps taking note of Chrome’s psychological advantage of a faster release schedule (Chrome 13 sounds very advanced), Mozilla has pushed Firefox towards a shorter release cycle as well adopting a new “Rapid Release” calendar.

SaaS

• Portfland, Oregon based startup AppFog is among those that are trying to grab PaaS share. Until this month, AppFog was known as PHP Fog and focused exclusively on providing a PaaS solution for PHP developers and servers. The company is now expanding beyond just PHP with a PaaS platform for multiple languages including Ruby, and Java. The expansion is being fueled by $8 million in Series B investment led by Ignition Partners. In total, AppFog has raised $9.8 million in funding to date.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Have you made the switch to LibreOffice yet? You really should! The project is going from strength to strength, with versions available for all Linux, Mac and Microsoft users. Most big name Linux distributions have alreeady made the switch from OpenOffice.org, and organisations such as Red Hat, Google, SUSE and the Free Software Foundation are throwing their weight behind the project too.

• The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.4, a new release of the free office suite’s 3.3 branch. The new version is available for download at http://www.libreoffice.org/download

Healthcare

• Samuele Riva, an Italian blogger, is being sued by Boiron, a France-based homeopathic “remedy” multinational. Riva dared to mock the company’s claim that its Ooscillococcinum has no “active ingredient.” The company claims that the product has been made by diluting “oscillococcinum” (a mythological substance said to be present in duck liver, though no evidence supports this claim) at 1:100 dilution 200 times, which “is the equivalent of diluting 1ml of original ingredient into a volume of water that is the size of the known universe.”

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

• The non-profit group Geeks Without Frontiers today released open source software based on an upcoming WiFi standard. It lets Linux machines be their own WiFi network, no hardware required.

• The software is based on the not-yet-ratified IEEE 802.11s, an extension to the 802.11 WiFi standard. 11s creates wireless “mesh” networks. Ratification is expected to happen by Q4 2011. 11s allows multiple wireless devices to connect with each other without having a hardware access point between them and to “multi-hop” to reach nodes that would otherwise be out of range.

Standards/Consortia

• With the launch of Community Groups, W3C now offers a smooth path from innovation to open standardization to recognition as an ISO/IEC International Standard. W3C’s goals differ at each of these complementary stages, but they all contribute to the organization’s mission of developing interoperable standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters.

• I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities — window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten. But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion — a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

• As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.

• Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people.

• Chinese security forces have launched a two-month “strike hard” crackdown against violence, terrorism and radical Islam following renewed ethnic violence in the restive western region of Xinjiang, the regional government has announced.

• The former Metropolitan Police commissioner has been cleared of misconduct in his handling of the phone hacking inquiry by the police watchdog.

• The Independent Police Complaints Commission said Sir Paul Stephenson had not committed any criminal acts.

• An independent inquiry will examine claims former assistant commissioner John Yates secured a job for a News of the World executive’s daughter.

Finance

• Only a new way of managing the global economy can prevent more mayhem in the markets and on the streets

• The cautions are getting more numerous and blunt. Since January, heavyweights who have spoken out include Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and former managing editor of the Financial Times, and even America’s staunchest defender of laissez-faire economics, the five-term former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Here in Canada, the Conference Board of Canada has recently released two studies on inequality, funded by 24 influential corporations. The studies warn, “High inequality can diminish economic growth if it means that the country is not fully using the skills and capabilities of all its citizens or if it undermines social cohesion, leading to increased social tensions. Second, high inequality raises a moral question about fairness and social justice.”

• Can it be true that the trillions of dollars we spent bailing out Wall Street only restored the deeply flawed status quo, instead of bringing about the fundamental system overhaul we needed?

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was sued by Allstate Insurance Co. over the sale of more than $100 million worth of residential mortgage-backed securities that the insurer claims the bank itself called “junk” and “lemons.”

• Allstate asked for damages including the lost market value of the securities, plus principal and interest payments in the complaint filed today in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Clive Goodman, the News of the World royals reporter who resigned in disgrace, wrote a letter to News International’s HR department four years ago asserting that the editorial staff of the NoTW knew about the phone hacking, that it was discussed at editorial meetings, and that Andy Coulson — UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s ex-media advisor — was active in these discussions. It also calls into question Rupert and James Murdochs’s testimony to Parliament that they hadn’t been aware of the practice.

Censorship

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• J.R. Bricks recently signed with Block Starz Music LLC, a German-American digital imprint that was reportedly bought by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in April.

• This single, previously titled “Waffle House,” drew the unwanted attention of the legal counsel for WH Capital, LLC and Waffle House Inc., the owners and licensee of the Waffle House trademarks.

• The lawyers sent off a cease and desist letter, claiming J.R. Bricks was improperly using the restaurant chain’s image without proper permission.

Copyrights

• With Righthaven being told to pay attorneys fees yet again, we were curious if Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson would stand behind his earlier claims that judges mostly supported Righthaven, but were just providing “guidance” to less careful competitors. While he isn’t going that far, in an interview with Joe Mullin at PaidContent, Gibson continues to pretend that Righthaven hasn’t been beaten up nearly as badly as it has.

• First, Gibson claims, as Righthaven has been arguing in court lately, that if a court rules (as they have been) that Righthaven didn’t have the copyrights in question when it sued, then it’s “just” a “jurisdiction issue” and, therefore, the court cannot then rule on the further merits of the case and should not award attorneys’ fees. That’s a rather interesting way to avoid acknowledging what appears to be a form of fraud. It seems pretty damn clear from multiple rulings that the courts do not consider this merely a “jurisdiction” issue, but rather an attempt to deceive the court system and use it to force people and organizations to pay up. Either way, Righthaven seems to be gearing up for an appeals court challenge on this issue.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.