● 08.20.11

● Links 20/8/2011: Linux Graphics Survey, Firefox 7 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I read constantly that “Linux is not ready for Mom” but I cannot help ask myself which distribution….or, to be more specific, which mother.

• Three days ago, we celebrated Mother’s Day in my country. Thus, my brother and I wanted to surprise our mother and my wife (who recently became the mother of a cute baby girl). We wanted to give them a memorable present, something that they could use both for entertainment and, why not, to learn. In an unplanned visit to a computer store, my eyes fixed upon the classic Asus Eee PC 900, the tiny netbook that drew me to the world of Linux with its version of Xandros. Next to it sat the Asus Eee PC 901. Temptation was formidable, so we ended up buying both despite the clerk never quite understood why we rejected his offer of some other netbooks (preloaded with the rip off known as Windows 7 Starter).

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• So, there you go: that’s two mothers who are happy with Linux.

• So much of the landscape of business and home computing has changed since the beginnings of the GPL and the Linux operating system. The time has surely come to reassess some of the movement’s fundamental thinking. All I would ask is that the points I list here be examined as possible areas for improvement that could help the public at large take up open source and Linux more fully.

• We’re going all-digital. That’s the news. Starting with our next issue, #209, we’re going off-rack and off-mailbox, but staying on-email and on-Web, where we can grow and improve. It’s the only path open to us, but it’s also a good one. Hang with me as I explain why. (See also Experience the New Linux Journal for details about the new format.)

• Pariser’s point suddenly has implications for the Linux community. While default settings are changeable, it’s not a trivial act. For a default to be changed, a user must know the setting is changeable and how to change it. So to make a change to a piece of software or a distribution and say “The user can always change it back” is, as Pariser points out in his own example, a bit disingenuous.

• I was very pleased to find out that I was allowed to make a choice between two operating systems when I started in my new job. Of course, the choice was to be made between OS X and Windows. At the moment, Linux is used only on our development servers.

Desktop

• Zemlin is still joking about The Year of The Linux Desktop. He’s so busy catering to big business he has forgotten that most “desktop” PCs (Personal Computers with a GUI, say) are run by ordinary people like my wife (GNU/Linux user for a couple of months now and my service calls are way down… ), and GNU/Linux works very well for them. The “Year” has come and gone a long time ago but GNU/Linux is still performing well on millions of desktops.

Server

• Zentyal, formerly known as eBox Platform, is a multi-purpose Linux Ubuntu remastered and it’s based on Ubuntu server 10.04 (LTS). It can function as a network gateway, unified threat manager, office server, infrastructure manager, and a unified communications server. The project’s source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. Zentyal is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Spanish company eBox Technologies S.L., which holds the copyright to the codebase

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Google spends $12.5 billion acquiring Motorola’s smart phone division. Linus switches from Gnome to Xfce and KDE 5 development is about to start. We discover things, draw our own boxes, and listen to your views in the open ballot.

Kernel Space

• In the afternoon keynotes of the first day of LinuxCon, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down to talk about the twentieth anniversary of Linux with Jon “Maddog” Hall, Eben Moglen, and Dan Frye, or as Zemlin called them, The Godfather, The Lawyer, and The Suit.

• Many people in the world consider Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, to be a visionary. Linus Torvalds himself does not.

• In a session at LinuxCon with kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, Torvalds detailed his view of what he does and what is wrong and right in the kernel world.

• “I’m not really a visionary guy,” Torvalds said. “My vision extends to pragmatic issues for the next kernel release.”

• I managed to catch Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s keynote for LinuxCon yesterday, and watched what was a combination of a Linux cheerleading session and a pretty tongue-in-cheek slam-fest of all things Microsoft.

• WAITING FOR THE START OF Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future, a talk by Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger at Linuxcon North America, The INQUIRER was treated to two songs, ‘Hey Ya’ by rappers Outkast, and ‘Paper Planes’ by MIA.

• The songs are not similar. MIA’s, which samples ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash, is a piece of braggy call to arms in which the singer offers to “take your money”. The other, at least if you accompany a listen with viewing the video, is a celebration of being different, attention seeking and wacky.

• Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, took the stage in Vancouver, BC to talk about the challenges that Linux will face in the next 20 years. Whitehurst’s topic meshed nicely with the lead-in keynote from Jim Zemlin. While Zemlin examined the world without Linux, Whitehurst took a look at the next stage — Linux over the next 20 years.

Graphics Stack

• It’s time for the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey on Phoronix. Since 2007 (see the 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 results) we have been running an annual Linux graphics survey. The purpose of this survey is to help graphics driver developers, software / application developers, and other organizations understand the hardware/software configurations and features currently being used by Linux desktop users. It’s now time for the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey.

• With the 2011 Google Summer of Code, we now know how the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker and morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) turned out, but how did the remote display capabilities for the Wayland Display Server evolve over the summer? It’s something that hasn’t yet been reported about on Phoronix.

• The aim of the remote display for Wayland GSoC project was to pair a proxy compositing server with the client, a psuedo-client with the real compositing server, and enabling network communication between the pseudo-client and proxy compositor. Under this design, it would then be possible to run Wayland clients remotely in a seamless manner.

• While some NVIDIA Linux developers are up here in Vancouver for LinuxCon (met some friendly and informative NVIDIA engineers at the Linux Foundation gala last night), the NVIDIA Linux desktop team back in Santa Clara has put out the first 285.xx Linux driver series beta now that the 280 driver was made official earlier in the month.

• Every time there is an article about Wayland you can see that there a lots of uneducated comments about the “fact” that Wayland does not support network trancparency and because of that it is completely wrong to go for network trancparency. These discussions contain a lot of myths and even FUD and I consider it important to share my thoughts about these concerns as I am belonging to those who actively work to bring the benefits of Wayland to the KDE Plasma Workspaces.

Applications

• Sometimes, you run into a problem that you just can’t work through with mental brute force alone. Brainstorming with others works, but that’s not always an option.

• One popular and effective way of beating a problem or releasing your creativity is mindmapping. While you can go old school and use pen and paper, there is quite a bit of mindmapping software out there for the desktop and on the web.

• There are a number of really solid mindmapping tools for the Linux desktop. Let’s take a closer look at three of them.

• OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Game Drift Linux is a brand new Ubuntu-based distro from the Danish company, Linos. The firm specialises in creating Ubuntu derivatives for various special uses. As well as Game Drift, for example, the company also offers GoSchool, an Ubuntu-based live distro used by Danish schools to allow students to carry out exams on their own computers while still ensuring an identical software set and, more importantly, a secure and level playing field. Another project (still on the Linos drawing board at the time of writing) is DGSP, or Dedicated Game Server Platform. Although little is known about it at the moment, we understand it’s designed to make the running of a dedicated gaming server a much simpler task than it is right now.

• Open Source and Cross Platform flight simulator game FlightGear has reached version 2.4 after being in development for 6 months bringing in many impressive new features and fixes.

• Early on, even as we were founding Mojang, we talked about the idea of collaborating with other indie game studios to release more great games. We wanted to find studios who have our philosophy of developing games, which is staying close to the community and treating it as a service. Today we’re announcing our first game developed by a 3rd party: Cobalt by Oxeye Game Studios.

• have to confess that even as I grow older, I still love computer gaming and get excited when someone releases a commercial quality game for Linux. When Dead Cyborg Episode 1 was released on August 15, I thought perhaps this could be my next purchase (or, more accurately, donation).

• The early screenshots looked great and the story line was intriguing. I guess Dead Cyborg could be described as a first person adventure puzzle game “about the meaning of life… and death… in a rusty post-apocalyptic metal and concrete world.” I love first person games: shooters, adventures, horror, puzzle… The game itself is available as a tarball of binaries or, it is said, one can run it in their browser. I didn’t have much luck with that.

• Free Mega Games Pack (FreeMGP) Vol. 1 for Linux is an endeavor by LastOS team at cyvoc.net to create a free mega compilation of open-source and freeware games with light system requirements. The games are packaged into a large archive managed by a Permanent Portable Games (ppGames) system. You open a sort of a browser window, choose which games you want to install and you deploy them on your system. Installations are done using Wine.

Desktop Environments

• The final frontier. Now that Shell and BP are mere steps away from drilling exploratory wells off the Coast of Alaska and Russia, everyone’s playfully referring to the Arctic as the “final frontier” for petroleum development.

• Saturday marks the commencement of the Tar Sands Action, which will take place in front of the White House.

• It is a two-week long civil disobedience campaign, planned to last through September 3, demanding that the Obama Administration turn down the proposal to build the Keystone XL Pipeline.

• The 1,980-mile pipeline is slated to transport the dirtiest oil in the world from Alberta’s tar sands down to southeast Texas. The pipeline’s route overlaps with the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies 82 percent of the people that live within the aquifer’s boundary their drinking water. It would also snake through the Nebraska Sand Hills, which is a vital wetland ecosystem, containing a diverse array of plant and animal life.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• One of Linux‘s most popular desktop environments, KDE, released their latest series (version 4.7) at the end of July. This version improves on work done in previous releases by adding new features while improving performance and stability.

• However, this new version does not provide a drastic change such as GNOME 3, as most changes are under the hood and are not visually reflected. Needless to say, you will still see an improvement while working, but they do not fall under the aesthetics category.

• Tomorrow evening I leave to participate in the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters, or COSCUP, in Teipei, Taiwan. I will be presenting on Plasma Active and helping spread the KDE and Qt story (and love!) while I am there.

• The Berlin Desktop Summit was a roaring success from my experience at it. We, as they say, pushed forward on all fronts: cross-project collaboration, KDE Frameworks (the next major version of KDE’s libraries and runtime requirements), application development and, of course near to my heart, our Plasma workspaces.

• In my last post about shared connections I asked how I could make shared connections easier to setup. I have received some suggestions, but some of them were not that easy to implement (drag’n drop one connection onto an interface widget in Plasma NM’s main window) or still not easy to understand how to use. Then I got an idea to just add a new entry in the “Add” button, similar to when creating VPN connections. I am here to ask what you all think about this change to the connection editor:

• As we can see KWin has its root in KWM from KDE 1 (there are still one or two comments in KWin source tree saying KWM) and it seems like the capitalizations was added in later times

GNOME Desktop

• A lot of people hate Canonical’s Unity desktop, but a lot of people also hate the current state of the GNOME 3.0 Shell too. For those that are still fond of the GNOME 2.x environment, there is a fork of GNOME2 that’s been little talked about up to this point. This fork is called the Mate Desktop Environment.

• Marples is a (gtk2/3) theme, for those who like dark themes. the name marples is derived and pays homage to Marp-1-blue theme by Malys777.

• The theme is beta right now. The writer is working on the theme everyday, so it is coming along nicely.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• In counting down the release to Mandriva 2011 Viacheslav “multik” Kaloshin, from ROSA Labs, has been blogging about a new significant changes in the works. So far they’ve been a bit ho-hum, but today he announced the 2011 official codename.

• “Some times ago, we asked in cooker and engineering mailing list about new codename for Mandriva 2011. This topic generated lots of emails, where suggestions were from star names to animals,” was said of the process. After a bit of discussion they narrowed the suggestions down to the Periodic Table of Elements. So, today the official codename for Mandriva 2011 is “Hydrogen.”

Red Hat Family

• A running joke at this years LinuxCon is that “X is the year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Zemlin, head of the conference’s sponsoring organization, The Linux Foundation, started it with his keynote in noting how often he’d made that prediction and how often he’s been wrong. The current prediction, which I believe Linus Torvalds made last night was : “2031! The year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has another year in mind for the Linux desktop though: Never. Oh, and the Windows and Mac desktops? Get ready to say good-bye to them soon.

Debian Family

• Software patents increasingly threaten both large technology firms and independent developers. Naturally, this has caused uncertainty in the free software community. To help free and open source software developers better understand patents, the real risks they pose, and the limits to their reach, the Software Freedom Law Center is publishing on its website the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ.

Derivatives

• Parsix is a Linux distribution based on Debian Testing. It is a community distribution with roots in Iran. It is not as popular as other community distributions, but development is active and well. The only previous review of Parsix on this website was of Parsix 3.2, which was more than a year ago. This article provides a detailed review of the latest stable version, Parsix 3.7, which was released on August 14, 2011. It is code-named Raul, after a character in Happy Feet, a computer-animated family film.

• The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 201108 RC with updated ISOs for Gnome and Xfce.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Last week we hit Feature Freeze. This is the big date that all developer dread the most. Now features and new upstream versions have to have landed, everything else will be a matter the release team has to decide upon. We are rushing towards release with UI Freeze and Beta Freeze coming up next week. Exciting times!

• Search Focus: Today many people are search focused. With search engines (or url bars) being a primary way of reaching both information and applications. This is a easy and natural design to adapt to.

• Large Footprint Dash: The dash is not invoked lightly. It takes up a large footprint because a user shifts from task to data search mindset. A large foot print gives the opportunity to create distinguishable visual representations of data. Instead of small text driven ones.

• With Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 long since out, and Ubuntu 11.10 stirring up excitement with every update, it’s easy to forget that the 16 month old Long Term Support release of Ubuntu 10.04 remains installed on many a users computer.

• The news of Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile business is a potential game changer for the mobile computing market. The reasons Google made this purchase were obvious; they needed an arsenal of patents to fight the illegitimate battles of the patent wars to protect Android. As I have described in my previous post, these wars are an unfair and obtrusive burden on the entire tech industry, preventing innovation and bogging down our legal system. It’s too bad Google had to do this. I must admit I feel bad for their position. There may also have been the incentive to prevent fragmentation of the Android landscape by gaining more control of Android implementation. This incentive would have been secondary at best given the threat of the current law suits.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• I was pretty sure there was something wrong with the whole thing in fall of 2009, when they first asked me. A Nokia employee contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to be a director of the Symbian Foundation (or so I thought that’s what they were asking — read on). I wrote them a thoughtful response explaining my then-current concerns about Symbian:

• * the poor choice of the Eclipse Public License for the eventual code, * the fact that Symbian couldn’t be built in any software freedom system environment, and * that the Symbian source code that had been released thus far didn’t actually run on any existing phones.

• I nevertheless offered to serve as a director for one year, and I would resign at that point if the problems that I’d listed weren’t resolved.

Android

• Images of a super-thin Motorola Droid HD phone popped up on the web along with the latest iteration of the delayed, but soon-to-be-released Droid Bionic. The Droid HD appears to feature Android 2.3, a 4.5-inch qHD or higher resolution display, and an eight-megapixel camera.

• Distributors lose their rights when they violate GPLv2, but the Free Software Foundation is more forgiving in its license enforcement to encourage continued participation in the free software community. GPLv3 has improved termination provisions to codify this approach, giving developers one more reason to upgrade.

• The Motorola Atrix Android handset has a suite of accessories that go beyond the typical docking options to transform it from a dual core Android smartphone into an multimedia hub or even a netbook. With the latter, the Atrix slots into the back of a very slimline looking notebook and phone’s CPU runs the show.

• Notwithstanding the Logitech Revue Google TV system’s drastic price reduction to $99, all new and existing devices will soon be updated to Google TV version 2, based on Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”).

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• We successfully carried out our first solar photovoltaic school deployment in Haiti, last week! The EFACAP school in Lascahobas, Haiti now has 2.4KW of solar pv capability to charge 500 laptops with a DC only designed and wired system. According to our research and to OLPC, our installation has the distinction of being the world’s largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment!

Free Software/Open Source

• A gaggle of software developers and an Internet celebrity sit down for a nighttime talk in the bowels of a massive computer-chip-development company …

• There’s no punch line, and for the San Diego techies who gather twice monthly in Qualcomm’s massive research facility to discuss the who’s who and what’s what of the computer world, this meeting was no joke. Rather, it was chance to network, to meet with kindred spirits and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity to discuss some pretty geeky stuff.

• If you haven’t heard a keynote about the wonders of the cloud, you haven’t been to an open source conference lately. But Mårten Mickos’ LinuxCon cloud keynote was more than that–it was really a freedom keynote.

Events

• While we were out at dinner, the conversation drifted toward the FOSS company and how these two great guys were making the company profitable, but were working themselves to death doing it.

• Now as a consultant I often wear two hats, the technical side and the business side. As we sat there I became aware of my business hat being put on, but the fascinating part was when I turned to Julien, his hat was already on, and pointing in the same direction as mine. I love it when that happens….

• “You guys have to fix that problem”, he said. “You have to make the time to grow the company to bring in more people so you can focus more on running it and less on just ‘keeping it alive’”.

• All I had to do was just nod my head.

• “We do not have the time to build our company,” they said.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 7, for example will bring the Azure 2D graphics API and memory enhancements, Firefox 8 will make add-ons much safer to deal with and we now hear that Firefox 9 is likely to get the much anticipated tablet UI. Mozilla just posted the tablet UI as a deliverable for Firefox 9.

• Just days after Mozilla released Firefox 6, the clock is already ticking on Firefox 7, which tipped up in the Firefox beta channel yesterday. There are all the usual improvements including enhancements to Firefox Sync, increased performance for HTML5 Canvas animation and better CSS3 support, but none of those really matter because there’s one important improvement that isn’t even visible to the user.

• Two days after Mozilla delivered Firefox 6 to its wide-release stable channel, Firefox 7 and its much-anticipated spate of better memory management and reduced load times got promoted from the developer’s Aurora build to the Beta channel. You can download Firefox 7 Beta for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Almost all of the 25,000 workers at thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region will over the next year begin to use Libre Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, ‘for long term strategic reasons’, which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner (about 5.3 million euro) worth of proprietary licences.

CMS

• WordPress announced Friday that its open source blogging platform now powers 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5 percent. Astonishingly, the company found that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

Public Services/Government

• he Federal Institute of Science and Technology will organise a two-day national conference on Free Open Source Software. The conference organised by the Computer Science Department of FISAT and the FISAT Free Software Cell will be held on FISAT campus on August 26 and 27.

• In the two-day meet, Praseed Pai, author of ‘Slang For .net’, will speak on Cross Platform Development. Shakti Kannan, Ambassador of Fedora, Pune, and Ranjith Siji, Chief Technology Officer of Walking Ant Technologies will speak on other sessions. Workshops on Android, Robotics and Open Source, PYQT and nS2 protocol simulator will be conducted by Soham Mondal of Android ECCO System, Bangalore, KPN Unni of CEO, KRIATE, Chennai, and Jyothish K John of FIT.

Licensing

• That’s where the new Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) standard comes into play. The SPDX 1.0 release is being made at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon event in Vancouver. SPDX is a working group of the Linux Foundation.

• According to the Linux Foundation, the SPDX standard defines a standard file format that lists detailed license and copyright information for a software package and each file it comprises.

Programming

• This week we interviewed three members of the SciRuby team (a collection of tools for scientific computation written in the Ruby language): John Woods, John Prince and Claudio Bustos. We think you will find this a very interesting an throurogh interview.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• If NBC’s David Gregory had asked just a couple of follow-up questions of Michele Bachmann on Meet the Press on Sunday, August 14, he would have found that her anecdote about how “Obamacare” will lead to economic ruin doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

• In fact, he would have found that the financial problems of the Iowa employer she cites to bolster her point are far more likely the result of the economic policies of former President George W. Bush.

• In answering Gregory’s question about how she would “turn the economy around within several months” if elected president, as she recently promised to do, Bachmann pledged to repeal both the health care reform law and the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress enacted last year to reform the way financial institutions are regulated.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• More than 60 per cent of people arrested by Toronto police last year were forced to undergo a strip search, according to police statistics.

• But a police accountability group says routine searches are against the law and alleges Toronto police are using the practice to humiliate and intimidate people.

• Police figures show that 31,072 people were strip-searched in 2010, up from 29,789 the previous year.

Finance

• The trend of bank consolidations in this country must stop. The era of Too Big To Fail must end. In fact, it is time for many banking giants to be broken up and return to more manageable size with more emphasis on customer service then on over stated profits. Banks like any other company should grow and profit through increased revenue derived from competitive business practices serving and servicing their customers.

• Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

• What you can see from this is that Goldman Sachs principal reason for existing is to pay its employees a lot of money. But, they employ a whole lot of other people’s money to do this. If you look at their Balance Sheet in 2008, you may be stunned to see that their total liabilities were $820,178,000,000. Yes, that is billions. This is definitely a lot of other people’s money. Let’s put this into perspective. Goldman Sachs total debt exceeds the publicly held debt of 22 of the 27 nations of the European Economic Community.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In Britain, the phone hacking scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a yarn that seemingly never stops unleashing juicy new details.

• As the week began, a letter emerged alleging that senior News Corp. editors routinely discussed phone hacking — suggesting that executives likely knew about their newspapers’ illegal eavesdropping on voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and crime victims. That revelation called into question whether Murdoch’s son James, a senior executive, misled Parliament in his recent testimony, when he said he was unaware of the practice.

• Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich are among a diverse group interviewed in Jeff Warrick’s new documentary, “Programming the Nation.” The film is being released by the International Film Circuit and opens Friday, August 19th, at Quad Cinema in New York City. Warrick both directed and produced the film.

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