● 08.30.11

● Links 30/8/2011: Many New Linux Tablets, Thunderbird 7 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This means it’s now possible to run homebrew & backups on all Xbox 360s, no matter which firmware is loaded, in the past this was only possible on Xbox 360s with a certain firmware-level. This also opens the possibility to run quite easily Linux on your Xbox 360!

• The Linux community has been united around the globe over the last few weeks in celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux. As we head into a new decade, many of The Linux Foundation’s members are looking for Linux talent to help advance the OS for everything from cloud computing to virtualization and super computing to embedded development and mobile computing.

Desktop

• Dusty Phillips certainly falls into the power user category and his answers reflect that status. Dusty runs a tight system that’s optimized for his workflow. And it’s fascinating that he does so much with just one machine.

Kernel Space

• There’s a variety of features and other enhancements to OpenBenchmarking.org that are still forthcoming. I’ve been talking about several of them over the past six months that I look forward to implementing as soon as time allows.

Graphics Stack

• If you’re thinking about trying out the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta release later in the week or are beginning to wonder about what the graphics driver options for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” when released in October, here’s a collection of information you’ll want to know about the graphics drivers to be found in Ubuntu 11.10.

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• The Linux 3.1 kernel isn’t making it out for a few more weeks and just before the final release, so Canonical is playing it safe and sticking to the Linux 3.0 kernel although the still-in-development release does provide some nice improvements to the DRM graphics drivers and other areas of the kernel. Users can manually upgrade to the Linux 3.1 kernel and it should be relatively safe.

Applications

• If you’re watching your weight, monitoring your health and dietary habits, or simply unconvinced by flashy food labels that don’t tell the whole story, this is the project for you. According to the Web site:

• Double Commander is a very interesting cross-platform file manager inspired by Total Commander (it even supports Total Commander plugins). It uses two panels side by side and comes with a huge feature list: tabbed interface, multi-rename tool, embedded terminal, internal text editor and file viewer, browse archives (ZIP, TGZ, LZMA, RPM, RAR, DEB, etc.), extended search and is fully customizable.

• You have decided it is time to start your blog, and you are not just any person. You are a Linux geek, so which is the best platform for your blog?

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

• Recently word spread like wildfire across the net that Linus Torvalds, Father of Linux himself, had proclaimed GNOME 3 an “Unholy Mess.” The hatred for all things GNOME 3 didn’t stop there. Pundits, grand-standers, tinkerers, and media-types alike went on and on about how GNOME 3 had become nothing more than a failure. At the same time, Ubuntu Unity had been given a similar title as a nearly worthless desktop.

• Let’s step back in time a year or so ago when KDE 4 came out of the starting gate. Yes it was hampered by a complete rewrite, but like it’s GNOME brethren, KDE was lambasted as too buggy to ever work correctly.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• “World must be crazy” say fellow hackers when realized that one day I left Samsung’s Linux Mobile Lab to work on Smart Refrigerators.

• But well, it’s still in the same company, the same city. Yet this does not mean I am stopping to dig in Linux stuff for living: we’re talking about Linux fridges.

• However, there is something even less expected: these are full four-doors Qt fridges. I dare to say, except for cars or airplanes with infotainment modules, for me these cooling monsters are one of the biggest ‘Qt devices’ available on the consumer market.

GNOME Desktop

• Owen Taylor announced a new version of the GNOME Shell and Mutter releases this afternoon for what will be incorporated into the GNOME 3.2 desktop. While it’s late in the development cycle with the final GNOME 3.2 release coming next month and the beta release being set for Wednesday, the Mutter 3.1.90 carries two important changes along with prominent changes to the GNOME Shell.

Distributions

• Lost in all the news of and attention paid to Mandriva 2011, a new distribution was added to the Distrowatch database. This Ubuntu-based distribution is designed to provide users the means to “create stunning graphics, captivating videos, inspiring music, and professional websites.” Version 11.04 was released the other day, so let’s take a peek.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• After several months of delays, the developers have released Mandriva 2011. The distribution includes Linux kernel version 2.6.38.7 and X.org 7.6 with X Server 1.10.3. Systemd has replaced the traditional SysVinit in version 2011.

• Mandriva 2011.0 also introduces the PiTiVi video editor, replaces DigiKam with the Shotwell photo manager, incorporates KNetworkManager, and guts out KDE’s Amarok for the Clementine music player instead. KMail has also been ditched for Mozilla Thunderbird.

• * more than 22600 packages in repositories;

Gentoo Family

• This spin of Sabayon on the other hand, although the better one, feels average when compared to other KDE 4 distributions like Kubuntu, Kanotix, Debian and in particular when compared to SimplyMEPIS which is just unreal. SalixOS does KDE 4 faster with only 512 MB ram. Kongoni is snappier and also allows to compile updates and any additions via its ports system. So does Slackware with sbopkg. So choose your poison, if for whatever reason you like Sabayon more than any other distribution you’re going to use it anyway, regardless the resource usage and speed. (Slightly updated 30/08/11 15:03)

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With the iPad, Apple started a new revolution in the world of technology. Swarms of Apple-fans and tech enthusiasts ran to the Apple store just to grab, what was then, simply a bigger version of the iPhone. While the iPad may have been a big success worldwide, it has undoubtedly touted its competitors to come up with tablet computers of their own.

• Although essentially every other software company (except Microsoft of course) has been relying on the good old Android, there have been some whispers about the porting of Ubuntu to these sleek gadgets. What’s more, a Chinese company is already working on a fully functional Ubuntu-powered tablet computer.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• As professors and librarians in the United States await a judge’s ruling on a copyright lawsuit by publishers against Georgia State University over its e-reserves practices, a similarly themed battle in Canada has seen a number of high-profile research universities walk out on licensing agreements with that country’s major copyright clearinghouse.

• More than a dozen Canadian universities — including heavyweights such as the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and York University — have said they will not renew their agreements with Access Copyright, a government-created nonprofit that sells licenses to its library of copyright-cleared content.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Fujitsu and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo will next month release an Android tablet you could use in the bathtub, featuring a 10.1 inch touchscreen and dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, according to the Datacider.com website. Meanwhile, Toshiba’s poised to release a slimmer followup to its chunky Thrive, according to a Notebook Italia report.

• Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) could sell anywhere between 3 million and 5 million Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablets in the fourth quarter, making it far and away the most successful slate provider on the open-source platform, according to Forrester Research.

• Fujitsu, known for making lower-end computers and other devices, is apparently ready to throw its hat into the Android tablet game, with the Fujitsu “Arrows Tab,” a rugged Honeycomb tablet. They’ve announced the 10.1-inch device, and it’s set to launch next month on NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese carrier. The tablet could have HSPA, UMTS, and LTE connectivity, as well as GSM and GPRS capabilities, for roaming and such. The Arrows Tab will also be packing a TI IMAP 4430 1GHz dual-core processor, so it won’t be slow by any means.

• One of the biggest obstacles Toshiba faces with the Thrive is that the company has no Android presence to help the company gain a foothold. They have no track record of Android phones or tablets to speak of and nothing reputable to bring to the table. At $429 the 16GB version is roughly $70 less than its Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 counterpart. Is it worth paying the extra money for Samsung’s 10-inch tablet? That depends on what’s most important to you. Do you want a functional tablet with great hardware and function? Or do you need to look cool and hip with the slimmest, sexiest tablet on the market?

Free Software/Open Source

• OSFA recently celebrated its second anniversary and would once again like to recognize some of the individuals, projects and deployments that support OSFA’s mission.

Web Browsers

• I have a pathological use of browser tabs: I use a lot of them. A lot is probably an understatement. We could say I use them as bookmarks of things I need to track. A couple weeks ago, I was saying I had around two hundred tabs opened. I now actually have much more.

• It affected startup until I discovered that setting the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs pref to 0 was making things much better by only loading tabs when they are selected. This preference has/will become browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. However, since I only start my main browser once a day, while other applications start and while I begin to read email, I hadn’t noticed that this was still heavily affecting startup time: about:startup tells me reaching the sessionRestored state takes seven seconds, even on a warm startup.

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• One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy’s user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has released the first beta of version 7.0 of its open source Thunderbird news and email client. The Beta channel release adds the ability to print a summary of selected messages and brings several improvements to the user interface. Other changes include updates to attachment handling and various Gecko platform fixes.

SaaS

• As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.

• Citrix acquired Cloud.Com in July. As an independent entity Cloud.Com had been holding some software proprietary. Now, to win new business, Citrix is opening the entire code base.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The US Government met with European competition officials to lobby on behalf of Oracle during its purchase of Sun Microsystems, according to leaked diplomatic cables.

• The cables, released this week by whistleblowing site Wikileaks, reveal that the Obama administration had monitored the European Union’s investigation into the competition issues that could arise from the merger and tried to convince them to let the deal go ahead.

• The EU had investigated the merger due to concerns for the future of Java and the open source MySQL database.

Healthcare

• The Veterans Affairs Department is set to make its open source agent operational Tuesday and make available the software code of various applications in the electronic health records of VA and the Defense Department.

• Users of the applications will also have a method to report back to the open source agent changes to the software.

BSD

• This article continues series of reviews of non-Linux operating systems which you can find existing. Another big family of OSes is based on BSD core. PCBSD, BSDanywhere, FreeSBIE… you can read more about them. It’s time to start our today’s adventure.

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• Forum, Documentation and FAQ sections are pretty much empty on official site. I have not found any information about LiveUSB creation process for GhostBSD in the Internet either. Finally, I decided to look at DVD-RW option. This means the test could only be carried out on Toshiba L500 laptop. Expectedly, it would be a hard task for BSD since not every Linux distribution worked fine on that laptop so far. This laptop has Realtek 8191 WiFi card which is not the most popular among free open source software developers. But let’s talk about this later.

Public Services/Government

• While the Slovak Republic is slowly moving forward on the issue of open licenses, Romania appears to have taken a step backwards. The Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs recently banned open source solutions from a public tender of almost 3 milion euro due to ‘internal and European interoperability requirements’. The tender specifically says “All versions of software that are part of the offer may not be published under a ‘free software license’ – GPL or similar”.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• In what has become an annual tradition, Microsoft celebrated the start of the VMworld show in Las Vegas this week with more satirical bashing of VMware. This year Microsoft launched a Web site called VMlimited in which it likens VMware to a guy who still thinks it’s circa 1977. However, Microsoft’s viewpoint doesn’t jive with the news of new partnerships and wares streaming out of the VMworld show this year.

• Disney’s best-selling Cars toys are being made in a factory in China that uses child labour and forces staff to do three times the amount of overtime allowed by law, according to an investigation.

• One worker reportedly killed herself after being repeatedly shouted at by bosses. Others cited worries over poisonous chemicals. Disney has now launched its own investigation.

• It is claimed some of the 6,000 employees have to work an extra 120 hours every month to meet demand from western shops for the latest toys.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That’s because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the procedure.

• The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.

• In responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the department is withholding two legal analyses by then-government lawyer John Yoo, and is revealing just eight sentences from a third Yoo memo dated Nov. 2, 2001. That memo is at least 21 pages long.

• The communication logs show the admirable but futile efforts of UN Special Rapporteurs to gain answers and information on horrific incidents of torture and possible war crimes or crimes against humanity. The incidents Special Rapporteurs are seeking information about are not necessarily unknown, but what makes them significant is how the US has done little if not nothing to address and investigate the killings of journalists in the Iraq War.

Cablegate

• IGOH refers to Interim Government of Haiti, the unelected government installed after a US-backed coup ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

• CNN is reporting that recent Wikileaks cables have revealed that Apple assembled an anti-counterfeit team in 2008 to combat counterfeited iPhones and iPod touches. Apple’s early plans to attack Chinese counterfeits were to go after retailers and street vendors, work with police to raid manufacturing facilities, and to go after online retailers.

• This is the story of Daniel Berg aka Daniel Schmitt aka Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the many collaborators with WikiLeaks in the ‘nascent period’ up to but not including the big releases of 2010.

• Daniel was an employee of the US storage giant EDS in Rüsselheim Germany when he heard about WikiLeaks. Daniel’s not a programmer – and certainly not a hacker – but seemed to ‘dabble’ in political topics such as ‘anarchy’ and transparency.

• But we’re getting ahead of our story. The following data was culled over the past few months when the opportunity (and the inclination) came to research Daniel’s bizarre life and relationship with WikiLeaks and the website’s founder Julian Assange. All items are referenced online save Domscheit’s own book.

Privacy

• The bill requires all Internet service providers to save their customers’ IP addresses — or online identity numbers — for a year.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• On of the sneakier parts of ACTA is that the White House has insisted from the beginning that the document is not a binding treaty. Instead, it insists that ACTA is merely an “executive agreement.” Of course, the only real difference is that an executive agreement doesn’t require the Senate to ratify it. Basically, the US is calling it an executive agreement so that the administration can sign on without any oversight or scrutiny on the treaty. The Europeans, in the meantime, never got the “ix-nay on the inding-bay eaty-tray” notice from the US folks, and have been happily declaring ACTA a binding treaty as it clearly is.

• However, many legal experts have noted that this raises serious constitutional questions, as the Constitution simply does not allow this kind of agreement to be signed without Senate approval. Amusingly, Senator Biden — back during the previous administration — was one of the leading voices in trying to prevent President Bush from signing an “executive agreement” with Russia, without getting Senate approval. One wonders if he’s magically changed his mind.

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