● 08.31.11

● Links 31/8/2011: KDE Speed to Improve, Firefox for Tablets

Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• New Intel graphics drivers for X.org already support the Ivy Bridge family of processors that is expected to become available early next year. In future, a new Linux version will be selected on an annual basis to become a long-term kernel with two years of support. Material from LinuxCon 2011 Vancouver provides development background on such topics as USB support, KVM and Wi-Fi drivers.

• Both Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon and Ubuntu volunteer and journalist Amber Graner find that, when they deliver talks based on Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North’s The Burnout Cycle, afterwards people approach them privately to talk about their own experiences with burnout.

• Similarly, kernel hacker and Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora talks about sitting with a dozen women and technology activists and discovering that all of them were burned out, recovering from burnout, or else had been burned out in the past.

Graphics Stack

• Last week I wrote about Samsung releasing code to a new DRM driver for one of their ARM SoCs, the Exynos 4210 that’s used by the Samsung Galaxy S II and other mobile devices. It looks like this open-source kernel driver from Samsung stands a chance as being the first ARM driver to be accepted into the DRM area of the mainline Linux kernel.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• According to the press release from Unigine, Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. In Oil Rush players build up defenses and upgrade oil platforms. Players progress through the game by capturing enemy platforms and oil rigs.

• Sylvain Labbe aka Ozzy from Sunday Coders announced the GNU/Linux release of his game Marball Odyssey.

Desktop Environments

• There are folks in the world of FLOSS just as determined to sabotage their installed base. Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4.x and GNOME 3 come to mind. Perhaps those new interfaces are “better” in some ways, but the users will notice the learning curve. I don’t doubt some will not even be able to start using them because they are used to clicking on things they can see in front of them just as they have been seeing and grasping since infancy. Unnatural may be new but it’s not intuitive. Training had better be built in or it will be resisted.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Have you experienced performance issues when using KDE? If so, then you aren’t the only one. While things have been improving as KDE 4 matures, some users still have registered complaints. And one KDE hacker is trying to address them.

• Martin Gräßlin had begun working towards “rendering at 60 frames” per second. Gräßlin stated in a blog post today, “I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec.” But after some thought he realized where a couple of bottlenecks may be hiding.

GNOME Desktop

• Many people asked me at Desktop Summit about the work I’ve been doing recently on implementing the awesome Documents designs from Jon and Jakub; so here it is, I am very happy to announce the first release of GNOME Documents. Here’s the obligatory screenshot.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Aside from a few isolated instances, Mandriva generally felt quite snappy and fast. It used 400 MB of RAM at idle, which I think is about average for KDE 4. KWin desktop effects worked well after I enabled them. The only issue I had was that there was no keyboard shortcut to directly change the virtual workspace; I had to zoom out to see the whole desktop cube to change workspaces, which is a little more cumbersome and time-consuming. What I mean is there’s no shortcut like CTRL+ALT+LEFT to switch to the workspace immediately to the left. For some reason I also couldn’t find any way to set such shortcuts to my liking.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has chosen to announce its new cloud management software Aeolus with a fresh spin of being more community-oriented than Aeolus’ competitor, OpenStack.

• Red Hat is leading a Fedora-like effort to succeed where OpenStack has struggled in building an open-source cloud founded on broad community input.

• Red Hat’s engineers are building Aeolus, a software suite to spin up, manage and deploy applications from physical and virtual servers to any public or private cloud.

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is never one to mince words, and is often full of surprises. Recently, although his position is arguable, he contended that both the PC and fat client operating systems are headed for obsolescence. Now, he has told ZDNet which company he forecasts will be Red Hat’s primary competitor by the year 2016: VMware. There are some excellent reasons to believe that forecast.

• The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t scheduled for general availability for another couple of years, making this the right time for Red Hat to get started on its development.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is now starting to take shape as the Linux vendor begins the multi-year process that will ultimately result in a new enterprise distribution release. RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010 and RHEL 7 is currently scheduled for release in 2013.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• 2. Ubuntu is lovely. Yep there, I’ve said it. Linux for the desktop is now a great product. Not a perfect product yet, but great. How do I know? Well I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on the wife’s machine and it worked flawlessly out of the box. No having to configure networks, fiddle with arcane video driver settings or anything like that. It just worked. OK, there was one glitch later on, where her HP inkjet printer driver was incorrectly installed (so I had to hunt around on the forums to find the fix) but I said it wasn’t perfect. And even so it easily compares with the best that Windows has to offer in terms of ease of installation. Surprised? Yeah me too. Last time I looked Ubuntu was a pain. Now it’s not. ‘Nuff said?

• In two days, September 1st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for final release on October 13th, 2011.

• With this occasion we thought it will be a great idea to inform our Ubuntu readers about some of the interesting features that will be included in this first Beta release of Ubuntu 11.10.

• We also remind everyone that just like the previous release (Ubuntu 11.04), this version of the Ubuntu operating system will have two Beta releases; the second one will be availble on September 22nd.

• So I was reading a recent article in NetworkWorld where once again, the “Canonical doesn’t give back” bullshit is raised. The author seems to take a couple “jabs” by bringing up Greg K-H’s infamous plumbers rant talk, the fact that Microsoft is in the top 10 of kernel contributors (and Canonical isn’t even top 30), and even says Canonical is unprofitable as “general understanding”…nice, thanks! Thankfully, it seems from the comments, that people see this as the sensationalized, we-need-click-through-traffic journalism it is. I could go into an epic long posting of how wrong the basis for the “doesn’t give back” argument is, or take jabs at other distros profitability, how they got there or why they were sold…but I won’t. Instead, I’d like to issue a bit of urban education on those of you who seem to hate Canonical/Ubuntu because it succeeds where others have failed.

Devices/Embedded

• The UK-based charity Raspberry Pi, which hopes to supply schools worldwide with ultra-low-cost computers, has shown off the current version of its $25 computer running Quake 3.

• The device itself is only about the size of a credit card and is designed to connect to a PC, monitor, or a touchscreen to create a cheap tablet.

• Linaro has released a new version of its Linaro open source Linux tools, kernel, and middleware stack for ARM Cortex-based consumer electronics. Based on the Linux 3.0.3 kernel and GCC 4.6 toolchain, Linaro 11.08 offers Android and Ubuntu images for the BeagleBoard-xM, Pandaboard, Snowball, and Samsung Origen development boards, plus a new build for the Freescale i.MX53 board.

Phones

Android

• Motorola Mobility announced an enhanced version of its QWERTY-enabled Motorola Pro phone destined for Europe and Asia. The Motorola Pro+ moves up to Android 2.3, is considerably lighter, and offers improved 640 x 480 resolution and Corning Gorilla glass for its 3.1-inch screen, but carries over a 1GHz processor, a five-megapixel camera, and business-oriented features.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

↺ HP to Manufacture More TouchPads

• Hewlett-Packard said it will manufacture more TouchPads in response to “stunning” demand following the company’s decision to discontinue the tablets. “Despite announcing an end to manufacturing webOS hardware, we have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand,” Mark Budgell, an HP spokesman, wrote in a blog post. The site appears to be overloaded and is currently unavailable, but the post has been reposted elsewhere online.

• Hold on to something tight, webOS geeks. Your favorite tablet, which I can only assume is the TouchPad, might not be the last webOS tablet incarnation from HP. An HP executive and former webOS VP recently stated that the company could resurrect the TouchPad stating to Reuters, “tablet computing is a segment of the market that’s relevant, absolutely.” But let’s hope that HP’s Personal Systems Group head Todd Bradley remembers the TouchPad’s rough path to success.

• Toshiba has launched its first tablet powered by the “Honeycomb” branch of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system in Europe. Like most Honeycomb-based tablets, the AT100 series tablet has a 1200×800 10.1-inch touch screen display and a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 250 processor with 1 GB of RAM.

• Barnes & Noble’s traditional business model is lagging, but its digital focus has helped buoy its financial performance, the company said today.

• During its fiscal first quarter that ended July 30, B&N generated $1.4 billion in sales, representing a 2 percent increase over the same period last year. Its slight revenue increase becomes more impressive when one considers that the core of its operation–book sales in stores–were down during the period. In fact, the company reported that store sales decreased 3 percent year over year to $1 billion.

• For a mere $199, Linux fans can buy this little netbook that offers a number of things not found with tablets. Running MeeGo, the X101 does lack the Ethernet and VGA port found on the bulkier netbooks already out there. Because the target is those considering tablets, this netbook is lacking anything that is going to add bulk to its form.

• Back in April, before Toshiba had officially revealed the name of its upcoming tablet, one Babyfacemagee did some serious detective work to figure out that it would be called the Thrive – and ended up being dead-on. Fast-forward a few months, and we’re hearing rumors of a new, slimmer, sexier Galaxy Tab-fighter from Toshiba.

Free Software/Open Source

• The company, a longtime technical computing leader often credited with putting 3D graphics workstations on the map, has purchased OpenCFD Ltd., which provides open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. OpenCFD has a large, very active user base that spans the commercial engineering, science, and public sector markets. The OpenFOAM CFD software comprises more than 80 solver and 170 utility applications. It’s used for solving everything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions to turbulence and heat transfer problems and engineering challenges around solid dynamics and electromagnetics.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla Mobile Team is working tirelessly to make Firefox awesome on tablets, and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the design decisions we’ve made with the UI thus far. Firefox for tablets is an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size.

• Google and Microsoft are heavily pushing the creation of HTML5 games for Chrome as well as IE9 and IE10. However, the opportunity is much greater for Mozilla, which isn’t nearly as active in this space as its rivals.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Google took a hit on the Lindholm email issue when the magistrate entered an order 354 [PDF] favored by Oracle requiring Google to (re)produce the emails. Google indicated its intention to appeal the ruling and to withhold production until such time as Judge Alsup makes a final determination, but the magistrate stated such delay was improper and ordered Google to produce the emails immediately.

CMS

Funding

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• There has been much hand-wringing of late about whether the explosion of government-run app contests over the last couple of years has generated any real value for the public. With only one of the Apps for Democracy projects still running, it’s easy to see the entire movement being written off as an overly optimistic fad.

Open Hardware

• As first-tier PC brand vendor Hewlett-Packard (HP) has recently halted all its TouchPad projects, upstream suppliers are currently suffering from the component inventory, which is prepared for the production of the upcoming TouchPad including the 7-inch model, according to sources from upstream component players.

Standards/Consortia

• The OpenOffice-based Bungeni was presented at the UK parliament in March this year. Those attending were from the Parliament ICT, Hansard Section, Information Management and Table Departments. The main goal of the meeting was to assess ways in which the UK parliament can provide technical assistance and support to the Bungeni project. The project states that one of its aims is to make parliaments more open to citizens, the name of the project itself conveying this idea: “Bungeni” is the Kiswahili word for “inside Parliament”.

Leftovers

• But, with Windows 7, suddenly this no longer works. Running Explorer with RunAs, simply opens a new instance of Explorer as the currently logged in user. Back when we started migrating users from XP to 7, we searched and searched for the solution for Windows 7 that works like XP. But, even today, none has been found. The workaround? To use Switch User and log in to the PC as an administrator account, and run Explorer. But, the drawback is when trying to switch back to the regular user that is logged in, their password needs to be typed in. This is counterproductive if the user is not at their desk while the admin is troubleshooting.

Health/Nutrition

• We know Monsanto and other biotech giants have been pushing genetically modified crops around the globe, but new diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last week make it clear how entangled our government is in corporate agricultural interests.

Security

• Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai’s clients and contracts, information about the company’s security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Spanish press associations have expressed concern about recent episodes of police violence against journalists covering demonstrations against Pope Benedict’s four-day visit to Madrid and protests staged as part of the anti-corruption 15-M movement.

• Freelance photographer Daniel Nuevo was covering August 18 protests in Madrid against the Catholic Church-sponsored World Youth Days, which featured Benedict XVI and attracted hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Grassroots church groups and civic organizations organized the demonstrations to denounce the “waste” incurred by the celebration, which is partly financed by government and corporate sponsors.

• King Hamad of Bahrain said Sunday he was pardoning all those who insulted him during a month of Shiite-led pro-democracy protests, in a bid to bring normality back to the Gulf kingdom.

• He also said that civilians that were being tried in military courts for their participation in the protest which was crushed in mid-March, will eventually be handled by civil courts, while those who were dismissed from their jobs will be reinstated.

• Syria’s most renowned political cartoonist, who recently drew a sketch comparing President Bashar al-Assad to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, had both his hands broken in an attack yesterday by masked gunmen who dragged the 60-year-old out of his car.

• Ali Ferzat, whose satirical art once drew death threats from Saddam Hussein, was treated in hospital. He was attack as he left his Damascus studio at four o’clock yesterday morning.

• Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

• Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Cablegate

• The chief executive of the Cordoba Foundation says a WikiLeaks report which accuses the U.S. forces of killing ten people in cold blood in Iraq in 2006 is just the tip of the iceberg.

• There’s been a sudden explosion of interest in Wikileaks cables down under, after every single one of the US diplomatic cables on Australia was suddenly released online to the public this week. While hardened Aussie journalists insist there are no major “bombshells,” plenty of intriguing new stories are now exploding onto the media landscape. Overall, the US cables reveal a sovereign nation absurdly subservient to US foreign policy, with Australian ministers queuing to discuss confidential party deliberations with their friends in the US embassy.

• Israeli experts downplayed the security risk posed by the leaked documents, which name alleged Israeli, Iranian and Jordanian intelligence agents, but said that WikiLeaks has definitely taken a more brazen stand vis-א-vis Washington.

• A wealth of Wikileaks revelations have embarrassed Labor and the Coalition, while a High Court ruling could further damage Labor.

• Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland bemoans having his department being publicly caught out, ratting out, 23 Australians to the US embassy without due process.

• ATTORNEY-GENERAL Robert McClelland has accused WikiLeaks of “incredibly irresponsible” conduct after the self-styled whistleblower group released a cable that named 23 Australians accused by ASIO of having contact with Yemeni terror group al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula.

• A recently released WikiLeaks cable from 2006 reveals 120 Chinese children vanished from Swedish immigration centers within a period of 18 months.

• The Embassy of Stockholm believes the disappearing acts were managed by organized traffickers residing in several European countries.

• The children — ages 10 to 18 — arrived in Sweden unaccompanied and, oftentimes, without travel documents, to seek political asylum. They all claimed they had relatives who were victims of religious persecution and seemed “very professionally coached” during questioning, according to a Swedish official.

• Women and children had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the head in house raid, which was covered up by the military

• SIX women living in Australia have been named by American intelligence agencies as potential targets of an al-Qaeda plot to recruit women for terror attacks, according to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• By settling for cheap technology, China has “vastly increased” the risk of a nuclear accident, claim diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, The Guardian newspaper reports.

• The U.S. Embassy cables from August 2008, released by WikiLeaks, warned that China’s choice of technology would be a century old by the time dozens of China’s reactors come to the end of their lifespan.

• Dr. John Harte is based at the University of California-Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. With a PhD in physics, his research encompasses the most serious biochemical and climate-ecosystem feedback processes of global warming and theoretical ecology. He has been at the forefront, for decades, of some of the most important studies pertaining to the biological impacts – particularly in alpine environments – of climate change, as well as humanity’s role in the disruption of critical ecosystems.

Finance

• The challenges poor and homeless Americans often face accessing clean drinking water and restroom facilities violate international human rights standards, according to a report issued by a United Nations investigator this month.

• Catarina de Albuquerque, a U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, visited the United States in late February at the invitation of the U.S. government.

• MATT TAIBBI: Under the authority of the enforcement division. Now, this—there’s no legal authority to do this. And, you know, apparently, according to my sources, this was illegal. You can’t just unilaterally shred any government document, no matter how insignificant. And these are significant law enforcement investigatory files that they were unilaterally destroying.

• AMY GOODMAN: Talk about just what the SEC does, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• MATT TAIBBI: Well, they police the financial markets. They’re the main cops on the beat on Wall Street. It’s basically a two-tiered structure. It’s—you know, for Wall Street crime, it’s the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are the two main sort of policing organizations that prevent things like insider trading, market manipulation, securities fraud. They also make sure that all publicly traded corporations—they have to make regular disclosures, you know, every year, and they make sure that those disclosures are accurate, that you don’t have an Enron situation, for instance, where a company is reporting profits that they don’t have and hiding losses that they do have. The SEC is supposed to be the number one cop on the beat preventing all of this stuff. And if they’re not doing their job, which they apparently haven’t been, you know, what results is a situation like 2008, where just corruption overwhelms the markets, and you have this explosion of, you know, a lack of confidence all around the globe.

• The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private agency’s opaque operations.

• He’s very good at making investments that look remarkably like examples of blatant corruption.

Censorship

• It is a blow to the FT, whose apps had processed subscription transactions independently. Last year, 10 percent of its new digital subscriptions were taken out on iPads. But the publisher says its model is premised on owning data about customers that goes through along with transactions. This was more important to it than Apple’s 30 percent take, CEO John Ridding told me recently.

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