● 09.14.11

● Links 14/9/2011: CentOS 5.7, Fedora 17 Name

Posted in News Roundup at 2:48 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Last Saturday I got myself an Acer Aspire One netbook (bought it on impulse, really) from a friend who had it gifted to him but said he had no use for it. It came preloaded as usual with Windows 7 and as a nay sayer to that OS, I opted to install the beta release of Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Desktop

• Here I digress. With my found computer I added a bunch more memory, uninstalled Windows, and installed a free Linux system, Ubuntu. The computer is old but works fine and is faster than Windows. It uses fewer resources.

• Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) is project started by a South African millionaire to make computing systems more available to everyone and one they can understand. You can download it for free or order CD’s for a symbolic price. Regular updates of programs and the system itself are always free. Once installed, I thought, «OK, now I’m going to have to configure it to connect to internet and make stuff work in general.» But no, it connected to the net automatically and everything in the package worked without changing a thing. The first thing to do is to use its update system because things are always changing.

Kernel Space

• “x32 ABI” promises to take advantage of the benefits of 64-bit x86 processors without suffering from the overhead in 64-bit operation. At present, maintenance at Kernel.org has slowed down kernel development. Some kernel hackers are demonstrating their sense of humour with a Linux logo reminiscent of Windows 3.1 and a rickrolling kernel module.

• In a recent post tech writer Sean Michael Kerner advocated moving the kernel to Github. Here’s why I think the evidence isn’t so clear cut. Note this is my personal opinion, since I’m not a member of the kernel developer community and thus have no real say in the matter.

Applications

• With Linux, you will find quite a lot of backup tools, ranging from the overly simple to the overly complex. There are command-line tools, GUI tools, server-based tools, and combinations. Some of these backups are so incredibly difficult, their usefulness comes into question. So where do you find that happy medium? That, of course, depends upon your purpose and your budget.

• I want to suggest what I believe are the five best Linux backup tools, which cover everything from the simple desktop to the complicated server backups. These are all free, except for one enterprise tool that requires support.

• I’m looking forward to meeting Western New England’s CS 490 (Software Engineering) class tomorrow morning. A small group of students led by POSSE professor Heidi Ellis are spending the semester diving into… well, that’s the debate right now, actually. It’s a toss-up between GNOME Cheese, a Linux desktop webcam app, and Ekiga, a cross-platform softphone, and the question is which project will be most valuable for them to dive into given the limited span of a semester.

• Ask any system administrator what the top three pain points of his job are and you’ll likely see a range of responses. However, there’s a single response that always makes it into the top three: Backups. Backups are the bane of any IT professional’s existence. The problem is backups are notoriously unreliable. Couple that lack of reliability with poor backup quality, and you’ve created a service that often disappoints and frustrates even the most optimistic system administrator. Now, add the frustration of virtual machine backup and restore to the mix, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Proprietary

• Since some of the distros are starting to move towards Gnome 3 and hence Gtk3 we have been working to get Opera to support Gtk3 themes. And now we finally have something to show! wink

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Remember few days back we wrote about a new Linux game, No Time to Explain (NTTE). The game developers have uploaded their own game on Pirate Bay and strangely enough it has increased game sales. Read on.

• The full game should be available in about a months time with no price set as yet.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• We are extremely happy to announce that the Qt Project, the outcome of the open governance work, will go live on October 17th, 2011. This is a week before Qt Developer Days in Munich, and you can be sure to hear more about it there!

GNOME Desktop

• The gnome released the gnome desktop 3.1.91 including the gnome shell 3.1.91. This will eventually become the 3.2 version of the awesome desktop. There are many changes happening in this new version. Within these are the new online accounts, new user menu, onscreen keyboard, gnome contacts, new font manager and numerous other changes. The new gnome shell version 3.1.91 have some of these changes already implemented.

Distributions

• There seems to be a mad dash lately of bloggers tripping over themselves to write reviews of Bodhi Linux. Jeff Hoogland and his merry band of developers have come out recently with version 1.2.0 and I’ve put it through some paces. Overall, I like it, but rather than yet another Bodhi review getting lost in the shuffle, I thought I’d put that one off for another time.

New Releases

• We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.7 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• In an ideal world, software bugs get fixed shortly after they are discovered. (Actually, in a really ideal world, there would be no bugs to begin with, but let’s be a bit realistic). You might be led to believe that once a bug has been reported the Mageia packagers will fix the bug, issue a new package, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• It’s time for Fedora contributors to go crazy again… a.k.a. Red Hat is looking for codename proposals for Fedora 17, which will be their first community Linux release in 2012 to succeed the soon-to-be-released Fedora 16. Here’s some of the names that have been proposed thus far.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The upcoming Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for release on October 13th, will introduce a new software center application.

• Good things come to those who wait – particularly elementary fans willing to wait until April 2012…

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Opinion is split over whether or not the default Ubuntu login sound needs a refresh. Just what could it be replaced with?

• This month, I will have been with Canonical for 5 years. It’s been fantastic, but I’ve decided to move on. Next week, I’m going to start working for Google,

• We frequently get asked what do we test on the certification program. While we do have a simple page covering this topic, some times we are asked for further details. We have now updated the certification program guide with a more comprehensive description of the test cases. We review and update if necessary the list of test cases for each release:

• For some time now, there have been calls for Canonical and the Ubuntu team to find ways to reach out to more useful applications that Ubuntu users can take advantage of. For example, many users lament the fact that applications such as Photoshop are easy for Windows and Mac users to use, while Ubuntu users are boxed out. At the core of this debate is how the Ubuntu team approaches developers, and there are some strong signs that a larger and more diverse community of developers will start to contribute to Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• The volunteers of the Raspberry Pi project have, with the arrival and demonstration of the first alpha “Model B” boards, moved another step closer to their vision of creating an ARM-based, low-cost computer for education. The Raspberry Pi computer now has two models, and the “Model B” board being shown has changed somewhat from its previous appearance, losing the “USB stick” styling in favour of a more traditional rectangular board – the size of a credit card but with lots of space for mounting I/O ports. The board is based around the Broadcom BCM2835, a 700 Mhz “application processor”, and over the last month the developers have been putting it through its paces. First they showed a demo of Quake 3 running on the Pi:

• It’s no secret that I think software patents are a scourge that needs to be gotten rid of, and I’m by no means alone in that opinion. In this era of lawsuits and revenue models based heavily on patent licensing fees (I’m looking at you, Apple, Microsoft and Oracle), the harm they’re doing to innovation is right before our very eyes all the time.

Phones

Android

• Android is growing and so is the interest for Android platform among application developers. We have featured this awesome collection of top games for Android recently, now here are some really good wallpaper apps for Android which I think are among the best. Read on.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said that tablet demand was one of the company’s few bright spots in its second quarter and Android devices delivered sales ‘better than we expected.”

• AT&T will begin selling the 4G version of its 10.1-inch Iconia Tab Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) tablet Sept. 18 for $480 outright, or $330 on contract. The Acer Iconia Tab A501 4G closely follows the typical Honeycomb script, from the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor to the five- and two-megapixel cameras, but it’s significantly cheaper than most of its rivals.

Free Software/Open Source

• Most computer users are spending much more time these days viewing and creating multimedia content. According to comScore, 85.6 percent of online Americans (178 million people) watched video online in June 2011, and they spent an average of 16.8 hours each watching those videos during the month. In addition, Nielsen reports that the number of people watching video on their smartphones and tablets has increased 41 percent since last year.

• A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine bought a new laptop for his work. He called me and asked me to come over, mainly so he could show that device off. And partly (as it turned out) to once again try to convince me of the wonders and superiority of Windows.

• Shortly after arriving at my friend’s place, he unveiled his new Acer laptop. It’s a nice piece of hardware. They keyboard even has a numeric key pad — something I haven’t seen or used in a while.

• Of course, my friend started his new machine for me. It booted up into Windows 7 Home Premium Edition (whatever the heck that means). I’ve used Windows 7 before and wasn’t really impressed.

Events

• Following a truncated workday on Thursday, I quickly packed, threw my stuff in the car, and raced up the road as quickly as torrential rain would safely allow to Reagan National Airport. I took a short flight to Columbus, Ohio, where this weekend the Ohio Linux Fest 2011 was set to go. I got into the hotel around diner time and fortunately I was able to hook up with a variety of folks including Ruth Suehle from opensource.com, Jared Smith, Red Hat mega-architect and superstar Thomas Cameron, and Fedora Docs hackers John McDonough and Zach Oglesby for dinner at Bucca di Beppo. Yum!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We, Firefox Mobile front-enders, have been working hard for the last few weeks to get the new Firefox UI for tablets in place for general testing. It has now reached a functional state that is good enough for getting some early feedback. So, how can you help us?

• All the way back in 2008, we were covering Mozilla’s effort to deliver an innovative mobile browser, dubbed Fennec (Fennec is a small Fox…smaller than a Firefox). The Fennec project has not taken the world by storm since then, but the underlying technology powers a new version of Firefox for tablet devices that could make some waves. This week, a blog post announced that Firefox for Tablets has arrived in Nightly Builds.

• On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles–things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. This is the second of our community spotlight posts.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For quite some time, I’d been a fan of Sun’s OpenOffice suite, after having decided to live life open source!

• Though, less powerful than the Microsoft Office series, OpenOffice was decent enough for all my needs. I could open files at will, whether .docx, .doc or otherwise and perform the basic operations that defined the core of Microsoft Office packages.

CMS

• My presentation was based on the results of the State of Drupal survey, which got over 3,000 responses from people all over the world. Because I didn’t have time to talk about all the survey questions in my keynote, I’ve decided to make a summary of all the survey results (PDF, 160 KB) available as well. It gives a more complete view on the survey results.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• From Jakub’s message, the trunk code for GCC 4.7 should be done with state one by the end of October, if the same 4.6 schedule roughly follows. He’s called out on various branch maintainers to see if their respective feature work will be ready in time for merging to GCC 4.7 trunk within the next month and a half.

Public Services/Government

• Last month, Department of Defence chief technology officer Matt Yannopoulos revealed that 100 corporate staff had been using OpenOffice in a year-old, “semi-formal” trial.

• Last year, her husband announced millions of Ubuntu notebooks would be distributed to students.

Programming

• So what has this to do with windows programmers being smart? Well they have to be and also patient. The current visual studio (yes, small letters again Gary) seems to be a real monstrosity. Not only does it take for ever and a day to start up, it also wants to connect to the internet. Then to open up a “solution” (more like a problem to me :P) it wants to connect to the internet again and takes several more minutes to open. Long enough to make a cup of coffee. The disk space it consumes is massive. In the gigabytes compared to hundreds of megabytes for what I use. But lets put all that aside. The program is started up, the code is loaded and I am about ready to peruse the mind of a fellow programmer.

• Perl 5 project leader Jesse Vincent has made a textual version of his Perl 5.16 and Beyond speech available in prose form: Perl 5.16 and Beyond thread on p5p.

Leftovers

• An internet troll who posted videos and messages mocking the deaths of teenagers, including a girl hit by a train, has been jailed.

• Sean Duffy, 25, targeted Facebook tribute pages and posted videos on YouTube taunting the dead and their families.

• I just don’t see the company as “the next Microsoft” or whatever.

• The reason is, simple. Windows systems are vulnerable to all kinds of spyware and viruses. Anymore, if you click on the wrong link or open the wrong attachment, your system is toast. When your system becomes infected, it slows down, gives you web browser re-directs, and even blocks access to much needed software applications.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• He notes that “the whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

Cablegate

Finance

• Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

Censorship

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The EU Parliament just started discussing a resolution and oral question to the Commission on Net Neutrality. Make your voice heard to ensure that your EU representatives make a strong commitment for a free and open Internet against pressure from the telecoms industry.

Copyrights

• In keeping with a growing trend, this week Federal Judge Bernard Zimmerman of the Northern District of California severed 5,010 Doe Defendants from a single case—effectively dismissing all but one defendant. EFF participated in the case as amicus. This case, like many we’ve seen around the country, involved a pornographic work. Plaintiff sued more than 5,000 individuals anonymously based only on their ISP addresses, for allegedly exchanging an infringing file over a BitTorrent network. The copyright owner claimed that participation in BitTorrent “swarm” was a form of conspiracy, meaning it could sue everyone at once in California.

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