● 09.20.11

● Links 20/9/2011: GeeXboX 2.0, Birthday for Mageia

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• We get hands on with Samsung’s Series 5 3G, the first Chromebook on the market and the international role model for Google’s ambitious new PC landscape.

• After a pilot program in December in which Google shipped out the first prototype Cr48 Chromebooks to beta testers in the United States, the first commercial Chromebooks started shipping in June to the United States and a handful of European countries.

Server

• A2 Hosting says its MemHT hosting accounts include cPanel, free CloudFlare CDN service, free Server Rewind backups, the CloudLinux OS and Attracta tools to improve Google listing and rank.

• Once again IBM has done a fine job of making Power Systems all about Unix and Linux. It’s as interesting that this presentation is listed on the IBM i home page as it is that a presentation like this gets made with essentially no recognition that IBM i is part of the Power Systems equation. You can find it under the heading of “Special Offers,” where none of the four offers have anything to do with i.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Ubuntu should move to a monthly release, according to Scott Remnant. Bruce Perens has come up with a new scheme for copyright ownership and Linux Format turns 150. Hear how successful we are at discovering things, building mesh networks and thinking up excuses.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.1 contains all the necessary components for passing through PCI devices to Xen guests; KVM offers rudimentary nested virtualisation support for Intel CPUs. Supported CPU platforms now include the OpenRISC open source processor architecture.

Graphics Stack

• Last month I alluded to a 40-way graphics card comparison being worked on at Phoronix. This comparison is to extensively compare the performance of the open and closed-source drivers for each graphics card and to comprehensively comment on other areas of the Linux graphics driver support. Not only is the OpenGL performance being evaluated, but the thermal performance, CPU utilization, and power consumption is being looked at too. Being published today to mark the beginning of the Oktoberfest 2011 articles are the ATI/AMD Radeon results. This includes 28 of the 40 graphics cards, with GPUs as old as the Radeon X800XL and as new as the AMD Radeon HD 6950.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Desura has launched a new Alpha Funding initiative very similar to other crowdfunding projects like Kickstarter and 8 bit Funding. 5 Indie games have been selected as launch titles and out of which 3 will have Linux versions in future.

• For those into open-source real-time strategy games, there’s a new alpha release of the growingly-popular 0 A.D. game.

• The open source channel is known for a lot of things, but breathtaking games isn’t one of them. That may change soon, though, thanks to the people behind the open source game 0 A.D., which in its latest iteration brings gorgeous and elegant gaming to the free software world — and it’s still in alpha. Read on for a look at the amazing things these volunteer programmers have accomplished in recent months, and what they mean for the open source channel as a whole.

• Desura website has been updated and a whole lot of new Linux games have been added. The main page of Desura now features a nice Tux icon at the top. Users are taken to Linux games database once clicked.

• Deepak Fights Robots is a fun arcade and platform game for Linux by Tom Sennett. The game is highly inspired by Bubble Bobble, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man.

Desktop Environments

• Human beans of the two legged kind love variety. That is why we always are changing the drapes, moving the furniture and continuously buying new clothes. We like to show our individuality in the way we present our personal surroundings to other people.

• Yet when it comes to compooters there is no such choice for many people. Because they use proprietary operating systems they are very limited in choice for what they can do to customise their “computer room” and have it look and work in a manner to suit their individuality.

• Two developments in the Linux world have spawned a hell of an amount of comment: Canonical’s decision to develop Unity for Ubuntu and the arrival of GNOME 3. While there have been many complaints about the changes made in both, there must be a fair few folk who are just getting on with using them without complaint. Maybe there are many who even quietly like the new interfaces. While I am not so sure about Unity, I surprised myself by taking to GNOME Shell so much that I installed it on Linux Mint. It remains a work in progress as does Unity but it’ll be very interesting to see it mature. Perhaps a good number of the growing collection of GNOME Shell plugins could make it into the main codebase. If that were to happen, I could see it being welcomed by a good few folk.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The last couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy. Or, if you prefer (and I do): ridicubusy. On the personal side of life, I managed to squeeze in a two day paddle-and-camping trip the other weekend, played dinner host to Lawrence Krauss (made some of my favourite dishes, and one new one (for me, anyways): egg yolk ravioli), co-hosted a “Ready, Steady, Cook!” evening at the house along with S. All of that was enjoyable, and great breaks between the long hours of working on Plasma and general KDE “stuff”.

Distributions

• Linux fans, do you burn CDs for multiple distros and have to update those CDs when a new version comes out? As long as you have access to a wired internet connection you can download the latest versions of 7 distros directly from the disc.

• A CD-ROM burned with NetbootCD allows you to download and install the latest versions of CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Slackware, or Ubuntu.

• From the beginning the Salix OS developers made clear that they had no intention of competing with Ubuntu or Mandriva and they were not trying to create a newcomer-friendly distribution that would be easy for Windows or MacOS users. Rather, they described the target audience as “lazy Slackers.” I’ve always understood that to mean Linux users who want the reliability, stability and performance that Slackware consistently delivers but who also want modern conveniences and features like automated dependency resolution, automated notification when patches are available and a first class set of tools to administer their systems. If those are truly the goals then Salix OS meets them admirably.

• Nobody can argue there are 2 major Desktop Environments now in Linux world: GNOME and KDE take lion part in installed Linux desktop systems. Most Linux distributions are released with at least one of them available. But since system requirements for resources of KDE and GNOME are rather high and growing, there is more and more space for lighter desktop environments like LXDE and XFCE.

• I am beginning to feel this curse with the choice of distributions available today. Let me start with a little background information. I have been a regular Linux user on desktops and servers since about 2006. In that time I have mostly worked with Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS. I have had the pleasure of building a desktop from the ground up using a Debian net install CD. I have setup other users with Ubuntu and Fedora on desktops and netbooks. I have installed new servers and re-purposed retired ones. In short, I can be considered a semi power user, still not among the experts but a bit better than an average user. And this is where the curse strikes most often.

• The project I’ve been working on does require a bit of thought around enterprise Linux versions run by a community. There is the ever amazing CentOS, Scientific Linux and a few others who have been around the block a time or two. The work that they have done has been immense and very helpful to many, including me.

• For my project, the work was about building a fully binary compatible, enterprise-ready, community version of Linux, very similar to what CentOS and others have done. The question always comes ‘why?’ which will be addressed later on in future posts. Suffice it to say, the work we’ve been doing has paid off in both a individual and community sense.

New Releases

• Macpup is a small,light OS. The .Iso is only 164 MB.It runs in ram and is very fast. It is not a striped down,bare bones,basic core OS. Macpup is a full featured systemright out of the box with apps for office,graphics,multimedia,internetand much more.And it looks really cool.

• After countless years of development, the 2.0 release of GeeXboX (codename “Love It or Shove It”) finally has landed. The GeeXboX project was created in December 2002, 9 years ago, to become the major HTPC / MediaCenter dedicated Linux distribution. From a ridiculous 3 MB ISO image, using an ultra-simple customized version of MPlayer OSD, GeeXboX now has evolved into a much more mature system. Our objective always has been to provide you with a Linux distribution, so easy to use, that anyone, regardless of any computer skill, would be able to make use of it.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Yesterday, September 18, was Mageia’s first birthday. It was one year ago that a fork of Mandrake Linux was announced. From the start Mageia decided to take a new tack in distribution development. They synthesized the community and professional models of development in way no other had quite done before and it’s paying off. Mageia recently unleashed their inaugural release and received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to enterprises worldwide. It also offers enterprise-ready open source operating system platforms. The company was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.

• * 52 Week High: $49.00 * 52 Week Low: $31.77 * Book Value: $6.88 * Float Short: 2.06%

Fedora Community

• The global Software Freedom Day was held Saturday, September 17th. However, as with previous years, the SFD organizers landed their event on the same day as Fredericksburg’s downtown Oktoberfest celebration. We love a good party as much as anyone, but we found in previous years that even though we had more foot traffic our SFD event, most passersby were not interested in software as much as beer and bratwursts. (Go figure!)

Debian Family

• The bottom line: I have been recommending Linux Mint for quite some time now – I happen to have gotten back an ASUS netbook from a friend over the weekend which was loaded with Linux Mint 8, and had been in daily use without a hiccup for a couple of years. The only change now is that I will be recommending the Mint Debian editions first, rather then the Mint Ubuntu editions. If you haven’t tried Linux Mint yet, this would be a very good time to do so.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The stunningly fast ability to install applications at a moments notice is one of the primary reasons Linux is so popular. Ubuntu systems by default comes with the Synaptic package manager or the Ubuntu software center, whichever you prefer. You can also install packages from the internet or from the command line. New items are downloaded through software repositories which store collections of applications that are bundled into packages. When you choose an item to install from the package manager all relevant packages required by an application will also be installed. When you install Ubuntu only the official application repositories are accessed but more can be added without too much trouble.

• I don’t recommend using Déjà Dup to hold your data when you upgrade distros (e.g. from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10) without understanding the risks.

Flavours and Variants

• In what we can now call it a tradition, we celebrate the Software Freedom Day by publishing our latest release: Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.0 STS, codename Dagda.

• Ten days ago the Bodhi Team and I released our second update to Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 Today I am happy to let all of our users that have limited or no-internet access machines know that our service pack 2 is ready for download. For those that do not know our service packs allow for a single download upgrade of your Bodhi system from the previous stable release to the current (those still on Bodhi 1.0.0 will need to install service pack 1 followed by service pack 2).

• Canonical recently released its Beta version of Kubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, with all eyes toward the final release scheduled for October 13. We take a look at this release and the new KDE 4.7 Desktop and Netbook Plasma Workspaces.

• Regular readers might remember my review of Pinguy OS 10.10.1 this past April.

• A friend of mine brought me his computer for fixing, a Compaq Presario with XP Home. It was in a reboot loop. I told him about Linux, and all its advantages, and he agreed to try it. I grabbed my PCLinuxOS CD and installed it in a matter minutes. Everything was working, but something about that particular hardware was not sitting well with it. It kept freezing. This is the first time I see this, as all other machines I have installed it on have been very stable. My guess is that it has to do with the graphics. The machine has and old built-in Intel graphics adapter. I did not have a proper graphics card laying around to give him, so I figured I wouldn’t fight it.

• I decided to install Linux Mint LXDE for one reason really – I use a Dell Vostro with 2gb RAM and a Core2Duo running at 2.2ghz. I simply wanted the fasted machine possible given the spec of the hardware.

Devices/Embedded

• RoweBots announced that its minimalist, Linux- and POSIX-compatible “Unison” real-time operating system (RTOS) powers eSight’s Alivios Intelligent Eyewear. Currently in clinical trials, Alivios helps to improve vision in people with eye diseases such as macular degeneration, combining Unison OS 5.2, a Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci processor, an HD video camera, and “near-to-eye” displays, says the company.

Phones

Android

• With 500,000 activations a day, Android is becoming the dominant player in the mobile eco-system…

• Back in 2008, the project initially began under the name of the “iPhone Linux Project.” This project aimed to boot a Linux kernel, and by the end of 2008, this aim had been achieved. The year after, the hacker behind the iPhone Linux Project surprised everybody by presenting a working first-generation iPhone running Android OS: The iDroid Project was born.

• According to data from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, in the 12 weeks ended 7 August, Android had 47.1 per cent share of the UK smartphone market, compared with 22.9 per cent during the same period a year earlier.

• Apple’s IOS however, has fallen by eight per cent to 20.8 per cent share from 28 per cent a year earlier, as Android surged in popularity.

• RIM’s Blackberry OS was the second most popular with 21.5 per cent of the market, up four per cent from 17.4 per cent a year earlier.

• Prepaid phone provider Boost Mobile announced a mid-range Samsung smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard and a $230 no-contract price tag. The Samsung Transform Ultra runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz processor, and offers 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, a three-megapixel camera, a front-facing VGA webcam, and Android Market support, the mobile provider says.

• Samsung’s Galaxy S II, Epic 4G Touch is a mouthful to say and a handful to hold, but the 1.2GHz dual-core processor and Sprint’s 4G WiMAX network make it worth the $200 on contract, says this review. Battery life suffers on 4G, but from the 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display to the responsive cameras, there’s a lot to like.

Free Software/Open Source

• If there ever was evidence that FLOSS is a better way to do IT, the smart phone is it:

• * lots of choices for the consumer * Android/Linux (FLOSS OS from Google) shipments at 47.1% of the market, up 105% over last year

• High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and Japan.

• Low context cultures are process driven. They rely on facts and processes. Their communication style is much more direct and action-orientated. They are orientated towards the individual rather than the group. Western cultures like the US and Germany are considered low context.

• Generation Z is beginning to join the workforce. This age group–born between the early 1990s and early 2000s–has never really existed in a world without the web or lacking the widespread use of cell phones, laptops, and freely available wireless networks and digital media.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 7 beta is now the default web browser in Ubuntu 11.10 Onceric Ocelot beta and for the first time ever, Firefox scores a perfect 100 in Acid3 tests. Congratulations Mozilla!

• One of the big things that Mozilla’s Thunderbird has been missing for years is a calendar. It’s usually the number one thing I hear about whenever anyone compares Thunderbird against Outlook.

• That’s where the Mozilla Lighting project is supposed to come – providing a Calendar plugin (based on Mozilla Sunbird) for Thunderbird.

Databases

• If you haven’t heard about NoSQL by now, we contend that you’ve been in hiding for the past three years. The term NoSQL itself refers to a broad class of data management that is not based on the traditional relational tables in typical RDBMS. Examples include document-based data storage such as MongoDB, key-value pair such as Riak, or column-based storage such as HBase.

• While assessing usage of NoSQL, we are often presented with the CAP model which is great from the theoretical perspective, but grasping its implications on real world enterprise systems is difficult.

• In this post, we’ll explain some of the design factors and the associated implications of using NoSQL in the context of three data-centric enterprise applications: Portal, Reporting and Analytics. Enterprise transactional systems are not included for obvious reasons.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice in Ubuntu 11.10 will not come with global menu support enabled by default.

• Announcing the minor change via his blog, Canonical’s Björn Michaelsen cited ‘stabiltiy concerns’ as the main reason for disabling the add-on by default.

Business

Funding

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• In a curious way, then, I find myself overwhelmed by the consultation and the issues it raises.

Leftovers

• The latest salvo in Sony v World is that Sony wants users of its Playstation Network to agree not to sue. Imagine going into a “mom and pop” shop on the street and telling the clerk, “I’d like to buy that can of unhomogenized peanut butter.” only to be told, “Sorry, we don’t do business with people who might sue us…”. That should not be part of any model of business no matter the size. Businesses should compete on price/performance and let their quality of service fend off attacks. If people don’t hate you, they are unlikely to sue. That works for me. I have never been sued.

Trolling

Finance

• When it comes to government money, it’s always about insiders running circles around the government money and pocketing a piece. Don’t ever forget that. And usually, there is a crony investment banker as part of the program.

• Lloyd Blankfein retains Reid Weingarten amid the governments inquiry into the financial crisis. The move hints there could be new push to investigate the firm and its executives on criminal grounds.

• The FHFA’s massive bank lawsuit extravaganza is a reminder of the horrific behavior that took place inside the subprime mortgage machine: fraud.

• In it’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, the FHFA claims that Goldman directly committed common law fraud, and particularly claims that Goldman “aided and abetted fraud.”

• Small investors, take note: The smart money isn’t sure what to make of the economy, either.

• Some market strategists say the recent drop in stock prices means the market is expecting a recession. Banks like Goldman Sachs and others have lowered their year-end forecasts for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. And Mark Zandi, the much-followed economist from Moody’s, says the chance that the economy will fall into another recession is 40 percent.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• File sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker have been big news in the United States for months as tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed against individuals alleged to have illegally downloaded the movie. The lawsuits have now made their way into Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has ordered the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who face similar copyright infringement claims.

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