● 10.14.11

● Links 14/10/2011: Fedora Web of Trust, Ubuntu Reviews

Posted in News Roundup at 6:07 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The free Linux desktop is mature. It’s not only on par with proprietary desktops on other operating systems, it actually is innovating and moving beyond what other systems do. It covers all the needs of the vast majority of use cases. It has a variety of office suites, it runs several fine web browsers (another area where Windows has lost relevance up to the point of being made fun of), it has excellent tools and applications in almost any area you can think of, it’s a primary choice for software developers, it even moves beyond classical desktops to netbooks, tablets, and more.

Desktop

• So, not only is GNU/Linux on the desktop doing well, people who actually use it for their living have become confident enough to switch distros without much fuss. Compare that with the German Foreign Office which found GNU/Linux brought complaints from users and was too expensive. What’s wrong with this picture? Instead of whining that users should go to M$, users are choosing the distro of their choice. No complaining about “compatibility” or “complexity”. Just getting on with it.

Server

Kernel Space

• If you are not taken by today’s release of Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, here are some new Radeon graphics benchmarks comparing the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu 11.10 to the latest R600g driver from Mesa 7.12-devel on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.1 kernel.

• Can computer science change the world? Ask Ken O’Brien, a first-year Ph.D. student at University College Dublin’s Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory, and he’ll answer with a resounding “yes.” With his focus on green scientific computing at CASL, Ken works with physicists, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists to develop new energy optimization solutions for scientific applications.

Graphics Stack

• For those interested in the GPU hardware acceleration support for Opera 12 that was made available with this morning’s release of Opera 12 Alpha, here’s the stipulations regarding the “out of the box” Linux GPU driver support.

Applications

• Looking for an enterprise back-up solution for your servers? Is your network too complex to be handled by simple back-up utilities? Does the thought of making backups feel like a headache? Do not worry, there’s Amanda to the rescue! Amanda is probably one of the best open source network back-up solutions available in the market today. The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (AMANDA), as the name suggests, was developed at the University of Maryland. It allows the administrator to set up a single master back-up server to back up multiple hosts over the network, to tape drives, to disks or to optical media, and even the cloud (with the help of Amazon S3 Web services). It provides an array of options for the type of media that can be backed up to, and a multitude of client environments.

• Back-ups are a crucial part of our digital lives, yet they don’t always get the love they deserve. Keeping back-ups is sometimes confusing, thanks partly to the jargon—should I have ‘differential’ back-ups or is a ‘full system image’ a better way? To address questions like these, this article sheds light on all aspects of back-ups, from its basic definition, to information that can help you perform the kind of back-ups you need. Backing up data is the process of making a copy (or more) of our data files—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, e-books, movies, music, browser bookmarks, settings, installed programs—almost everything. Fundamentally, the questions are: 1. What to back up? 2. When to back up? 3. Where to back up? 4. What type of back-ups to perform? 5. Do you need more than one back-up?

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• I was busy with other things when 3.2 was released, hence my only writing about it now. Having just started using the new release full time, I have to say that I’m really impressed with how it turned out. The rate of progress since the 3.0 has been extremely high.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Wednesday announced the new JBoss Enterprise SOA 5.2, JBoss Enterprise Data Services Boss Enterprise Business Rules Management System (BRMS) platform releases.

• Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product line management at Red Hat told, InternetNews.com that the overall goal of the new product releases is to help build intelligent, integrated enterprises.

Fedora

• I was hoping to wait a bit before announcing my project but I’m having problems getting my ducks in a row. Because of this I’m reaching out to the community for help.

• Linux distributions have been improving by leaps and bounds, and those improvements are becoming visible in the latest beta releases. Fedora, one of the flagship distributions carrying GNOME 3, is no different and should have plenty of new features to make your mouth water.

• Some people have a beef with this release name and have been going out of their way to grill its proponents on what a huge faux pas and injustice this is. Beefy Miracle — how could you name something like that? Don’t you see it will make you a laughingstock? What were you people thinking?

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu received a major update today. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution released version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot. The update brings a wide range of improvements, including some much-needed enhancements to Ubuntu’s Unity shell.

• Ubuntu 11.10 a.k.a Oneiric Ocelot has just been released. This highly anticipated release brings the latest open source applications along with some great improvements to the Unity interface. In case you’ve been dying to find out what’s so great about the Ocelot, read on as we give you a quick overview of everything that’s new in 11.10.

• For the new version of Ubuntu, code-named Oneiric Ocelot, the developers have put particular effort into revising the applications area, improving the usability of the Software Centre and enhancing Ubuntu’s Unity interface.

• Ubuntu 11.10 (“Oneiric Ocelot”) was released, featuring makeovers for its Unity desktop and Ubuntu Software Center, plus a switch to the Thunderbird email client and a new backup tool called Deja Dup. On the server side, Ubuntu 11.10 adds ARM support, as well as a new “Juju” cloud management framework, and the integration of OpenStack within Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure.

• Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot was released couple of hours ago and quite a few people would have already downloaded and installed or upgraded it. If you’re one of those wondering – “How does it look?” – here’s a brief screenshot tour.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Hey, here’s one for you: would somebody explain to me why we’re at the point where statements like “OpenOffice.org can’t be allowed to die!” are being made?

• Those are the words of Stefan Taxhet, CEO of Team OpenOffice.org e.V., the German non-profit responsible for managing the fundraising for the Apache OpenOffice.org project. Taxhet made this statement in a press release Tuesday that announced new fundraising efforts for the project, which is apparently in need of a cash infusion.

Leftovers

Dennis Ritchie

• Most of you who follow the tech industry have likely heard of the passing of computer programming icon Dennis M. Ritchie (also known as dmr) on October 8 at the age of 70. While it could be argued that Linus Torvalds is more famous in today’s world than Dennis Ritchie, it’s quite safe to say that there wouldn’t be a Linux without Dennis Ritchie.

• Today marks the passing of the pioneer of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie, the R in K&R. I personally compare his innovation to language. Because both of them gave us the ability to communicate with another creature: humans, and computers. Without him and his partner, programming would be as hard as Electrical Engineering. He is a prophet among computers.

• Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

• Often known as “dmr,” Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because “my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat.”

• “When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In a ground-breaking opinion on Net neutrality, the European Data Protection Supervisor stresses that restrictions to Internet access inevitably harm privacy. As the European Parliament enters in the final stage of the negotiations on its resolution on Net neutrality, this opinion underlines that the EU Commission’s “wait and see” approach is bound to fail and is unjustifiable. Members of the EU Parliament – who will soon hold a crucial vote on the matter – must preserve citizens’ privacy by requiring strong regulatory measures to ban discrimination of online communications.

Copyrights

• The Government now has a chance to set out clear strategies for assessing the impact of infringement and the effectiveness of different enforcement strategies. Doing so is stage one in finding a way to bring the voices in this debate – be it rights holders, artists, or civil society – closer together to discuss practical, effective and proportionate policy.

• One of the most irritating myths promulgated by the entertainment industry is the idea that copyright is an ethical imperative because it’s bad to “steal other people’s ideas”. This is frequently combined with an illustrative story of plagiarism — in other words, a situation in which someone fraudulently claims credit for someone else’s work. Of course, this is nonsense. Plagiarism and copyright infringement are two completely different things. Although they sometimes occur together, there are many examples of either without the other. And if your eyes just glazed over — no problem: Nina Paley has made it easy with her new Minute Meme for QuestionCopyright.org, called “Credit is Due”.

ACTA

• ACTA is a multilateral agreement which proposes international standards for enforcement of intellectual property rights. According to the FFII, research has shown serious fundamental rights issues.

• A group of prominent European academics published an opinion on ACTA. They conclude that certain ACTA provisions are not entirely compatible with EU law and will directly or indirectly require additional action on the EU level. They invite “the European institutions, in particular the European Parliament, and the national legislators and governments, to carefully consider the above mentioned points and, as long as significant deviations from the EU acquis or serious concerns on fundamental rights, data protection, and a fair balance of interests are not properly addressed, to withhold consent.”

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