● 11.04.11

● Links 4/11/2011: Fedora 16 Goes Gold, Apple Bats for Sacred Cow (Brand)

Posted in News Roundup at 7:48 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It all comes down to control. Not your control, the proprietary companies control. However much control they have over their operating systems the more mon^b^b^b^b^b better quality product they can provide you. That is their theory as far as I can figure out. What that means in real life is that no matter what you wish to do with your proprietary operating system, you have to chose the path they set. That path is generally expensive and to take words from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, almost, but not quite like a cup of tea.

• This means that if you want something or wish to perform some task which is outside the limited bounds the proprietary companies have chosen then you are SOOL. You could think of that last acronym as Simply Out Of Luck but in my mind it is somewhat different :P. The end result is that you either go their way or take the highway.

• Then along came Jones. Tall thin Jones…..oops a bit of Ray Stevens slipping in there I actually meant along comes Linux. With Linux you are not limited to a straight and narrow path. You can simply take the path, or method, of achieving what you wish in the manner you prefer. This means that to scratch your left ear you can use your left arm or even your right butt cheek if you so desire, and are flexible enough.

Desktop

• A 21st century revamp of the classic Commodore 64 computer is now offered with Linux Mint 11 running on a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and 2TB of hard disk storage. Equipped with a classically styled case and “color-matched” keys, the device has modern innards that also include 8GB of RAM, S/PDIF, HDMI, and DVI video outputs, an eSATA port, and wireless networking.

• Celio Corporation announced “ScreenSlider,” software that allows Android devices to act as external touchscreen displays for Windows PCs. The company’s technology is also being used in “Prodigy One Pro” automotive head units from Directus, designed to mirror output from a connected Android phone.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We talk about to Jeffrey Thalhammer about his project, PerlCritic, which looks at Perl Code and gives suggestions about how to make it better.

Kernel Space

• Workstation graphics cards tend to be significantly more expensive than their desktop counterparts, something the new AMD FirePro V4900 seeks to overcome. The card is available for less than $200 but still comes with the advantages of the FirePro series, workstation application certification, a three-year hardware warranty and greater technical support than with a desktop GPU. Performance wise, the benchmarks that Phoronix ran showed the card to be nicely between the V4800 and V5800 so perhaps not worth immediately running out and upgrading from the previous low end model but definitely worth considering for new machines.

• The recent Kernel Summit, LinuxCon Europe and Realtime Workshop events revealed lots of interesting developments from the kernel scene, including a few details of the hack at kernel.org. AMD has released new graphics drivers and there’s a patch to fix serious problems in the RAID 10 code in Linux 3.1.

Applications

• Rodent is fast, small and powerful file manager for the GNU operating system (but it also works in BSD). That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to call it a graphic shell (that’s probably more accurate).

• It’s been a couple of days since NaNoWriMo began. For those living under a rock, NaNoWriMo is an annual creative contest wherein participants have to churn out a 50,000 words novel in a short span of 30 days. The event which had over 200,000 participants last year, has gained a huge following among professional writers as well as aspiring ones. In case you’re a Linux user who is taking part in the contest, here are 5 essential applications that will help you get closer to your goal.

• As I was reading yet another article about the problems people are having with Unity, I was thinking about how we may be focused on the wrong thing when we fret about how the desktop interface works.

• Shouldn’t we, as a community, be focused on the application ecosystem? Or has the rise of software as a service caused the community to essentially declare this space “done”?

• The article in question was Bruce Byfield’s Linux Magazine blog entry that highlighted a Launchpad bug discussion about one Ubuntu developer’s concern that Canonical was basically disconnected from the Ubuntu community with their constant insistence that the Unity interface not be as configurable as prior interfaces.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Howdy folks Liam here with some news for you! A couple of projects are looking for help in the way of Donations.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• My blog has been rather empty lately. It’s not because I haven’t had anything to report, but due to the fact that many things have happened and all sorts of cool things in Plasma Active’s “Activity world” started appearing that I didn’t have the time to write about them.

• Do you like prizes? Yes, most of us do. That’s why I offered prizes to winners of contest which ran on this blog to celebrate its first birthday. Prize for the winner of “social” contest was 8Gb USB stick and CD with any Linux distribution available. The choice of the winner was Kademar Linux. It is the distribution based on Debian and Knoppix, created by community in Spanish province Catalonia.

• Many cool effects and animations are available for the Kubuntu desktop. Here you can get a few ideas for your desktop environment, and see all the options you can try. There are several different ways to zoom and magnify windows or different portions of your desktop. Or you can add effects for many actions, such as window opening and closing, mouse movement, or window switching. From the desktop effects settings window you can also enable desktop compositing which is required for most effects. Even the speed of most animations and effects can be toggled, you have complete control. Good luck creating your own desktop environment!

GNOME Desktop

• Jason Conti has ported Indicator Applet to GNOME 3. That means that you can now get almost the same classic (fall-back) GNOME 3 session look in Ubuntu 11.10 like in Ubuntu 11.04.

• With this, you’ll be able to use all the applications that come with an Ubuntu Appindicator, Indicator Date/Time, the session indicator, network, Ubuntu Sound Menu, Messaging Menu and even the Global Menu (optional) in the classic (fallback) GNOME 3 session, just like in Unity. However, unlike in Unity, the Global Menu doesn’t hide automatically for maximized windows and there are no buttons on the top panel.

• In an experiment to for alternative “open file” dialogs we started experimenting with the Dash. When you open a new tab you will be greated with the following page. The thumbnails generated skip “comments” and “imports” and try to jump directly to some code or text from your work.

• The Montreal Summit 2011 turned out to be a very fun and productive gathering earlier this month of GNOME hackers and developers. With the 3.2 release behind us, there was a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward, reflected both in the technical and non-technical sessions that were held.

Distributions

• If you usually follow some blogs about Linux, especially those on Arch Linux, there is a common word that you are come across often, AUR, acronym of Arch User Repository. You might wonder what does it mean, what does it imply for the distribution, and why it’s so popular for the Arch Linux community. If you asking yourself those questions, this post is for you.

• First, you should keep these two characteristics in mind.

• * Everybody may contribute to AUR. * It’s really easy to contribute to AUR.

• AUR is a kind of repository totally public, open to whoever want to contribute to let some resources available to anyone. No ceremonials, agreement or long ritual initiation to submits a package to AUR.

• François Dupoux proudly announced two days ago, November 1st, a major release of his popular SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.

• The SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 Linux Live CD operating system for rescue tasks, includes the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, an updated version of the XOrg Server, Mozilla Firefox, and GParted applications.

New Releases

• Willensky Aristide proudly announced last night, November 1st, the immediate availability for download or upgrade of the ArchBang 2011.11 operating system.

• ArchBang 2011.11 is a Linux distribution based on the Arch Linux, but with the lightweight Openbox window manager. The new version brings various features, new apps and lots of bugfixes.

• Three months after 2.3.0 arrived, version 2.4.0 of the SystemRescueCd Linux distribution has been released. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD and using Xfce as its default desktop, the SystemRescueCd is configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. Supported file systems include Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.

Red Hat Family

• Embedded virtualisation makes more sense than having a layer of software sitting below the operating system, says Navin Thadani

• There you go. Now, some of you might claim that all of this can be done automatically in some other distributions, with as little as two or three mouse clicks inside the package manager window. True, but some other distributions have the life cycle of a butterfly and will often break in between updates, while CentOS is rock solid. And it will stay around for a long, long while. Did I mention it is very simple and lightweight, too? Plus, if you pay attention, most of what we did is a three-minute job, possibly less than what it takes to achieve the same results in Windows.

• All right, so now you truly have a perfect desktop, with pretty much anything and everything you could possibly need, including the latest software, games, virtualization products, eye-candy and bling-bing, cross-platform support, plugins, and more. Well, I hope you enjoyed this. See you around.

Fedora

• There are many different Linux distributions, each offering a slightly different flavor of the free and open source operating system.

• On Thursday evening (3 November), the Fedora Project announced that the fifth release candidate (RC5) for version 16 of its Linux distribution has been declared gold, noting that “It is a nice, golden, almost… mustard-like color”.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The true power of Linux is in its near-infinite variety: no matter what your particular requirement, the chances are that you can find a distribution tailored to your needs. There are Linux distributions aimed at power users, programmers, gamers, people moving from Windows and those with older hardware that just isn’t powerful enough for many modern operating systems.

• It’s this last market that Puppy Linux, a lightweight distribution created by Barry Kauler, targets. Unlike more ‘mainstream’ distributions like Ubuntu or openSUSE, ‘Wary’ Puppy Linux is designed to work on as wide a range of hardware as possible, regardless of its age or specification.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• This morning in the Community Roundtable, Jono talked about the culture of Ubuntu and how it is changing and morphing. This caused me to think about another group of people who have popped up in the Ubuntu (And open source in general) world.

• Curious about how design decisions are made for Ubuntu’s Unity? About how the development team reacts to criticisms of its efforts? If you are, then a moment of unusual — and troubling — clarity emerged last week on Launchpad, Canonical’s development site.

• The moment takes the form of Bug #882274, filed by Tal Liron under the title “Community engagement is broken.” Although other people comment, much of the discussion is between Liron, an active bug-filer, and Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder. Liron writes as an Ubuntu loyalist, mostly succeeding in maintaining his politeness and trying to be constructive, but his frustration and feelings of being ostracized are obvious.

• Ubuntu One As Your User Account: Canonical is planning to make it possible to sign into an Ubuntu installation using the Ubuntu One cloud credentials. In that if you sign into an Ubuntu system — whether it’s a desktop or mobile device — you can have immediate access to all of your data stored in Ubuntu’s cloud associated with your single sign-on account.

• Network access would be required, obviously. The plan would be writing a PAM module to authenticate against Ubuntu One, users wouldn’t need to create a local account, easily supports multiple devices, would streamline migrations, and provide other benefits. One of the action items expressed is to even have sign-in support with Facebook. More details can be found on this notes page.

• I was a huge ubuntu fan. They got it *right* for a few years there, from 9.10 through 10.10 which I currently run on my netbook and desktops. My son’s machine is still on 10.04, and now I have a problem.

• It seems they just decided that 10.04 is reaching end of life and now I can’t perform updates on his machine. Further, the option to easily upgrade to 10.10 is no longer available in the update manager, they want us all to move to 11.10.

• The default ISO size target for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is now 750MB, which rules out burning this Linux distribution to a traditional 700MB CD, but allows for 1GB+ USB flash drives and DVDs. Plus there’s some other news from the Orlando development summit happening this week.

• Back on Wednesday was a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for “Precise Pangolin” about targeting a 1.5GB DVD image by default. Doubling the available space on the standard Ubuntu disc image would allow for incorporating more software, since with recent releases they have had quite a hard time managing to fit all of their desired packages onto a 700MB image. There’s been optional Ubuntu DVD editions for earlier releases, but the Ubuntu default ISO has always been CD-sized.

Flavours and Variants

• Praising an operating system over and over is a sure sign of fanboyism, which is punishable by flogging in some countries, or at the very least, leads to ostracization in the higher social circles. But it is truly difficult to find fault with the Puppy Linux, release after release. And while I tested Lucid Puppy not that long ago, I had an urge for more great stuff, so I redid my testing with the latest release, version 5.2.8.

• What can you expect from Puppy? A lot really. And I mean a lot. I had Puppy tested on three separate occasions and it’s only getting better. Sometimes, you have small changes, sometimes big ones, like the brand new kernel based on Ubuntu Lucid and a whole new level of Wireless capability. My last review revealed these tremendous improvements that the major version 5 brought to the table. So let’s what you get with 5.2.8. Perhaps some fancy dessert?

• You know what really helped us get to where we are today though? Team work. The old saying of “many hands make light work” holds true even in the process of software creation. While there is no doubting that I am the face man of the Bodhi project, this enlightening initiative has been a team project from the start. We started off as a small three man team:

• Myself: Packaging Enlightenment and building the ISO image. Jason Peel: Graphics and Web design. Ken LaBuda: Server setup and upkeep

• One website lists ten reasons to use linux my favourites of which are “Linux is easier to use than Windows” and “Linux is fun.” It is day three of the experiment and so far I haven’t installed Linux but I have taken a Dell Vostro 3350 apart about five times. I borrowed this laptop off a fellow comrade in this experiment, Jake B, as I will be sending my own netbook home this coming December.

• Starting off I aimed to install both VectorLinux and Bodhi to compare them. I consider myself a relatively light computer user outside of the office and so comparing two different distributions would give me something to talk about. Alas this choice has come back to bight me in the…

• Clement Lefebvre posted a preview of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” today. The post listed several noteworthy announcements. However, it wasn’t the news itself that was the most noteable. What seemed most noticeable to me was that Mint possesses what Ubuntu is struggling to recapture and what openSUSE and Fedora are duking it out to earn: user excitement.

• Canonical is trying to recapture the blogger excitement they once enjoyed. openSUSE is trying so hard to gin up some excitement for their upcoming 12.1 release and Fedora is trying to find some for version 16 that just went gold, but again, with lackluster results. I was beginning to think users are just burnt out. And change isn’t such a good word anymore.

Devices/Embedded

• I spent the first half of last week in a hotel in the outskirts of Munich for Nokia’s Qt Developer Days 2011. This is an annual gathering of the Qt-enlightened, designed to help attendees refresh their skills, upgrade to new ones and hear the gospel from the people who actually write the toolkit. But it’s also a chance to catchup on all the latest Qt gossip.

• The Raspberry Pi, a $25 working computer the size of a credit card, is almost ready for public consumption. But questions remain.

• The device was first revealed in May, with the brainchild behind it, former games developer David Braben, revealing the specs as a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128Mb of RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, USB 2.0, HDMI and Composite outputs, an SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, and open source software including Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, and Python. In August we saw a demo of the Raspberry Pi working, with it impressively managing to run Quake III.

Phones

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Motorola Mobility updated its Xoom tablet with a 10.1-inch Xoom 2 and an 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition tablet, each running Android 3.2 on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The Wi-Fi only devices are debuting in the U.K. and Ireland, and feature 1280 x 800-pixel screens with splashguard coating, while the 10.1-inch model is 10 percent lighter and 33 percent thinner than the original.

• Motorola Mobility updated its Xoom tablet with a 10.1-inch Xoom 2 and an 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition tablet, each running Android 3.2 on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The Wi-Fi only devices are debuting in the U.K. and Ireland, and feature 1280 x 800-pixel screens with splashguard coating, while the 10.1-inch model is 10 percent lighter and 33 percent thinner than the original.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s Principal Designer on Firefox, Alex Faaborg, is leaving the company to “try out design work in an entirely different space.” Before he goes though, Faaborg is sharing some designs from the Mozilla cutting room floor — mockups and design ideas that never quite made it to Firefox.

• Most Firefox users probably don’t know Faaborg by name, but he’s overseen the design of some of the browser’s bigger user interface changes over the years, including the Awesomebar, the move to tabs-on-top, the one-click bookmark system and the revamped icon that launched with Firefox 3.

• Firefox has made many improvements over the years and it is constantly evolving. Many new features have been added in the newer versions. Currently you can find Firefox installed by default on most Linux systems. But many users don’t realize there Firefox has several themes and thousands of plug-ins to expand the user experience. So why not take advantage of it? Here you can learn how. For people new to Firefox you will find all of the tools you usually use as well. Firefox has the basic bookmark functions, typical menu setup, customizable toolbars, and multiple tabs for browsing sessions. If you don’t have Firefox on your system you can install with the following commands.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• First thing I want to say is ‘Thank you!’ to all the people who have been organizing the conference. It was a great experience for me – full of contrasts, inspiration and networking. I was very happy to meet so many of you LibreOffice enthusiasts personally. There have been a lot of detailed descriptions on various topics (e.g. I really liked Christophs post, also check the LibreOffice Planet). I do not want to add much more to these – only one little thing:

Public Services/Government

• The document, entitled All About Open Source, is to be used as part of the “toolkit for procurers” as an introduction to open source software. “Open source is part of a wider focus on lowering barriers to participation, including for SMEs, reducing vendor lock-in, increasing use of open standards, improving competitive tension and reducing the overall costs of government IT,” said the government.

• Mark Taylor, founder of small open source software company Sirius, has worked with the Cabinet Office on the input of the guidelines. “They have been a long time coming, but a lot of thought has gone into them and for that the government should be commended,” he said.

• Cabinet Office issues guidance on open source

• Glynn’s comments are worth reading, but the background here is that the lip-service that both Labour and Conservative governments have given to open source over the years, while making the UK one of the safest places for proprietary software vendors to do business with the government.

• These are sane documents, but unless they actually connect all the way through to departmental buying decisions they will be as inconsequential as all the previous attempts. Connecting all the way through means tracking purchasing and challenging the results that are discovered. Nothing here gives me confidence that connection will happen.

• The UK Government has published what it calls its “Open Source Procurement Toolkit”. It’s a sad reflection of how long the open source in government non-story has been going on that at the top of the home page for those documents you find: “The Government first set out its policy on the use of open source in 2004. This was restated in both 2009 and 2010.” And still nothing has happened….

• However, trying to look on the bright side, let’s welcome the documents offered here – not least because they come in two versions: as PDFs and – drumroll – as ODFs. That might seem a small thing, but that alone shows that somebody gets it – that open source in government isn’t just about talking, but about doing. Making document files routinely available in ODF format is an excellent example – so kudos for that, at least.

Programming

• jQuery logo The latest version of the popular jQuery JavaScript framework, version 1.7, unifies the way that JavaScript developers “bind” to events by adding new common .on() and .off() methods. There are a number of existing ways, .bind(), .unbind(), .delegate(), .undelegate(), .live() and .die() which will be superseded by the new .on() and .off() API. The use of the new API is recommended, although the old methods will remain in place for now.

Standards/Consortia

• An interesting project that Collabora has been working on lately, which they are now ready to show off, is Witivi. This is a non-linear video editor that was written in HTML5 and works with the WebKit rendering engine.

Leftovers

• In trying to switch away from proprietary services, I have found that there still a lack of good information comparing the different systems out there and giving folks advice on who might be able to help with things like setup or hosting. I really value hearing from other people about what they use and what they find useful but finding this information online still seems to be a struggle.

• The autonomo.us wiki seems like the natural place to host or summarize this discussion and to collect and share information useful for those of us slouching (or running) toward autonomy in our use of network services. I invite folks to get involved in improving that already useful resource.

• Recently I’ve been involved with a migration from one Exchange 2010 server to another, and the project is still ongoing at the moment. I’ve written before about how overly complicated Exchange is, when compared to other open source mail server alternatives. I came across more examples of how Exchange and Outlook have caused a large increase in help desk calls, because of features of Exchange that are complex and shouldn’t really be there for an email server.

• One Exchange 2010 server is in an old Windows domain, and another Exchange 2010 server is in a new Windows domain. The reason? The domain name is being changed. It was decided to bring up a new domain in parallel, and migrate users over time to the new domain. This is a huge multi-month project, as the more PCs and servers and members of the domain that there are, the more complex a domain change can be. So far, the two Exchange servers are happy and we have them sending and receiving mail to/from each other just fine. But, there are some quirks with Outlook that have caused much grief.

Science

• Since world+dog uses multithreaded software, it’s nice to know that someone cares about what goes wrong with it.

• A computer science group from Columbia University says it has a solution to “data races” in multithreaded programs, a common source of bugs and crashes. Its offering, called Peregrine, is the result of work at the Columbia Engineering School led by an assistant professor of computer science called Junfeng Yang.

Finance

• Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

• So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

• MF Global, the failed firm whose chairman and CEO is Jon Corzine, has already destroyed the wealth of its investors and roiled the banking world. But now we are learning that it may have lost customer funds as well.

• A major Wall Street broker in derivatives markets with $41 billion in assets, MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Monday after Mr. Corzine made disastrous bets on bonds issued by European governments. It initially appeared he was (only) gambling with his firm’s own capital, but a federal official tells the Journal that MF Global has admitted diverting money out of customer accounts, which may be a violation of federal law.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Steve Jobs’ obsession with shutting down Andriod by spending all his company’s profits on hiring patent lawyers is starting to get out of hand. A tiny restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay which makes “balanced fast food” has had a writ from Jobs’ Mob and ordered to shut its doors.

• The reason is that Jobs’ legal hounds have decided that Apple fan boys are so stupid that they will confuse a small bistro with an Apple store. The fear is that they will buy a sandwich thinking it is the latest slimmed down Air and will complain when they try to plug it in and it does not go.

• Apple lawyers may have a point, anyone who is dumb enough to buy an iPhone 4S, which is identical to an iPhone 4, might have some problems with identification. But the rest of the universe, which can tie up its collective shoe laces, should be able to tell the difference between a sandwich bar and an Apple shop. One of the owners of the restuarant told IT World that all the outfit wanted to do was create bistro menues of fast food that’s healthy. Local authorities gave the name their approval. The logo looks more like the Georgia Peach logo than the Apple computer logo.

• The owner of Apfelkind, Christin Römer, registered the logo with the fashion and service industry in Munich this June. In the letter from Apple’s lawyers, they claimed that the logo could cause confusion with Apple’s global brand.

• The café’ (below) is advertised as an establishment for “children, coffee, and cake.” Its website describes it as a place where parents can relax over a cup of coffee, while their children are occupied in a playroom that features painting. Their menu contains several apple-laden snacks and beverages, such as apples with red cocoa cream, sugar apples, and apple blossom tea.

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