● 11.05.11

● Links 5/11/2011: LinuxCon Europe Photos, Plasma Workspaces 4.8

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• So, again, the premise is wrong, that GNU/Linux is at the 1% level. Reality is very different in other parts of the world. GNU/Linux is being promoted/advertised/pushed/sold. Check out Dell’s site in China. Dell has no problem selling GNU/Linux there. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is just unaware of that…

Server

• To date, ARM-based microprocessors have been used mostly in consumer electronics. Thanks to a new push from ARM vendor Calxeda, ARM will soon find a home in data center servers, too.

• “ISP infrastructure is increasingly being stressed by the advent of smartphones, driving bandwidth requirements higher while also stressing the DNS infrastructure, where even a single smartphone wake-up requires 36 DNS lookups,” Kevin Dickson, vice president of product management at Infoblox told InternetNews.com.

• Inside the Infoblox 4010 is a an Intel Xeon 5650 running at 2.66 GHz with 6 Cores and 4 x 300 GB hard drives and 24 GB of DDR3 RAM. The base operating system is the Infoblox NIOS (network infrastructure operating system) which is built on top off a Linux kernel. For the DNS features, the Infoblox system is based on the open source BIND DNS server, including what Dickson referred to as, “extensive enhancements to add management functionality.”

Kernel Space

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• If you buy a “smart” TV or DVR these days, the odds are that it will support UPnP for hassle-free media sharing. Thus devices like TiVos can locate each other and share recordings across the LAN, and a lot of Linux music and video players support connecting to UPnP shares as well. Give it a moment’s thought, however, and you’ll probably ask yourself “does it need a specialized device, or can I turn my existing Linux box into a full-blown UPnP server for my existing content?” Well, good news: not only can you, but it is pretty painless to do.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Having returned from two weeks away in Morocco, things have been hectic and Busy-with-a-capital-B. I’ve been working on some exciting new possibilities for Plasma Active which are not quite at the point that I can speak openly about them, but it’s been taking a fair amount of my time and energy .. and I think it will pay off next year.

• Nokia would abnegate the ownership of Qt, a cross-platform C++ application framework, shortly. Nokia would comply byopen-governance and would remain as ‘Maintainers of Qt’, said Kalle Karkas, head of Operator Marketing, Nokia, Finland at the third edition of the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 held in Bangalore today. Nokia would continue to invest in Qt and it has been recruiting people in this arena. He added that Nokia is not porting Qt to other platform but the company intends to focus on the developers community.

GNOME Desktop

• There’s some great news today: it’s now possible to run the GNOME Shell with Mutter but not having to rely upon any GPU hardware driver! Software rendering is now working with GNOME Shell rather than any fall-back thanks to improvements with Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe.

• Adam Jackson of Red Hat has announced to the world that it’s now possible for everyone to use GNOME Shell, regardless of whether you have a proper 3D hardware driver loaded. Adam says that as of tomorrow, LLVMpipe will no longer be treated as an unsupported driver for Fedora’s Rawhide, which is what will eventually be Fedora 17.

Distributions

New Releases

• Clonezilla Live CD maker, Steven Shiau, proudly announced on November 2nd a new stable version of his GParted Live CD operating system for partitioning tasks.

• Being based on the latest build (11-02-2011) of Debian Sid, the new GParted Live CD 0.10.0-3 distribution brings the amazing and improved GParted 0.10.0 application, and a handful of improvements.

• Version 0.10.0-3 of GParted Live, a small bootable Linux distribution that contains the GParted utility, has been released. GParted, which stands for Gnome PARTition EDitor, is a partition editor application that can be used to create, organise and delete disk partitions via a graphical user interface (GUI). Supported file systems include Btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT16 and FAT32, HFS and HFS+, NTFS and others.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat wrapped up a major channel partner conference last week. But the channel chatter continues within the Linux and open source specialist. Indeed, Red Hat is mulling potential ways to make sure the company’s internal sales team works even more closely with channel partners, according to North America Channel Chief Roger Egan. Here’s the update, and a look at how Red Hat plans to accelerate Linux, virtualization, Jboss middleware, cloud and storage sales through the channel.

• First, the sales chatter. Red Hat is exploring ways to ensure the company’s internal sales team has a “neutral” approach to revenue generation — potentially getting rewarded the same fee whether a deal is sold direct or indirect. As that internal chatter continues, Red Hat is making quantifiable progress with its partner program. The company expects to become the world’s first $1 billion open source company this fiscal year. Generally speaking, roughly 50 to 60 percent of Red Hat’s revenues come from partners. And more than 400 people — including 300 channel partners — attended a Red Hat partner conference in Florida last week.

Fedora

• While the Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening right now in the United States, over in India there is FUDCon, the Fedora conference.

• Kicking off today and running through the start of next week (6 November) is FUDCon India 2011. This conference for users and developers of Fedora is happening in Pune, India. Details on this year’s Fedora India conference can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki.

• EDIT: A previous version of this post listed the release as 2011-11-10, it’s actually 2011-11-08, my error! We did not delay two days or anything.

• That means GNOME Shell will be available for everyone and GNOME Fallback will no longer be required, but this raises a question: will GNOME Fallback still be available (since GNOME Shell will work without 3D acceleration, GNOME Fallback – which exists because until now GNOME Shell didn’t run without 3D acceleration -, doesn’t have a purpose anymore)?

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• (fret not, this is not only a wall of text, there’s a juicy screencast at the end if you make it all the way)

• Me being the maintainer of the applications lens in Unity you might wonder why I am now blogging about an alternative apps lens – let alone why I actually wrote the alternative myself!

• My favorite quote in the whole thing, and there are many, comes from Ubuntu SABDFL* Mark Shuttleworth: “I fully accept that Unity may not be for you. Then don’t use it. On Ubuntu you can choose Unity, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and many others.”

• And there you are, folks — certainly a unique concept of “community” in three words: My way or highway. Go ahead and use one of the other ‘buntus if you so desire, since we’re not changing the flagship for anyone or anything.

• Once upon a time, I used to be a Gentoo user and made it a hobby to tweak my computer’s operating system to be as minimalist and high performance as possible. It was great fun and I learned a lot about what was going on with my computer. I knew what each file on my system did because I had directly or indirectly chosen for it to be there. At one point I had five Gentoo machines compiling away.

• There’s some good news coming out of the last day of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS developer summit. During a session that’s going on right now, it was decided that the 64-bit version of Ubuntu (beginning with 12.04 Precise) will finally be the recommended version over the 32-bit Ubuntu.

• While Linux was the first operating system to have strong x86_64/AMD64 support, there’s been Ubuntu 64-bit images from the start, and most hardware for several years has supported 64-bit software, Canonical / Ubuntu have always recommended the 32-bit version of Ubuntu over 64-bit (in terms of when going to the download area of Ubuntu.com, etc). With Ubuntu 12.04 next April, this will finally change so that U

Flavours and Variants

• In Linux Mint 11 we made the decision to keep Gnome 2.32. The traditional Gnome desktop, although it’s not actively developed by the Gnome development team anymore, is still by far the most popular desktop within the Linux community. As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.

Devices/Embedded

• Powered by 400 MHz ARM9 CPU, Matrix-522 comes with built-in 64 MB SDRAM, 128 MB NAND Flash, and 2 MB Data Flash for optimal performance in automotive, factory automation, and industrial control system applications. I/O includes 2 LANs, 2 RS-232/422/485 serial ports, 2 USB hosts, and 21 GPIO. Also, dual isolated CAN (Control Area Network) bus 2.0-compliant ports support CANSocket and CANOpen APIs. Fail-proof capabilities for system backup and recovery are also included.

Phones

Android

• That’s what we should be seeing in the market for PCs generally but competition is stifled by lock-in of OEMs, retailers and businesses. It’s about time that changed. In Q2, the world shipped 91 million notebook/desktop PCs. Change will come but it’s too slow for me. While FLOSS is taking over the mobile space, it will penetrate the monopoly more slowly, one purchase or installation at a time. In Q2 50 million PCs shipped with “7″.

• A year ago at Google HQ in Mountain View, Andy Rubin built a mechanical robot arm. “I put a hammer in its hand and connected it to a big Chinese gong. Whenever Android sells 10,000 units, the gong sounds and you can hear it through the whole building. When I designed it, it sounded three times a day: now it does it every three minutes. I really have to reprogram it…”

• Rubin is Google’s head of mobile and the creator of the Android operating system. He’s also a DIY robotics fanatic, in case you hadn’t guessed. At home, he has several remote-controlled helicopters, a retina-scanning entry system (“a great way of managing relations with ex-girlfriends — no problem giving keys back, just an update to the database”), a laser-controlled Segway, and a home cinema where the lights dim when the titles run — all designed and built by him. So naturally, he built another robot to celebrate the success of his most famous creation, Android.

• It’s an unusual way to boast, but Rubin is allowed some bombast. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this spring, the most important trade show worldwide for tablets and smartphones, 90 per cent of the devices unveiled ran Android. In August this year, tech analysis firm Canalys reported that 48 per cent of all smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2011 were Android devices. The nearest competitor was Apple, on 19 per cent. Android overtook Apple’s iOS in 2010 — according to Google, 500,000 Android devices are currently activated every day.

Ballnux

• HTC and Verizon Wireless announced a high-end Android 2.3 phone due Nov. 14 that’s said to be the first U.S. smartphone with “Beats Audio” integration. The HTC Rezound is equipped with a 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm MDM9600 processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 4G LTE, and a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 display, and features lightweight Beats headphones.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon’s recently announced “Kindle Fire.” B&N’s “Nook Tablet” is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon’s tablet, among other differences.

Free Software/Open Source

• Chuckle. You know you’re winning when the enemy has to keep you alive… M$’s “partners” using FLOSS prevents M$ from using all its anti-competitive tactics.

• Motaparti: At KeyPoint Technologies, we are a team that is passionate about combining linguistics and computing to deliver new experiences for consumers. Our initial focus lies in improving the current text input experiences across all types of connected devices like smart phones, feature phones, tablets, connected TVs and IVI systems. We are a trusted partner for OEMs, platform providers and developers looking to innovate and deliver an enhanced user experience in this area. We are privately owned, with our headquarters in Scotland and offices in India and the US.

• Apache Harmony, the project to produce an open source cleanroom implementation of Java, has been now been dispatched to the Apache Attic where projects are placed when they are discontinued. A vote was taken within the project management committee (PMC), which saw a 20 to 2 majority send the project’s codebase into the loft for storage. The code will reside in the Attic where other developers may continue to view and use it.

• According to a study by Ericsson, by 2020 the world will contain some 50 billion network-enabled devices. Of these, many will be temporary or with low network bandwidth, or restricted in some other manner. RFID tags are a one such example of a restricted device.

Events

• LOS ANGELES – The SCALE 10X team announces that registration has opened for the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America To register for SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org and click on the Registration tab. Admission for SCALE 10X ranges from $10 for an Expo Only Ticket to $60 for a Full Access Pass. The Linux Beginner’s Training Class, a separate admission, is $25.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has elevated the most recent Firefox 8 Beta to release candidate status.

• The Principal Designer of Firefox, Alex Faaborg, the man behind almost every icon, button, and visual flourish in Firefox 3, 4, and beyond, is leaving Mozilla. Before departing, though, he has treated us to a list of his proudest UX achievements — including the Awesome Bar and the new Firefox logo — and also his department’s weirdest and most wonderful failures. Have you ever heard of the fluffy pie menu, or the stealth theme for private browsing? I thought not.

• This week I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the “thinking out loud” stops, and the “making it happen” begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows.

• Ireland is well placed to become a leader in the Mozilla and open source communities, according to the inaugural meet up of a Mozilla Ireland group in Dublin’s Odeon on Wednesday.

SaaS

• Open source cloud computing solutions are proliferating, as businesses and organizations demand flexible solutions for deploying public and private cloud applications. Among these solutions, OpenStack remains one of the highest profile examples, with vendors ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Dell to Citrix supporting it. Increasingly, OpenStack will face off with Eucalyptus Systems, which we’ve covered since its inception here at OStatic. In a piece for InfoWorld, Savio Rodrigues makes some good points about why Eucalyptus Systems may win organizations over and outpace OpenStack in the long run.

• After reading a recent interview with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, I’m beginning to reconsider my views on the contest between Eucalyptus and OpenStack becoming the dominant open source cloud platform.

• The vendor attention around OpenStack of late has been nothing short of amazing. Once a project controlled by Rackspace, vendors such as Dell, Citrix Systms, and Hewlett-Packard have joined the OpenStack open source community. Rackspace has given control of the project to the OpenStack foundation, apparently at the behest of large vendors contributing to the project. However, as Mickos states, OpenStack is still a work in progress and not production-ready — yet.

• Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I liked OOo4Kids then and I like it now. You get small, incremental improvements, which is a good thing. But like I wrote earlier, the journey is still long. There’s huge potential here, and it must be tapped. This require larger, bigger, more drastic, and faster changes to make the software the ultimate educational weapon.

• I would recommend completely overhauling the interface in non-Writer utilities and maybe even ditching them altogether, especially if children are not likely to use them. Then, focus most of the effort on making the program as safe and smart to use, with intelligent hints toward efficiency, separation of content and automated tasks.

• Version 1.2 is better than its half-number sibling, but there’s more to be done. I’m pleased overall and still quite optimistic, so I shall surely follow its progress into puberty. With some luck and lots of hard work, this could be the best office suite yet, for all the unintended reasons.

• Thanks to Alexandros for the recommendation!

Business

• Open source email and groupware provider Open-Xchange (www.open-xchange.com) announced on Friday at its third annual Open-Xchange Summit that it expects to have more than 42 million users by year end – an increase of 75 percent over the prior year.

Semi-Open Source

• SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the release of Sugar 6.3, a major upgrade to its Community Edition. Since 2004, there have been more than ten million downloads of Sugar and its related projects, delivering value to more than 850,000 people at more than 70,000 organizations worldwide.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join us, EFF, Demand Progress, and Fight for The Future in opposing the latest round of Internet Blacklist legislation.

Project Releases

• Thanks to your help in testing and reporting bugs during the beta period, we believe we have a solid, stable release. If you do find problems, file a bug and be sure to choose jQuery 1.7 in the version selection. Also be sure to provide a jsFiddle test case so we can quickly analyze the problem.

Public Services/Government

• The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit in an effort to increase its adoption in the public sector.

• The toolkit contains information on procuring open source software as well as guides to vendors and what sort of costs are likely to be associated with going down the open source route.

Openness/Sharing

• More than ever, companies are embracing the principles of open source to make major improvements, both internally and externally. Openness, transparency, democratization, and collaboration can be used to make your business a better place to work and create a better culture.

Open Hardware

• Although I Programmer is first and foremost a programming magazine, we can’t ignore the hardware. Open source software has been a well known idea, and something of a success, for decades, open source hardware is relatively new. You can say that open source hardware was born out the of the “maker” movement, but for such an obvious idea it has been slow to take off. The one big notable exception being the Arduino.

• In an effort to popularize the open hardware movement we now have the Open Hardware Journal starting with November 1, 2011 Issue 1. As it says on the cover page you are free to read it, copy it and redistribute it – as long as you don’t charge a fee, of course..

Programming

Leftovers

• I finally have to bring this up, as it’s been bothering me for years. At one location, I’m forced to use Microsoft Outlook 2010 for email, because it is all that is supported. Being in IT, I can adjust to various programs, even ones I don’t like. Except that there’s one thing with Outlook 2010 that I cannot stand. When replying to an HTML message, I cannot insert line breaks within the reply text from other users, that is indented to show previous correspondence, while keeping the original text marked so that it is together. In Outlook 2003 I could do this by right-clicking and decreasing the indent as many times as needed which would eventually put in a true line break where I could insert my comments within the reply text from other users. In Outlook 2010, this option is mysteriously gone. I can press the “Decrease Indent” button a million times and the cursor just sits there. Ah, this must be a “new feature” of Outlook 2010. Unfortunately, it is extremely counterproductive. When replying to somebody’s message, I find it very convenient to insert my reply lines within their original message text. This functionality has been around since the early days of email in every email program I’ve used. This way, when the recipient sees my reply, they can see exactly what my reply comments relate to, and their original text is grouped together. This also makes back and forth correspondence much more visible and easier to follow when both the sender and recipient do this. I am not a big fan of including all of my message text in one area, either in the very top or bottom of the message, because it is more work for the me and the recipient to try and figure out what each section of it applies to. It gets messier with the more back and forth correspondences, because there’s reply text above and below the original text from multiple sends back and forth.

Science

• Exascale computing is also expected to advance by three orders of magnitude over the next decade or so. Having broken the petascale barrier a few years ago, the supercomputing community has its sights set on exascale systems. There are many challenges involved in developing such systems, foremost among them being power consumption.

• Today’s most powerful supercomputers consume roughly between 1 and 3 megawatts per petaflop. It is generally agreed that an exascale-class system must consume no more than 10-20 megawatts, otherwise you would need a whole power plant alongside each such system, and their operating costs would be prohibitively expensive. Thus, the 1000-fold increase in performance from petascale to exascale must be achieved with no more than a 10-fold increase in overall power consumption. This means that just about all components of the system, – including its processor, memory, communications and software, – must be redesigned to achieve the required two order of magnitude improvements in power consumption.

Security

• Yet again we have the ultimate vulnerability discovered in that other OS, all supported versions except the GUI-less 2008. Just viewing a document with a TrueType font in it can give a remote thug complete control of a PC running that other OS.

Finance

• As Occupy Wall Street protesters and police face off in large cities and small towns across America, it is worth revisiting the positive policing relationship that was developed between protesters and law enforcement during the “original occupation” of the Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011.

• On February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, require 100% voter participation in union recertification and end the state’s practice of withholding and reimbursing union dues. The bill was perceived as a death blow to public employee unions and prompted massive, sustained and peaceful protests inside and outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in the winter of 2011.

• November 5th is Bank Transfer Day, a hopping Facebook campaign urging Americans to move their money out of big national banks and into local banks or credit unions.

• Hundreds of jobs are being lost, police are being diverted from violent parts of town, some businesses are closing, and others are choosing not to locate in downtown Oakland at all, she said at Thursday’s special City Council meeting.

• Yet at the same meeting, three of Quan’s staunchest supporters urged the council to support the Occupy Oakland encampment. One of them, Don Link, told The Chronicle that they spoke at the meeting on behalf of a group that emerged from Quan’s mayoral campaign and is led by Quan’s husband, Floyd Huen.

Privacy

• In its quest to make sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 never sees the light of day in Australia, Apple has levelled a legal threat against an Australian tablet importer in an attempt to destroy the devices and obtain the names of those who have purchased one. Unfortunately for Apple, the tablet importer in question has no intention of playing ball.

• Gadget importer Dmavo had been capitalising on the injunction slapped on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in October until last week, when Apple’s high-powered legal team at Freehills hand-delivered a 21-page cease and desist order designed to choke off the supply of the Samsung tablet to Australia.

• The document (PDF) ordered Dmavo to return an undertaking to Freehills, stating first and foremost that the importer would stop selling, importing and disposing of all variations of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple and its lawyers also sought to obtain all of Dmavo’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 units for immediate destruction, as well as the names, addresses and other details of anyone who bought one of the devices from Dmavo. Apple also wanted to find out from which company Dmavo was importing the devices.

• In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

• The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Paris, 2nd of November 2011 — La Quadrature du Net publishes today its response1 to the BEREC consultation2 on “transparency and Net Neutrality”. BEREC and the European Commission must move past the failed “wait-and-see” approach championed by Commissioner Neelie Kroes by adopting EU-wide Net neutrality regulation. Citizens can help protect the Internet by responding to the consultation3 and refusing “transparency” as a solution to Net Neutrality violations.

DRM

• There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn’t work is to put it in terms he understands: “What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?” It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it’s a historical one. Rhapsody just had the next in a line of DRM music services to go–this week the company told its users than anyone with RAX files has unil November 7 to back them up in another format or lose them the next time they upgrade their systems.

ACTA

• “NO to ACTA!”, the video published by La Quadrature du Net last week, has been viewed more than one million times. It has become the top rated and most viewed this week in Youtube’s “News & Politics” section. Such an impressive welcome illustrates how crucial of a responsibility lies between the hands of the Members of the European Parliament with their upcoming vote on ACTA. It is also an encouraging step towards defeating this dangerous agreement —an effort requiring a broad mobilization among citizens.

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