● 11.10.11

● Links 10/11/2011: Ask Fedora, Thunderbird 8

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Clearly we’ve a long way to go before The Linux Foundation or RMS can put their stamp of approval on our revue — all our media files use proprietary codecs and file formats; likewise, our audio and video cues are executed from the booth on proprietary software rather than FOSS alternatives.

• Even so, I’d wager that a lot of people in my local comedy racket would think they’d need a Mac or Windows laptop to play such a critical part in a show like this. They’d be wrong.

Kernel Space

• One measure of GNU/Linux’s success in mindshare is how it is perceived by the public. A whole generation of kids who watch TV are seeing Tux the penguin, mascot of Linux, on commercials for Fruit Loops breakfast cereal. What do you make of this?

• Much has been written about how the Internet has revolutionized collaboration and made it possible for your brilliant ideas to make a difference no matter where you live on the planet. Bill Gates is famously quoted in Nick Kristoff’s “The World is Flat” that “… so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.” This is of course true, but even with the Internet, there is no replacement for face-to-face interaction. The tribe, it seems, still needs to gather around the fire to have a talk now and then.

• Job seekers with Linux smarts have the upper hand in the Linux job market right now, but the right combination of technical and people skills are still required.

• “When we look to hire Linux system administrators, there are a few key aspects that get our attention,” says Peter Baer Galvin, Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies. “Natural curiosity is one. Is the candidate interested in technology, finding solutions to problems, inventing new solutions, and experimenting? We find those attributes to be a good indicator of whether the admin will be able to improvise, learn, and determine the best course of action.”

• Obviously, no Linux admin can have all the skills every employer will want. But as Galvin says, natural curiosity can help make you stand out as a job candidate.

Graphics Stack

• Back in September I provided the most comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux graphics comparison that took 28 graphics cards from all supported ATI/AMD Radeon product families and tested them under Linux using the latest Catalyst driver as well as the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D driver. In this article is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side as I take most of the GeForce graphics cards at my disposal and try them under the NVIDIA binary Linux driver and the community-developed open-source “Nouveau” driver. Not only is the OpenGL performance looked at for multiple generations of NVIDIA hardware, but the thermal and power consumption is compared too. In certain OpenGL workloads, the open-source Linux driver is now faster than NVIDIA’s own driver for select graphics cards in a fair comparison, but overall the NVIDIA blob still reigns supreme.

Applications

• When it comes to a file syncing, there are quite a few options that are available on Linux as well as Windows. Dropbox is probably the most widely used such program. Users of Ubuntu can use Ubuntu One to sync files between Windows and smartphones. You also have lesser known but very good programs like Wuala and the upcoming Sparkleshare.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Over the last couple of years it has become almost a tradition to have a Gluon sprint prior to Qt Developer Days in Munich. This year was not different. Through much effort, a sprint was pulled together for the Gluon team, in part commemorating the first of these sprints two years ago, where the Gluon Vision was first laid down, and in part to assist in the work towards the next release.

GNOME Desktop

• GNOME 3 has become something of a polarising moment for the popular Linux desktop. In chasing visions of tablets, touchscreens and the mythical “everyday user”, the GNOME 3 Shell has left many Linux power users scratching their heads, wondering why the GNOME developers decided to fix a desktop that wasn’t broken. The problem for those that dislike the new GNOME is not so much the underlying GNOME 3, which is in many ways a step up from its predecessor, but the GNOME Shell specifically, which looks and behaves like something much more suited for a tablet than a 30 inch desktop monitor.

Distributions

Gentoo Family

• The Gentoo project today announced the official Gentoo Wiki. This step has been a long time coming. When disaster took out most of the volunteer wiki several years ago, a big hole was left. This hole has now been filled by a “herd of proper Gentoo developers.” The Gentoo project runs on its documentation. The Gentoo Handbook is indispensable for getting Gentoo up and running properly, but for issues beyond what’s covered in the Handbook a well stocked wiki is ideal. Documentation at the Gentoo Wiki is still a bit sparse right now, but volunteers are invited to contribute.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. began a program for Israeli startups designed to boost use of its open-source software and increase sales as more companies migrate to cloud computing.

• “Our goal is for next-generation Internet service providers to build on our platform,” Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst told reporters in Tel Aviv. “As they grow, their customers will buy our software.”

• Seven Israeli early stage technology companies with revenue of less than $1.5 million each were chosen to get free access to Red Hat enterprise software. The program will be expanded in Israel before being extended to other nations, Whitehurst said. Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer its software at a declining discount as the companies’ sales grow.

Fedora

• Fedora, the free, open-source Linux operating system distribution from the Fedora Project, has been updated to version 16. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat.

• Fedora 16 offers a range of enhancements to its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities, along with numerous package upgrades and usability improvements.

• Fedora’s latest release, Verne, features several cloud and virtualization enhancements and capabilities designed to make it easier to build large cloud deployments.

• The new virtualization and cloud features in Fedora 16 allow administrators and users to launch, run and manage cloud environments, according to the project announcement on Nov. 8 from Red Hat sponsors The Fedora Project, which is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• However, Fedora developers tend to include latest cutting-edge technologies into Fedora, long before they are included in RHEL or other distributions.

• The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project released Fedora 16 (“Verne”), featuring the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment and virtualization and cloud enhancements — including support for the Aeolus and OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms. Version 16 upgrades the techie-focused Linux distribution to Linux 3.1, and moves up to the GRUB2 bootloader and Firefox 7.0.1, while offering enhanced contact and document management apps.

• Fedora Utils is a “post installation” script for Fedora which lets you easily install applications that are not available in the main Fedora repositories and tweak various settings.

Debian Family

• Though I’ve used Ubuntu since 2005 and it has been my Linux distro of choice, I prefer to use Debian GNU/Linux for running web server on my VPS or a server at work. Why? because:

• * Debian is quicker to install * Debian is lightweight / uses less memory / feels faster * Debian doesn’t install XWindows by default * Debian feels more ‘hands-on’ * Debian has the largest software repository

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The new version of the graphical “Y PPA Manager” can now be used under KDE, as the developers have integrated code to support kdesudo, a component that allows programs to be executed at root privilege level.

• It was just a few weeks ago that planning began on Ubuntu 12.04, or “Precise Pangolin,” but already key details about the upcoming version of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution are beginning to emerge.

• In the Ubuntu world (and I am sure in other distributions as well), the choice of what apps we ship in the default install has always garnered much debate and discussion. With each UDS there is a default apps discussion, and the following few weeks usually involves some debate over whether the decisions reached made sense. In the past this has involved the addition of TomBoy and other Mono apps, the removal of GIMP from the default install, the addition of PiTiVi, the removal of PiTiVi, the Rhythmbox to Banshee move, and now the move from Banshee back to Rhythmbox.

• One of the fundamental kernel changes that was decided upon during the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit by Canonical’s kernel team is to drop support for the non-PAE 32-bit Linux kernel. However, it seems there is growing resistance towards this move.

• Physical Address Extensions (PAE) is a feature found on most 32-bit x86 CPUs that allow addressing system memory greater than 4GB. Vanilla 32-bit kernels without PAE can’t address more than 4GB of RAM, but most processors still in use today support the CPU feature. Running the 32-bit PAE kernel on systems with less than 4GB of physical memory is not an issue, as long as your CPU supports PAE. Since nearly all hardware that will be touching the 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release supports PAE, Canonical wants to drop support for the non-PAE kernel. (64-bit users don’t need to worry about PAE.)

Flavours and Variants

• I was going to test Linux Mint in a virtual machine. After reading that, I won’t bother. It’s obviously an organization intent on building revenue and restricting freedom rather than allowing users to do what they want, use information technology freely. Further, while free software licences do allow one to run software with little restriction, this organization is merely following the letter of the licences and not the spirit of sharing. We should move on to better things.

• Obviously Linux Mint has some good features/policies but it is still a small distribution despite recent popularity and it may grow into something beautiful or something horrible. It has a long way to go on the evolutionary trail of distros.

• In the last few weeks, I’ve heard through at least three channels about a new lightweight Linux, Bodhi Linux. With system requirements of a 300 MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM, and 1.5 GB of hard disk, it sounds perfect for a few systems I have awaiting refurbishing. The downside, according to TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen, is that it needs some additional work after installation.

Devices/Embedded

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• With Firefox only available for Android and Maemo, Mozilla hasn’t made many inroads on the mobile front, but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting still. The open source organization has been working on a project called Boot to Gecko, or B2G, with the goal of building a standalone OS allowing web developers to build apps that are equal “in every way” to native apps built for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. To that end, B2G is creating new web APIs that safely expose capabilities like the phone, camera, Bluetooth, and SMS to web pages and applications. The goal is to boot the OS on an Android-compatible device, as well as port or build new apps.

• Mozilla is releasing a major update for Firefox (Firefox 8) today, so let’s give a look at what we are getting in this release cycle.

• Some releases ago, Firefox introduced a feature so that when you are restoring a previous Firefox session, the current tab is loaded first while the others are loaded afterwards in the background or as soon as you switch to another. If this is not the behavior you want, there is now an option in the Options (Preferences) window, to load all tabs at once as before.

• Thunderbird 8, made available for download on Tuesday, is built using the Gecko 8 browser engine used in Firefox 8, also released the same day. Notably, the new version of the email software is accompanied by Lightning 1.0. The add-on, which has been under development at Mozilla for years, gives Thunderbird a calendar module.

• A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla’s CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here’s the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.

• One of the key people in this tale is Dave Hyatt, the main architect of tabbed browsing at Mozilla, and now at Apple. Eich explains: “he was getting fed up with Netscape management.” Perhaps as a result of that frustration, he was also writing new browsers, one of which became the popular Mac OS X browser Camino.

• “Dave quit Netscape to go to Apple,” Eich recalls. “This was a real feather in Apple’s cap – Hyatt knew all about Web compatibility – the team at Apple was very talented, but they didn’t know about Web compatibility. He wasn’t working on Mozilla at that point, except in his spare time. Inside Apple he was working on a fork of KHTML which led to the whole Webkit story.”

• Firefox 8 has been officially released today as an upgrade from Firefox 7.0.1.

• It’s a big week for Mozilla, as Firefox celebrates its seventh birthday and Firefox 8 hits the interwebs.

• In recent years, Firefox has lost ground to browsers such as Google Chrome. Yet Firefox remains a significant and important part of the browsing landscape.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.4, an improved version of the award-winning free office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice has recently won InfoWorld’s BOSSIE Award 2011 as Best of Open Source Software, and the Open World Forum Experiment Award of Most-Popular Software.

• Much has been written today about the enterprise and cloud features of Oracle Solaris 11, which was launched today, but what’s new for those of us who just like to have the robustness and security of Solaris on our desktop machines? Here are a few of the Solaris 11 desktop highlights:…

Openness/Sharing

• A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

Standards/Consortia

• Adobe’s love affair with its Flash format has come to an end. Oh sure, Adobe said they were just killing development on mobile browser Flash in favor of HTML5, but seriously, do you think, that they’ll keep working on Flash on the desktop for much longer? If you do, I have a nice, lightly-used bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. No, the end of Flash is in sight and HTML5 is now the one true future for Internet video.

• In Adobe’s official announcement, Danny Winokur, Adobe’s VP and general manager of interactive development, wrote, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”

Leftovers

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could face as much as $2.6 billion in legal losses, largely on mortgage-related lawsuits and probes, the securities firm said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

• New York-based Goldman also reported trading losses on 21 days in the third quarter, a period in which Goldman posted just its second quarterly loss in a dozen years as a public company. That was its highest number since the bank’s fiscal fourth quarter in 2008, which saw the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Goldman’s previous quarterly loss.

Censorship

Civil Rights

• The Public Safety Minister and various police folks are arguing that telecom operators should have to hand over any and all of the following information without a warrant and without an underlying criminal investigation: name, address, telephone number and electronic mail address, Internet protocol address, mobile identification number, electronic serial number, local service provider identifier, international mobile equipment identity number, international mobile subscriber identity number and subscriber identity module card number that are associated with the subscriber’s service and equipment.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The enforcement of Canada’s net neutrality rules, which govern how Internet providers manage their networks, was in the spotlight earlier this year when documents obtained under the Access to Information Act revealed virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process.

• The documents painted a discouraging picture, with multiple complaints against Rogers Communications due to the throttling of online games going seemingly nowhere, while a complaint against satellite Internet provider Xplorenet languished for months until the Commission threatened to launch a public proceeding.

ACTA

• According to the agenda, the Committee on International Trade will discuss ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) behind closed doors on 23 November. [1] We object to this discussion being held behind closed doors. Since the publication of the ACTA text, discussions have to take place in public.

• ACTA’s predecessor, the TRIPS agreement, killed millions of people. 500 Million Europeans, and billions abroad, are entitled to full transparency.

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