● 11.24.11

● Links 24/11/2011: Doom Code, Atmos Storage for Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I like new things. I really do. But, like most people, I don’t like to change the way I work. I have built an efficient flow to my day and to disrupt it by trudging around through some ill-conceived new interface that only serves to frustrate me and slow me down is not something I take lightly. The rule of thumb for any new interface should be efficiency not the lack thereof. For now, I’ll stick with the “classic” versions of my favorite operating systems.

Server

• There are many ways to design a website. The most skilled among us are best-known for being able to code a website using nothing but a text editor. However, for those of us who are less skilled in this area, the right software tools can make all the difference.

• In this article, I’ll explore the benefits of using a simple text editor,as well as look at the value of various website creation applications available for Linux. Remember, just because there are various web editors available for Linux, doesn’t mean that these applications are going to work as expected. I’ll shine some light on what’s working, what isn’t and why.

• Many of today’s top supercomputers are running on Linux operating system (OS) as their users prefer the open source software’s flexibility in customization as well as low costs compared with alternative proprietary OSes, observers said.

• Last week, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD announced major strides in high-performance computing (HPC) at SC11. Intel’s Knights Corner CPU is the first processor capable of handling 1 tflops performance, and Nvidia introduced several new supercomputers that would be using its Tesla GPUs as part of a hybrid computing approach.

• The changes to Atmos, launched by EMC on Monday, see the storage company broaden the ways people can access and manage the Cloud Delivery Platform layer of the infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud product.

• “We’ve seen tremendous traction and interest from both service providers and enterprises looking to deploy public and private-cloud storage offerings, and both have benefited greatly from the new advancements built into the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform,” Mike Feinberg, general manager of EMC’s cloud infrastructure group, said in a statement.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• In an effort to foil crackers attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, as well as improve the syslog process as a whole, two Red Hat developers are proposing a new binary-based tool called The Journal that could replace the syslog daemon in as early as the Fedora 17 release.

• Linus Torvalds has issued a Thanksgiving Linux kernel update for those not in a food-induced coma from this American holiday. The delicacy is the Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel.

• Samsung has committed a patch in the Linux kernel repository to add support for its quad-core Exynos 4412 SoC (System-on-Chip).

• As seen on an October 4 post in the Linux Samsung kernel tree, author Changhwan Youn and committer Kukjin Kim, both employees of the electronics giant, posted information on a new Samsung chipset based on the ARM architecture.

Graphics Stack

• For those wishing to follow the development of Wayland Display Server, there’s some new progress to report on. This time it’s about supporting screensavers under Wayland.

• Pekka Paalanen has proposed a screensaver interface for Wayland, which includes adding the interface to the protocol file, compositor stubs, and other changes.

• One year after the Radeon and Intel drivers supported precise vblank timestamps, there’s a new patch for enabling this support in the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver.

• Precise vblank timestamps and counting is needed for DRI2 sync and swap extensions and GLX_OML_sync_control, among other purposes. See this article for when the precise vblank timestamp support originally came to the Linux DRM drivers.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• Two Indian brothers have written a program, called Whiz-Chat, which allows anyone to chat with their Gmail friend directly from the terminal. It is a very good alternative for those who are on a very slow Internet connection or just don’t want to get out of their terminals.

Games

• Unigine has announced that flooded post-apocalyptic naval RTS, Oil Rush, will officially release on January 25, 2012 for PC, Mac OS X and Linux.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

• The KDE community is proud to announce that next year’s Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

• Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year’s Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

• As always, major support from the local team will be the center of the organization for the conference. Claudia Rauch, the business manager of KDE e.V. in Berlin, is the overall project manager, and a small production team will assist. There’s a lot that needs to happen for Akademy to go smoothly.

GNOME Desktop

• As you know, in GNOME, we’re committed to bringing you the easiest, most beautiful, and most advanced operating system in the world today. A major part of this effort, now, is to build a suite of amazing core applications that provide the operating system key or essential features. Today, I’d like to talk about our goals for one of these apps. It is just the earliest stages but here’s a taste of where we’d like to go.

Distributions

• In this article is the first of several articles comparing the recently released Fedora 16 to Ubuntu 11.10. This first article is looking at the boot performance and power consumption from several different notebooks when performing clean installs of Fedora Verne and Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot.

• The only issue I ran into was this one (initscripts update) which requires simple manual deletion of a file for the update to succeed. This is currently the second news item on the Arch Linux front page, so it pays to check and be prepared.

• We all know these arguments. An outsider comments on Linux distribution plurality and says that the lack of a unified platform is what hurts Linux adoption. This argument is not without its merits, but it isn’t exactly a valid argument anyway. The first main issue with it is an obvious one. If no one singularly owns and controls Linux, no one would be able to pull all variants off of the virtual shelves and standardize the community on a singular distribution. Beyond this, there exists an entirely practical reason for distribution plurality that people tend to overlook.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• One of the most anxiously-awaited Linux releases in quite some time is now available for download on the Linux Mint Mirrors worldwide. It has not yet been officially “announced”, either on the Linux Mint web page or on Distrowatch, but I assume that will happen in the very near future. A lot of people are hoping that this release will be the “Peacemaker” of the recent Linux desktop disputes, between Gnome 2, Gnome 3 and Ubuntu Unity. It is certainly a very interesting combination of an Ubuntu (11.10) base distribution minus the Unity desktop, and a Gnome 3 desktop with a large dose of Gnome-2-like user interface added to it. To me, the most impressive thing about it is that this “hybrid” was undertaken by such a small group, led by Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint development team.

• The distribution is available in four ISO images, comprised of 32- and 64-bit versions, each in either a CD-sized image without most of the audio/video codecs and such or a DVD-sized image with pretty much everything included. All of the images are compatible with the existing Mint (and Ubuntu) Startup Disk Creator utility, so they can be easily converted to LiveUSB meida (or, of course, burned to a CD or DVD). One thing I haven’t mentioned in a while, when I boot the LiveUSB image on my systems it comes up to the boot: prompt and waits for input, then I type live and press Enter to start the live image. (I fully expect someone to post a comment that says “Jamie you twit, you’re doing wrong, if you fix that it will boot the live image just fine”, but honestly this has never bothered me enough to take the time to look into it.)

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is offering partners and customers the chance to download a beta version of its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, the next generation of the open-source software vendor’s virtualization system.

• While Red Hat has been previewing the beta software to a limited number of partners since August, this marks the first time the company has offered a preview to the general public.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth holds a 1 hour Q&A session following each release of Ubuntu.

• And today was the first chance many have had to ask Mark questions about upcoming changes, plans and more following the release of Ubuntu 11.10.

• The penguins are on the march: they are leaving Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu and migrating towards other Linux distros, fresh data suggests.

• Distrowatch’s annual web rankings claim Ubuntu’s top spot has been snatched by Mint during the last 12 months. In the past month alone Ubuntu’s been kicked to fourth place by Fedora and openSuSE, who slid in to take the second and third spots behind Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• Like other NAS servers from Synology, the DS712+ runs a Linux-based operating system, called DiskStation Manager, and offers an incredible amount of features for both home and business use. Most, if not all, of its features are very well thought out and comprehensive.

Phones

Android

• With the recent European release of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, we wanted to write a roundup of all the reviews and information available on the net to help our readers cut through the hype and decide if the Galaxy Nexus is the right phone for them. While we always try to present both sides of the story, with the Galaxy Nexus we can’t. No matter who we asked, one fact shown through all the fluff: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus might just be the best smartphone ever.

• It would appear that aside from those here in the United States that dropped a mint on an internationally shipped Galaxy Nexus and those of you living in the UK where they’re already in stores, it’s just the publishers who were amongst the lucky to review the device and none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who now have Google’s next hero phone in hand. For today, just one day after the UK launch of the Ice Cream Sandwich device, Woz was invited to have a Galaxy Nexus bestowed upon him along with a lovely Android 4.0 t-shirt. And there was much rejoicing.

• The concept of a bootable USB drive running Linux is nothing new. But what if you had a bootable USB drive that was literally an entire mobile device, simply lacking a screen? That’s what FXI has imagined with its “Cotton Candy” device. Details follow …

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.

• The mini-fondleslab was rooted pretty much simultaneously with its launch, with a combination of the Amazon SDK, a suitable USB connection, and SuperOneClick 2.2.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• By now, we are all used to the Firefox Mach 9 release cycle. We may like it or not, but it is here to stay, it seems. Therefore, I’m trying to transcend past my dissatisfaction with the Chrome copycat strategy and look into the actual changes, fixes, improvements, and new features added to the latest Firefox release, marked as number eight.

• The world of Internet browsers may be largely dominated by the “big three”–Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer–but there are a number of attractive alternatives out there that many users don’t even know about.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation, came to the University of Maryland to speak about GNU and the Free Software movement, hosted by the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC).

Public Services/Government

• The city council of Valmiera in Latvia is saving both energy and money by migrating its physical servers to virtual servers using open source virtualisation tools, says Kaspars Urbāns, head of the city’s IT department. “You will be pleasantly surprised by the electricity bill. With the amount Valmiera saves this way, it could buy a new server for the cluster every six months.”

• Seattle’s chief technology officer, Bill Schrier, is bracing for a 6 percent budget cut in 2012, bigger than this year’s, a sign of tighter spending that indicates slower sales gains for Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Intel Corp. (INTC)

• “Spending is going to be down, and in some places it’s going to be down considerably,” Schrier said of technology spending by governments generally.

Leftovers

• When you look at it methodically, it’s easy to see how all Microsoft’s parts are interconnected. If one part breaks, particularly if that part is Windows or Office, then the whole house could come down.

Censorship

• While the US is still pondering SOPA, we just got some absolutely fantastic news out of Europe. The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, has just ruled that P2P filters installed by ISPs violate the European Directive on electronic commerce as well as fundamental rights [full ruling]. This is a hugely important ruling that effectively protects all member states of the European Union from ever being subjected to ISP filtering and spying.

• The origins of this ruling lie in Belgium. The Belgian version of the RIAA, SABAM, had sued Belgian internet provider Scarlet because the ISP’s users were downloading copyrighted content without paying royalties. The President of the Tribunal de première instance de Bruxelles (Brussels Court of First Instance) then ordered Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor the internet traffic of its subscribers.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• The Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, the first such open source project, finds itself in a peculiar position today, that of having to fight to regain rights to its own name.

• This follows the successful application by the American defence contractor, Progressive Technology Federal Systems/Liblime, for a trademark on the name Koha in New Zealand. Koha is a Maori term that means reciprocity in giving.

• Open source Integrated Library System (ILS), Koha, came under a trademark threat when the US based PTFS/Liblime managed to get their application for a Trademark on Koha accepted in New Zealand.

• A Koha community blog says, “For the library that invented Koha to now have to have a legal battle to prevent a US company trademarking the word in NZ seems bizarre, but it is at this point that we find ourselves.”

Copyrights

• Members of the French Parliament are using a bill on private copying levy as an occasion to kill the copyright exception for private copying. Under the pretense of saving royalties collection, MPs have redefined fair use in the process. Giving in once more to pressure from the recording and movie industry, the French Parliament carries on Nicolas Sarkozy’s repressive policy against the Internet and new cultural practices.

• The European Court of Justice just rendered a historic decision in the Scarlet Extended case, which is crucial for the future of rights and freedoms on the Internet. The Court ruled that forcing Internet service providers to monitor and censor their users’ communications violated EU law, and in particular the right to freedom of communication. At a time of all-out offensive in the war against culture sharing online, this decision suggests that censorship measures requested by the entertainment industry are disproportionate means to enforce an outdated copyright regime. Policy-makers across Europe must take this decision into account by refusing new repressive schemes, such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and engage in a much needed reform of copyright.

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