● 12.04.11

● Links 4/12/2011: GNOME 3.4 and Torvalds, More GNU/Linux Games

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz[I’m on vacation for a week starting now]ContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Applications

• As the digital age progresses, the amount of data we produce each year is growing quickly. There was a time when we could fit all of our personal digital data on a few floppy disks, but many of us now have hundreds of gigabytes or photos, music and documents that we need to backup and protect. Backing up our data locally is important, but any good backup plan should also include off-site backups. “The Cloud” has promised us infinite, cheap storage where we can save our ever-growing data. Online cloud backups should be a part of your overall backup plan, but it’s important that your data is secure, encrypted, and backed up automatically. Here are a few online backup tools that aim to make cloud backups easy for users.

Instructionals/Technical

• rsnapshot is a backup tool written in Perl that utilizes rsync as its back-end. rsnapshot allows users to create customized incremental backup solutions. This article will discuss the following: the benefits of an incremental backup solution, rsnapshot’s installation, its configuration, and usage examples.

Games

• Thanks to the Humble Bundle i’ve discovered also this nice game: Dungeons of Dredmor. It’s a classic Rogue-like game, you have to move your hero in 10 level of dungeons where you’ll fight against terrible monsters, to get new equipment, skills and fight the big bad Evil guy, from the official site:

• I really like this game. It was 2001 when Mucky Foot Productions (not existing anymore) released this game. I played it a lot of times, and i never got tired of it. Beautiful music, funny characters, great landscapes. Ladies and gentlemen, a strategic game called… StarTopia!

• There’s three days left to the Humble Introversion Bundle that offers up a collection of DRM-free, multi-platform games at whatever price you wish, but how is this Linux game sale performing?

• Hard to believe, but after 12 years of community development, the guys from the open-source engine based on Bungie’s Marathon trilogy Aleph One have finally released a version called 1.0!

• Metagolf Linux game innovatively combines platforming action and golf. The gameplay style is really unique where upto 4 players can play on same screen with one golf ball to complete various objectives of different levels.

Desktop Environments

• Yesterday Gnome project announced a site called Gnome Extensions which makes it easier to find and install extensions. A lot of useful Gnome 3 extensions already existed, but not much was known about it until LinuxMint popularised them. It seems Linus Torvalds has tried the extensions and is now liking it. He posts on his Google + page, “Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable.”

GNOME Desktop

• There are a lot of people that don’t like the changes brought to the Linux desktop with GNOME 3. Among those people is none other than the father of Linux himself, Linus Torvalds.

• In an effort to slim down and improve its cross-platform capabilities, the developers of the Chrome browser and ChromeOS itself appear to be shifting away from Gtk use.

• This bit of information was quietly pointed out earlier in the month on the Aura window manager pages for the Chromium Projects. Chromium is the open source implementation of Chrome and ChromeOS, and Aura is the new window manager and shell environment that will support the various interface elements on these implementations.

• Marlin is a relatively new file browser for GNOME somewhat similar with Nautilus when it comes to features, but with a different default interface.

Distributions

New Releases

• · Announced Distro: VectorLinux 7.0 · Announced Distro: Clonezilla Live 1.2.11-23 · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 1

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.

• Ubuntu 12.04 named ‘Precise Pangolin’ has been released on 1st Dec,2011. This time Ubuntu 12.04 is based on Linux Kernel 3.2.0 relaese candidate 3. There are many more changes are done in the Ubuntu 12.04. It also support for APLS touchpads.

• Ubuntu team is running a pilot project called ‘Ubuntu Friendly community hardware testing programme’. The goal of the program is to find if the hardware is Ubuntu friendly or not.

• Members can run a test on “how well their systems work with Ubuntu, and submit this information to a website where data is aggregated and a useful ‘friendliness’ rating is generated for each model. This information is useful, for instance, in determining which systems work well with Ubuntu, and whether a particular hardware component is likely to work or give trouble,” Daniel Manrique write on a mailing list.

Flavours and Variants

• Since MATE is new, there’s not really a “new features” list for it. However, there are a couple of new features in Linux Mint 12 that also apply to MATE. Some things that are new apply only to GNOME 3 so I haven’t included them here. If you want to see those, please see the Linux Mint 12 GNOME 3 review that I did earlier.

• Linux Mint, the venerable Ubuntu based Linux distro, is in the news again. Linux Mint 12 codenamed “Lisa” is finally released. It based on GNOME 3.0 and runs GNOME Shell with some ingenious tweaks of its own. Detailed review of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” OS. Read on.

• The week of Thanksgiving in the United States was a shorter week for some, but that didn’t slow the progress of Linux. This past week, Linux Mint 12 was officially released, providing those that don’t want GNOME Shell or Ubuntu Unity with an alternative take on a modern GNOME Linux desktop. As Mint freshened the Linux desktop, developers continued to push forward on KDE and the Linux kernel.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Android-x86, the famous port of Google’s famous Android platform for the x86 (32-bit) architecture has just reached version 4.0.

• Android-x86 is a Live CD Linux distribution created mostly for the Eee PC netbooks, but can also run on any other 32-bit (x86) platform.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• This week there’s been a lot of fuss about Amazon releasing source code for software on its Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire. A lot of the hype we’ve seen is simply unwarranted; while you can download the source code that Amazon was legally required to publish, most of the software on the device remains proprietary, and every Kindle is still Defective by Design.

• This Android tablet can withstand five ft drops, water and dust ingress (IP65), and boasts the rugged military grade MIL-STD-810G rating. The Z710 can also operate in the coldest and hottest of environments, from -30 degrees C to +60 degrees C.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Apache Software Foundation has come under withering attacks lately, with accusations of its politics and bureaucracy getting in the way of its ability to foster open-source software.

• The common rallying cry of the Apache attackers is GitHub, a source-control system that has almost blossomed overnight into the industry’s top open-source code repository. But while GitHub clearly does offer a superior code-hosting alternative to Apache and other foundations in many respects, it is deficient in one of the most important ways: branding.

• There’s a new release of the open-source Lightspark software for handling Adobe SWF/Flash support on the Linux desktop. New to Lightspark 0.5.3 among other changes is a working Microsoft Windows port.

Events

• Over the last four years or so, I have attended numerous conferences in many different locations. It has been, really without any exceptions, an incredible experience. Conferences are one of the main ways that our communities come together and meet face-to-face—something that’s important to counterbalance the standard email and IRC development environment.

• In that time, I have also seen many different ways to organize, schedule, and produce those conferences, and, as is the case with free software projects, there are bits and pieces that conferences can learn from each other. What follows is my—fairly opinionated obviously—distillation of what works well and less well, which will hopefully be useful as new conferences spring up, or as existing ones plan for next year.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven’t caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.

SaaS

Databases

• NoSQL data store CouchDB has become Hadoop’s latest convert with delivery of a connector tying together the two big-data architectures.

• CouchDB user Couchbase has announced a certified Couchbase Hadoop Connector, developed with Hadoop shop Cloudera.

• The connector potentially simplifies movement of data between the Couchbase Server, which Couchbase says is “powered” by CouchDB, and the Cloudera Distribution including Hadoop (CDH). Couchbase uses capabilities of CouchDB such as mobile and sync. Both CouchDB and Hadoop, meanwhile, are Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Little over one month ago The Document Foundation announced their new online extension repository. At that time it had maybe a couple of dozen total extensions and templates, but now the number totals over 100.

• A short note from Florian Effenberger expressed the projects pride and gratitude towards those who have been contributing. OpenOffice.org had a wide selection and many articles were devoted to the bounty. Today, LibreOffice is well on its way to closing the gap.

• The extension site is easy to use because one can sort and search through the extensions. You can sort by LibreOffice version, or one of several criteria such as Highest Rated, Most Downloaded, or Newest. Extensions can also be filtered by category such as Language Tools or Writer-Extensions. And it doesn’t require Javascript to function.

Project Releases

• Genode, the interesting research (non-Linux) operating system developed on a unique framework architecture, recently experienced the release of Genode OS 11.11. This operating system, which brought Gallium3D support last year, now has a variety of virtualization modules available.

Public Services/Government

• Microsoft beware: a major UK government department is to trial open source desktops

Programming

Leftovers

Copyrights

• Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

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