● 12.20.11

● Links 20/12/2011: Red Hat Results, Mageia 2.0 Alpha 2, Firefox 9

Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• It’s vacation time already and I’ve been away from the blogosphere. I remember that, before 2009 (when was still a Windows user), I longed for this free time to come. No, not because I was included in Bill Gates’ gift list, but because I really needed this free time to format my hard drive and get rid of all the malware pestering the OS…

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• One month has passed since the first X.Org Server 1.12 snapshot was released, but now a new development version has landed.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Google’s Native Client (NaCl) has already made it possible to play new console style rich 3D games in Linux. Games like Bastion and Pocket Legends now run as fast as native games making full use of 3D graphics hardware through WebGL.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME and KDE may be the high profile Linux desktop environments, but they are not to everybody’s tastes. Richard Hillesley describes the different approaches taken by a couple of the more prominent alternatives.

• These are interesting times for the Linux desktop. The often-overlooked area of the Linux ecosystem is now the centre of attention and, while some users have welcomed the changes, others have reacted in true community style: ranting and raging, threatening to abandon ship or, when all else fails, demanding a fork.

• Razor Qt is a new lightweight desktop environment – think of it as an early LXDE, but using Qt. It doesn’t come with a display manager or window manager and its developers recommend using it with Openbox, but it should work with any WM, like Kwin, Metacity, etc.

• The guys at Razor Qt have just released version 0.4 of the advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. According to the project page, Razor Qt has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines.

• Changes to the behaviour of interfaces don’t always go down well, but are sometimes a good thing, says Richard Hillesley

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• One of the most popular music player in the GNU/Linux world, Amarok, has reached a major milestone with version 2.5. With this version Amarok is now officially supported on the ‘security-risk’ prone Windows OS as well.

GNOME Desktop

• This past year has seen some interesting developments in the Linux desktop arena. GNOME 3, obviously, has been a big bang. But I would also mention the wide spread of Xfce 4.8, which shipped with openSUSE in March 2011. As I wrote in a review at the time, it’s a really impressive release. As usual for Xfce, there have not been any major releases since then – the project tends to take a while to push out major features. Then again, Xfce does not aim to shake up the infrastructure (like KDE did with version 4) or the user interface (à la GNOME 3). Keeping things simple and familiar has its advantages, so why do KDE and GNOME make us change our ways?

• Another milestone for the Debian ecosystem and the Gnome 3.x desktop this weekend as the Debian unstable distribution (“sid”) completed it’s transition to Gnome 3.2.1, with the migration of remaining Gnome 3.2 packages to Debian “sid” including gnome-shell 3.2.1-8.

Distributions

• Anyways, the oxymoron at Wallmart made me remember that there is a nice place to get Pardus wallpapers.

• Vinux is a specialist distribution remastered from a Ubuntu base and optimized specifically with visually impaired users in mind. Some others also come with a screen reader and other accessibility options by default, for example in the login screen, but these are never turned on from the start and voice recognition software is rarely if ever present.

• Overall, Slacko is a nice continuation on the Puppy philosophy it’s designed around; It’s fast (at least on slightly newer machines than perhaps it’s intended for), reasonably simple, and most of all, very different to most current Linux distributions. Nothing else seems to combine the features it has with the footprint it takes up, and it’s incredibly flexible how it can be run as a regular, persistent OS from almost any medium. And while not suitable for a complete newbie, it’s definitely something a Windows or OSX power user could pick up and start using without too much hassle.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The Mageia development team has published the second alpha of version 2 of its community fork of Mandriva Linux. Aimed at developers and testers, the release is based on the 3.1 Linux kernel and includes KDE SC 4.7.4 and GNOME 3.3.3.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat reports its fiscal third quarter results on Monday and most indicators point to a solid year ahead, virtualization potential and rumblings about big data trends and Hadoop.

• The company is expected to report third quarter earnings of 26 cents a share on revenue of $289.6 million.

• Cautious optimism appears to be the optimum phrase for Red Hat (RHT) as it readies to report its fiscal third-quarter results late Monday.

• Revenue for the open-source Linux software services provider, which helps companies adopt cloud computing technology, will likely be 23% better than the year-ago period, at $289.6 million, according to the consensus of 24 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. That would be the lowest percentage rise in four quarters but would mark the seventh straight quarter in which sales rose at least 20%. The company’s profit minus one-time items is expected to be up 30%, at 26 cents, which also would be the smallest percentage jump in four quarters.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) shares are mimicking the company’s name rather well Monday heading into its third-quarter 2012 report, expected out after the market closes. The stock is down nearly 3 percent heading into the last two hours of trade.

• The Street is looking for Red Hat to report revenue of $289.62 million and earnings of 26 cents per share. The company posted a gain of 20 cents per share in the same period last year.

• Total subscription, training and services revenue for the quarter rose to $290.03 million from $235.58 million in the prior year quarter. Twenty two analysts had consensus revenue estimate of $289.62 million for the quarter.

• Red Hat first launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) back in 2007. In late 2010, Red Hat released RHEL 6, providing the next generation of enterprise Linux features. RHEL 6 was recently updated to RHEL 6.2, providing new control and storage features. The upcoming RHEL 5.8 release, which is now in beta, is getting its own set of updates. However, resource control is not among them.

• For the quarter, Red Hat reported revenue of $290 million, which is a 23 percent year-over-year gain. Net income hit $38.2 million or $0.19 per share, up from $26 million or $0.13 per share last year. Moving forward, Red Hat provided fourth-quarter guidance for revenue to be in the range of approximately $289 million to $292 million.

• Ubuntu is all over it and so is HP with their Project Moonshot effort using Calxeda ARM technology. While Ubuntu and HP and optimistic, Red Hat is more…realistic.

• Shares of Red Hat Inc. (RHT) plunged after the bell, as the company posted third-quarter earnings-per-share that beat estimates but revenue was just slightly higher-than-expected.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• There are plenty of Android tablets in the market already, but none has given the iPad much of a run. “The issue with the Android tablets is they tend to be all over the map in terms of design and experience, appearing too difficult to use and too hard to learn against the simple elegance of the Apple product,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. Can Google change that with its own model?

Free Software/Open Source

• Are you at a loss for what to buy the open source aficionados on your holiday shopping list? It’s actually not as difficult as you may think. Peruse this Linux fan’s personal picks to find inspiration as quick as a wink.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Ahead of an official release tomorrow, Firefox 9 has winged its way to various mirrors across the web and is now available to download from the official Firefox website — no messing around with a hammered Nightly FTP server this time, oh no!

Databases

• After nearly a year of development, the Grails team has released Grails version 2.0, their Groovy language based open source web framework. The new version sees improvements throughout the Grails framework including an improved user and developer experience, additional cloud support via Heroku and Cloud Foundry, integration with the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) and support for a range of NoSQL databases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• In such a large ecosystem it is impossible to agree upon a single vision for all participants, Apache OpenOffice does not seek to define a single vision, nor does it seek to be the only player. Instead we seek to offer a neutral and powerful collaboration opportunity.

• The permissive Apache License 2.0 reduces restrictions on the use and distribution of our code and thus facilitates a diverse contributor and user base for the benefit of the whole Open Document Format ecosystem. Within an Apache project it is possible to rise above political, social and commercial differences in the pursuit of maximally effective implementations of freely available open standards and related software tools.

• Our license and open development model is widely recognised as one of the best ways to ensure open standards, such as ODF, gain traction and adoption. Apache OpenOffice offers much more potential for OpenOffice.org than “just” an end-user Microsoft Office replacement. We offer a vendor neutral space in which to collaborate whilst enabling third parties to pursue almost any for-profit or not-for-profit business model.

Business

• Recently, I was directed toward an excellent analysis of commons-based peer production as a phenomenon which separates “entrepreneurs” (who want to get things done and create value in the world) from “capitalists” (who want to get a return on an investment of property without contributing any labor). An observer — clearly outside of the community of free software developers — expressed dismay at the example of Mozilla Foundation, which makes money from the open source Mozilla project, but does not pay for most voluntarily contributed code improvements to the Mozilla software. Is he right? Is this exploitation of those contributors?

Project Releases

• ZFS v28 (finally, with deduplication) is available in latest D-I daily builds when selecting kernel of FreeBSD 9 as boot option.

Public Services/Government

• The German city of Munich has been very precise at bumping off Windows PCs to give its Linux operating system Lebensraum .

• Munich’s LiMux project has been going great guns and today the city announced that it had migrated 9,000 systems away from the PC and onto Linux. It only wanted to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich but it turned out a bit easier than expected.

Programming

• PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better.

Leftovers

• In an unexpected move, a member of the Saudi royal family has invested $300 million in social networking company Twitter. This morning, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company and one of the wealthiest people on the planet, announced the investment, which was reported first by Bloomberg.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• As winter sets in and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) encampments contract, the three-month old movement continues to have a big impact on the campaign trail. President Obama as well as some GOP candidates have adopted OWS concerns and language, while big bank lobbyists and GOP spinmeisters work hard to hold the line, defending U.S. economic institutions and the American “free market” system against what they fear could be a broad-based populist uprising.

ACTA

• The fantastic folks from DerechoALeer.org designed this wonderful mash-up between two videos from La Quadrature: “RoboCopyright ACTA” (for the graphics) and “NO to ACTA” (for the text)! Thanks so much Juan! ♡

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.