● 12.23.11

● Links 23/12/2011: Daiwa (Bank) Selects GNU/Linux, Thunderbird 9.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Here’s an update on NEVEX Virtual Technologies, the start-up application performance solution provider that recently launched its signature CacheWorks platform. According to NEVEX Product Manager Andrew Flint, the company is planning to support Linux and VMware ESX environments and add new dashboards for increased user interaction in 2012.

Server

• The more things change, the more they stay the same. That is certainly true of anti-open source virtualization FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Linux virtualization is robust and enterprise-worthy, and is evolving rapidly. It is a threat to the established giants of virtualization.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Here’s a very unexpected but welcoming surprise for the holidays: there’s some source code that’s about to be released by VIA Technologies.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Few software companies reach $1 billion in annual revenue. No company has done it with a portfolio that consists entirely of open source software. But if Red Hat delivers the expected results in early 2012, it will prove that a company can do right by the open source community and its investors. Given the 2011 third quarter results announced by Red Hat on December 19th, it’s looking very likely.

• Japan-based Daiwa Securities’ internet bank, Daiwa Next Bank has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its enterprise operating system for its core banking system in the wake of increasing scalability and performance of its mission-critical system.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu’s declining popularity was a hot topic on the Internet recently, with a number of sites using Distrowatch’s annual web rankings to ring alarm bells for the popular Linux distro. But there were those who looked askance at these reports — and quite rightly so, accusing them of grossly exaggerating the extent of Ubuntu’s alleged decline. Whatever be the true extent of its decline, the fact is Ubuntu is still a very popular Linux distro and Canonical will have another chance of redeeming itself with Precise Pangolin in a few months’ time.

• Open-source software engineering group Linaro has pushed out a build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich for low-cost development boards from Samsung and ST-Ericsson. The build supports hardware acceleration for Systems on a Chip utililzing ARM’s Mali-400 graphics processor.

• Has Canonical’s controversial new desktop interface improved enough to not only be an amiable desktop for Ubuntu, but to fend off the competition from Windows 8?

Flavours and Variants

• Yesterday I installed Linux Mint 12, almost officially the world’s most popular Linux distro, made easy for simpletons such as myself. I was swayed by ZDNet contributor Jamie Watson, as he has detailed the progress of Linux Mint 12 thoroughly.

• It’s kind of based on Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’, with the main distinction being the inclusion of GNOME 3 and the beautifully crafted bridging of old and new features using Mint GNOME Shell Extensions. As they say themselves “It’s a brand new desktop but with traditional components.”

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• HP’s decision to contribute webOS to the open source community represents, at the very least, a detour from the company’s plans to “double down” on the operating system acquired from Palm, Inc. The good news for fans of the OS is that HP will continue to invest in the software’s development, albeit probably not at the unsustainable rate at which it was going it alone.

Android

• Ask someone to name a microprocessor back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s and you’d likely hear Intel and then maybe AMD. Jump ahead a decade and now the names that roll off of tongues are Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments. Why? Simply put, we’re more mobile today than ever before and Intel just hasn’t figured into the smartphone game. Until now.

• Linaro member motherboards ready for optimized Linux-based devices with latest GCC 4.6 toolchain for Android builds

Free Software/Open Source

• Solid engineering talent is such a prized resource nowadays that many tech firms have taken to doing acqui-hires, which is the practice of buying a company for its employees rather than for its products or technology. But it’s not just startup founders and programmers who are benefiting from this trend — the open source community has been a winner as well.

• Joining its fellow social-networking companies in the public release of internal code, LinkedIn has opened sourced software obtained in October with its acquisition of the IndexTank search-engine software provider.

• “We are looking forward to seeing IndexTank thrive as an open-source project,” wrote LinkedIn director of engineering, and former CEO of IndexTank, Diego Basch, in a blog post announcing the release.

• Sankor program team will be at the British Educational Training and Technology Show (BETT) in London from January 11 to 14, 2012 to present Open-Sankor IWB Open Source software dedicated to universal interactive education and, concurrently, to open and free digital learning resource creation and sharing throughout an international ecosystem of connected teachers.

Events

• The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) will organise the Fourth International Foss Conference, Kerala (Fossk4, http://fossk.in/4) from December 27 to 29.

• The event is being organised by the Icfoss and supported by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), Delhi; the Computer Society of India; and the Institutions of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has delivered the latest version 9.0 of its Thunderbird email and news client, a free and open source application that Windows, Mac and Linux users can take advantage of. You can get version 9.0 now, at this download site. Not everyone realizes that just as Mozilla has moved to a rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser, Thunderbird is being update much more rapidly than ever as well. Here are some of the enhancements in the latest version of Thunderbird.

• Mozilla has readied the 9.0 version of the Firefox browser for public download. In line with the product release, Mozilla confirms that an existing agreement with Google has been extended for at least three years to keep the search giant’s technology closely tied to the browser.

SaaS

• Srivas and crew are selling a product based on Hadoop, an open source incarnation of Google’s GFS and MapReduce platforms. But unlike its competitors, MapR is offering something that’s very different from the open source Hadoop project. The company spent two years rewriting Hadoop behind closed doors, eliminating what Srivas sees as major flaws in the platform.

• If you’ve used popular cloud-based services for storing and sharing files, such as Dropbox and Box.net, you’re probably familiar with how convenient they are, and how much they provide for free. In the past few days, though, an open source competitor to them, dubbed OwnCloud, has been getting a lot of attention. It’s a Linux-based way to set up your own cloud computing instance, which means you don’t have to have your files sitting on servers that you don’t choose, governed by people you don’t know.

• LexisNexis has worked for more than a decade to develop a large scale system for Big Data manipulation, and it believes that it has produced something that’s better and more mature than the better known Hadoop technology.

• New Relic, Inc., the SaaS-based cloud application performance management provider, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack(TM) community, a global collaboration of developers and technologists producing the open standard cloud-computing platform for both public and private clouds. Organizations deploying web applications on OpenStack can use New Relic to automatically monitor web apps in production and proactively identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• VirtualBox logo The VirtualBox development team has released the fourth maintenance update to the 4.1.x branch of its open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. As a maintenance update, VirtualBox 4.1.8 has no new features but does include changes that improve overall stability while also addressing several bugs found in the previous versions.

• Software developers offered new code analysis tools and extra speed via advanced compiler technology

• A few days after the Apache Software Foundation reiterated its claim on the OpenOffice.org trademark, another non-profit in Germany has decided to flaunt the ASF and the Apache OpenOffice.org incubation process by releasing a new version of the popular open source office suite: White Label Office 3.3.1.

• The new office suite, now available for download, appears to be a direct slap in the face of the ASF by the German non-profit Team OpenOffice.org e.V., which has proclaimed its mission to keep OpenOffice.org development alive.

Project Releases

• This release of Foswiki comes with quite some new features and more than 160 crunched bugs relative to the previous release. Here are some highlights:

Public Services/Government

• And if you want any further proof that the UK Cabinet Office has given up trying to defend UK interests, and totally capitulated to the pressure of proprietary software companies

• The Australian Government’s acting CIO has stepped in to ensure open source software is considered as part of one of the largest software tenders currently on offer in Canberra.

• The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has counselled the Parliamentary Services Department (DPS) over its compliance with the Government’s Open Source Policy after the DPS released a request for tender (DPS11097) to revamp its integrated library system (ILS).

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The idea is to create a free and open source map of the neighbourhood that everyone can use and share. We make use of the open source OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, and the first step is to figure out how much of the neighbourhood is already mapped. After this, mapping activity (who goes to which street and what kind of data to collect) can be planned out. Then comes the fun part of exploring little alleyways, noting down details of shops, street-names, speed-breakers, trees and even trash bins. After that we discuss interesting observations and upload the collected data back to the OSM website. Once the hard work is done we celebrate the free open source map of the neighbourhood!

Programming

Leftovers

Censorship

• Apparently, Apple not only claims the right to censor what’s available for download onto your iOS devices, but they also reserve the ability to pull it totally off of your device if it slips past their reviewers in the first place. This means no more Quickpick in the Appstore, on iCloud, or on your iPhone. I’ll let that sink in for a minute…

Civil Rights

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