● 01.11.12

● Links 11/1/2012: US Pressures Spain, SOPA Protests

Posted in News Roundup at 9:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X, and there’s no reason you couldn’t be too

Server

• While there are a number of open source solutions emerging for cloud computing, OpenStack remains one of the best backed platforms, with vendors ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Dell to Citrix supporting it. OpenStack got its early momentum from Rackspace and NASA, though, and late last year Rackspace announced Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, which is an OpenStack-powered cloud platform featuring managed services and–most important of all–operational support. Now, AT&T has announced that it is delivering an open source cloud platform based on OpenStack, dubbed AT&T Cloud Architect. It signals a big bet on open source from a major telco.

Kernel Space

• The EXT4 file-system pull request went in today for the Linux 3.3 kernel. The EXT4 updates for this next kernel include the new online resize interface.

Graphics Stack

• While OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support in Mesa 8.0 has been what’s talked about lately for this open-source graphics library to be released next month, there’s a lot of other improvements too in Mesa 8.0 for those of you using the open-source graphics drivers under Linux.

• Below are eight of the high-profile features/changes to Mesa 8.0 besides OpenGL 3.0.

Applications

• I just stumbled across a very useful site: alternativeTo.net. This is a site to help you find “alternatives to” any given software product. The page has a very clean design and a powerful interface: you can specify what platform you want — Windows, Mac, Linux, online (web apps), iPhone, Android, Winphone, or Symbian S60 — and then search for a product by name.

Instructionals/Technical

• Archbang is a Linux distro based of Arch Linux. It brings the full Arch Linux experience to users without the cumbersome installing process of Arch Linux. Archbang is very lightweight, fast and stable and usually works well out of the box. However, unlike with Ubuntu or LinuxMint, if you install Archbang on a laptop, you need to do some editing to make the laptop function keys work. This article will show you how.

Desktop Environments

• While there’s no doubt that the leaders in the Linux desktop contest are GNOME and KDE, that does not mean they are catered for everyone. Different people have different needs and there were and still are voices in the community that criticize some of the choices the designers of the two desktops made. We, as always, prefer not to take sides, but we noticed that, as it often happens in Open Source, alternatives started to appear, addressing the aforementioned issues. Today we’ll talk about two of the alternatives, so you know you always have a choice. So, for GTK and/or Qt fans that know how to install software on their distro of choice, we give you Cinnamon, an alternative to Gnome3, and Razor-Qt, a lightweight alternative to KDE4.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• A few months ago, the British journal Sociology published an article titled “Challenging Code: A Sociological Reading of the KDE Free Software Project”. Eager to find out what a ‘sociological reading’ of KDE entails, Dot editor Oriol Mirosa rushed to contact the article’s author, sociologist Brian Alleyne, who graciously and patiently agreed to be the subject of an interview. Read on to learn more about Brian, sociology, and the significance of KDE for the social sciences:

• KDE offers a very attractive desktop environment that is highly customizable. After installing KDE users will most likely want to configure their desktop wallpaper. With KDE you can easily select a different image to use as the desktop background, or you can use solid colors. Background images and be stretched, tiled, and centered as well for convenience. To access your desktop background settings you can simply right-click on your desktop background, then select the desktop settings option. The KDE Plasma desktop provides a fantastic interface for managing wallpapers, and thousands more are only one click away.

• Many of you have been asking for my color theme and my widget style that I’m using in the blogseries, so I finally decided to upload it

• The style itself is the nice shiny Oxygen, the default widget style that ships with KDE Workspaces. I just tuned the scrollbars a little and you can do that too – just open System Settings, go to ‘Application Appearance’, select ‘Style’ and right next to the widget style combobox is ‘Configure…’ button. Open that, switch to ‘Scrollbars’ tab and tweak it to your liking. I use 10px width and no top and bottom arrow buttons. All the rest is default.

• Since we released Qt under open governance on qt-project.org, there was always one piece missing. The Qt 4 repository was so far still handled in the old system. This was done as a simple prioritization, to get the parts of Qt that we considered most relevant for the development community out first.

Distributions

• Apple has made famous the phrase “There is an app for that“. In the open source Linux world, you can apply the same saying too: “There is an distro for that“. Indeed, for whatever functions you want your OS to perform, there is a distro for that. Need a media center? Mythbuntu. Need a multimedia creation tool? UbuntuStudio. Need a distro for kids? DouDouLinux. Need a lightweight OS that runs in old computer? Lubuntu. Need a super lightweight distro that can fit into your USB drive? DamnSmallLinux. Need a distro for browsing the web? BrowserLinux.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Welcome back from the holidays! It seems like we’re all refreshed, we all had a great time and we’re all ready to dive into 2012 and make Mageia even better.

• 2012 started as a rather interesting year. Perhaps influenced by the so-called “Mayan Doomsday” prophecies, people today reported hearing strange rumbling noises coming from the Earth.

• Interestingly, the Linux world also has its own disaster predictions–you always listen that Linux is finished on the desktop, that the desktop computer itself is finished, and a myriad more.

• One of the predictions that I read is that 2012 will be the definite year of Mandriva’s disappearance. Since Mandriva was the distro that made me migrate to Linux, I must admit that I received the news with a grave heart.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• I was walking around Fry’s over the holidays. One of the numerous Linux magazines in the technical publications section had an interview with someone at Canonical, and the title on cover was something like “Unity is a Conversation We Must Win”. There was so much wrong with that sentence I wonder now if it read that Unity was a Conversion that they must win. It does not work for me personally either way.

• Fedora 17 (a.k.a. the Beefy Miracle) already has an impressive list of new features coming, but several more features have been added to their planned list.

• The Beefy Miracle already has a beefy list of possible changes like maybe the Btrfs file-system by default, multi-touch advancements, GNOME Shell software rendering, and many other features, but now there’s even more.

Debian Family

• Last year, Debian GNU/Linux and CentOS were the most popular Linux distributions on web servers. According to recent monthly figures from W3Techs, Debian has recently regained the top spot from CentOS and was running on 29.4 per cent of Linux-based web servers (9.6 per cent of all web sites). CentOS had held the lead by a few per cent during most of the last year; Debian moved ahead by a small margin at the end of the year.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Jane Silber is on a mission to get the Ubuntu Linux distribution onto mobile devices and TVs, rather than be stuck on desktop PCs. The CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu) took over from the previous CEO, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in March 2010, but has been with the company since shortly after its 2004 founding. Right after New Year’s Day, she paid a visit to InfoWorld offices in San Francisco to talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Canonical’s ambitions in the mobile market as well as reflect on Canonical’s successes and what separates it from rivals.

• [ Also on InfoWorld: Canonical has been looking to attract mobile application developers to its platform. | Read InfoWorld's Mobile Edge blog for the latest perspectives on mobile technology. ]

• InfoWorld: What are Canonical’s goals for the client distro, the server distro, the smartphone distro, and tablet distro, and how will you measure success on these fronts?

• Silber: On the client side, it’s about moving from the desktop to other form factors. So tablet, TV, and at some point down in the future probably phone, but that’s a bit off. And success, there is commercial success in terms of device manufacturers wanting to ship Ubuntu and its user base, its user adoption. There is a real demand for an alternative platform. We believe Ubuntu has all the characteristics that are needed to become that platform.

• To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You’ll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

• Jane Silber is on a mission to get the Ubuntu Linux distribution onto mobile devices and TVs, rather than be stuck on desktop PCs. The CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu) took over from the previous CEO, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in March 2010, but has been with the company since shortly after its 2004 founding. Right after New Year’s Day, she paid a visit to InfoWorld offices in San Francisco to talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Canonical’s ambitions in the mobile market as well as reflect on Canonical’s successes and what separates it from rivals.

• First of all, after seeing the working Ubuntu TV prototype at Canonical’s CES booth, I was impressed considering that it all came together in just about three months — since the Orlando 12.04 summit where Mark Shuttleworth shared his vision of bringing Ubuntu to TVs and smart-phones. Canonical isn’t ready with any Ubuntu smart-phone yet, which they hope to have ready by Ubuntu 14.04 in two years, but the TV work by them and the community is coming along quickly.

Flavours and Variants

• The success of Linux Mint is down to its usability – easy to set up and get running and then use. The latest development is a new user interface, Cinnamon. Richard Hillesley looks at the history of Mint, claimed to be the second most popular Linux distribution after Ubuntu, and considers whether Cinnamon marks a turning point for the distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• A British community interest company, Rhombus Tech, is part of the way towards developing a micro-computer on a circuit board, much like the Raspberry Pi.

• A test version of the Raspberry Pi computer has attracted bids of more than £3,000 in a fund-raising auction on eBay. With the machine about to start its first major production run, could it be the right tool to revitalise computer science in schools?

• Following the news that the Raspberry Pi foundation was auctioning 10 of the beta model B boards on eBay comes the news a lot of people have been waiting for: they’ve started manufacturing the production models! The Raspberry Pi blog has all the details.

• This is getting seriously ridiculous. Relative to the power and feature sets computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. But they don’t come much cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, a $25 computer designed specifically to encourage children to program. My colleague, Ryan Cartwright wrote about it right here on FSM.

• At $25 it has excited huge interest. But what if I told that it will be bested by an even cheaper computer. Do I hear $20? Do I hear $15? Yes, you heard that right (and it’s being sold in China for $7, for God’s sake). It is planned for educational purposes and as a retail product too. It’s being developed by Rhombus Tech.

Phones

• The Tizen project, which is developing an open-source operating system for devices like smartphones and tablets, is offering a download of the alpha release of the source code of the operating system.

Android

• Several companies have announced Blu-ray players and media streaming boxes for Google’s Android-based Google TV TV platform. Sony has its NSZ-GS7 Network Media Player and NSZ-GP9 Blu-ray disc player, Vizio tipped its VBR430 3D Blu-ray player and VAP430 Stream Player — as well as several Google TV-enabled R Series HDTVs — and E Fun will provide its Nextbox set-top.

• FXI Technologies showed off its Cotton Candy PC for us a few months ago, but since then the company has added Android 4.0 and Ubuntu with a Unity UI as supported OSs, along with the original Android 2.3. It still runs on a dual-core Cortex A9 processor and has quad-core Mali 400 graphics that’s purportedly powerful enough to play 3D games. The device itself can be booted via USB or HDMI, effectively turning any television set into a computer. It’s important to note that when using over HDMI, it still requires power over USB.

• Polaroid clicked into gear at CES this week, launching an Android-powered smart-camera with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities and access to the Android Market.

• I finally succomed to an ebook reader this Xmas. After having spent years of standing by the traditional “dead tree” format, I made the jump after reading over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the train recently. I instantly took to e-ink and found its far more comfortable for long drawn out reading sessions than wrestling with a book.

• Despite what I consider as rather high prices for the new ebook titles (when you compare them to the “physical” paperback versions) I still think its a great method of reading and whilst I opted for Amazon’s product, there are a slew of alternatives out there, to which I believe most, if not all are Linux powered.

• We’ve spent the better part of yesterday cruising around the Central Hall on a quest to highlight the coolest tech at CES, but Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was on hand at CNET’s Next Big Thing panel to talk about the future of consumer electronics. While doing so, he (perhaps unsurprisingly) made it clear that he isn’t a fan of the word “fragmentation” when it comes to Google’s Android OS.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Pantech making their second announcement for AT&T today this one is a Tablet. The Tablet will feature a 8 inch screen, and run on the LTE network. The tablet will be $299.99 with a two-year contract, with planned availability on January 22. The tablet runs android 3.2 and will be waterproof as well.

• At the core of the XO3 is Marvell’s 1 GHz, single-core Armada 618 SoC, which we’ve seen in tablets such as Vizio’s $330 8-inch tablet. The SoC supports Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3, 3G cellular networks, USB 2 and HDMI interfaces, as well as a digital camera with up to 16MP resolution. Marvell says the 618 is capable of delivering 1080p video encoding and decoding at 30 fps.

• Not content with shipping the world first quad-core Android tablet, Asus is now showing two more Nvidia Tegra 3 models at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). They’re the seven-inch Eee Pad MeMo ME370T — which will reportedly sell for just $250 — and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T, with enhanced wireless performance and a 10.1-inch display that packs an impressive 1920 x 1200 pixels.

Free Software/Open Source

• It started recently when I bumped into this Larry’s post. This persuaded me to think (one more time) about names of operating systems and applications in the world of Open Source. The post I linked above tells us that names are not always as good as they originally appear. And it gives at least 4 examples where developers needed to think twice before arriving at the current name.

• After nearly two years since the last stable release and four years since development began, open source desktop publishing software Scribus has released version 1.4.0. Over 2000 new feature requests and bugs have been resolved in this release since the development started, making it the first major release in several years.

• Google is one of the strongest proponents of open source. The company has released the source code of Google Body, a project that company retired last year along with many other such projects. The project has already found a ‘suiter’ body.

• Zygote Media Group has created a Zygote Body using this open source code. Zygote Body offers the same navigation, layering, and instant search as Google Body. Like Google Body, Zygote Body can be used in browsers that support WebGL, like Chrome and Firefox, without needing to install additional software.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Six months ago, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler — one of the original members of the team that built the Firefox browser — made it quite clear that the open source outfit wasn’t interested in helping businesses. Their only aim, he said, was serve individual web surfers. “Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours,” Dotzler said.

• We are pleased to announce that the proposal for an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox is now a plan of action. The ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• “One of the unfortunate things that LibreOffice inherited, as part of the several decades worth of unpaid technical debt, is unused code that has been left lying around indefinitely,” wrote Michael Meeks, a Linux desktop architect at SUSE who coordinates LibreOffice development work, in a blog post on Monday.

• The appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R.

CMS

• One of the major plus points about free and open source software is that it adheres to widely accepted standards. Rarely does any software of this genre seek to create its own standard in order to do what proprietary systems do – grab marketshare.

Education

• If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching. As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:

• Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11 year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones. (Or they might just sit down and write a new operating system kernel as someone else did a few years ago.)

• Those words – amazingly – were pronounced earlier today by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove as part of a long-awaited speech about the future of ICT teaching in the UK.

• The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary has announced.

• It will be replaced by an “open source” curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry.

• Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum “harmful and dull”.

• He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.

• He said this would create young people “able to work at the forefront of technological change”.

• Speaking at the BETT show for educational technology in London, Mr Gove announced plans to free up schools to use curricula and teaching resources that properly equip pupils for the 21st Century.

• He said that resources, developed by experts, were already available online to help schools teach computer science and he wants universities and businesses to devise new courses and exams, particularly a new computing GCSE.

Public Services/Government

• In a previous post I discussed how Faith Gordon requested the City Council in Lackawanna, NY to make available to the public copies of the entire Council meeting agenda not just a summary. Ms. Gordon requested that the entire City Council meeting agenda including resolutions, memos etc. be put on-line, so that the public can see what the Councilmembers see when voting at a meeting.

• The response Ms. Gordon received from one Councilmember was, “Why do we have to put it on the website? I don’t understand,” said 3rd Ward Councilman Francis J. Kulczyk. “Do we have to do it? Who else does it?”

Openness/Sharing

• An open-source curriculum Advances in technology should also make us think about the broader school curriculum in a new way.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• I don’t expect that Rick Santorum will be our next president, despite his near-win in Iowa and a decent showing in the New Hampshire primary. I’m pretty certain that when more voters become aware of his views and voting record, Santorum will join Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty as former contenders for the GOP nomination.

• But if by some strange turn of events he is sworn in a little over a year from now as our 45th president, no one will be happier than the executives I used to work with in the health insurance industry. Santorum was without a doubt one of the most reliable go-to guys in the Senate when insurers needed a champion for one of their causes. That was certainly true in regard to the industry’s efforts to shift ever-increasing portions of the cost of medical care from them to us.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• While U.S. officials are scrambling to pass domestic Internet censorship legislation in the name of curbing copyright infringement, they’ve been much more effective in their efforts to export these laws abroad. Previously, we’ve examined US attempts to pressure the prior Spanish presidential administration to enact harsh copyright laws. A new letter reported by the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, reveals that the U.S. government didn’t miss a beat when they renewed their threat to put in place trade penalties toward Spain unless the new government enacted a copyright law in a timely manner. The US was dangerously close to getting their dream legislation in Spain last year, but were disappointed when the Spanish executive office deferred to fully enact the copyright law, Ley Sinde, due to its wide unpopularity. Digital activists and Internet rights lawyers internationally recognized that this Spanish law would overtly skirt due process, violate personal privacy, and limit freedom of expression.

• The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with “retaliation actions” if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Tucson-based civil rights attorney Stacy Scheff believes that Westin Kierland may have violated federal constitutional law when they threw a journalist (and paid guest) out into the dead of night–due to the simple fact that the journalist evicted had written critically of (and was not liked by) the organization hosting a conference at the hotel. (A new story about these events is available here).

• Scottsdale, Arizona–A suburb awash in money and golf courses, set against the backdrop of the jagged mountains surrounding Phoenix.

• I was sitting in a sports bar of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, swapping journalism stories with Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star on one of the bar’s overstuffed leather couches. Over the course of an hour, the bar filled with conventioneers from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS). (A new story on Westin’s connections to other ALEC corporations is available here.)

Censorship

• Following a consultation held in late 2010, the European Commission just announced an action plan on the role of Internet actors in the policing of online content1. One key issue is that of “notice and takedown” measures, which are today implemented in total opacity at the expense of users’ freedom of communication. As the global war on sharing rages, this announcement underlines the pressing need for citizen involvement in this crucial debate to better protect our freedoms online.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

• Last week I posted on the government’s consultation on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and its potential effect on Canada’s public domain. According to a leaked draft of the proposed intellectual property chapter, the TPP would require countries (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Japan – all current or potential TPP members) that meet the international copyright term standard of life of the author plus 50 years to add an additional 20 years to the term of protection. The extension in the term of copyright would mean no new works would enter the public domain in those countries until at least 2033 (assuming an agreement takes effect in 2013).

• Europe has been embroiled in a controversy over the copyright term of sound recordings for the past few years. While the law provided protection for a 50 year term, major record labels argued for an extended term to generate more profits from older recordings. Proposals to extend the term in the UK and Europe were widely panned as independent studies found that benefiting a few record labels would come at an enormous public cost (see here or here). For example, the UK Gowers Review of Intellectual Property concluded:

• By now, most people who pay attention to our government and have a pulse, are aware of the Twin Titans of Tech Terror, SOPA and PIPA.

• I am guessing those people comprise about 12 percent of America’s population. The rest are either in tears over Kim Kardashian’s divorce or are ticking off the days until the new season of Dancing with the Stars.

• I’ve often stated that if we were to take measure of the average US citizen’s IQ, based on their television viewing habits, they would place comfortably between a bag of hammers and….uh, Kim Kardashian.

• Reddit, the popular link-sharing and social networking site with over 2 billion page-views and 35 million active users a month, is taking the nuclear option in protest about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP draft laws by shutting down on January 18th for 12 hours. During that time, Reddit will suspend its normal operations

• “Instead,” the Reddit administrators state, “of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis ‘kn0thing’ Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meet-ups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.”

• Reddit, one of the most popular social news site, has decided to go Nuclear to protest the dangerous SOPA, the anti-American bill. The site has threatened to blackout reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). Which means there will be no reddit for 12 hours.

• Wikipedia is also planning to block access to Wikipedia in the USA. Many other sites are planning similar protest. It is shameful that the US congress has ignored all the warning by the IT expert and are going ahead to push the bill. These congressmen are not working for the benefit of users or US citizens. They are working for the Hollywood and the corporations who are funding them to pass this bill.

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