● 02.16.12

● Links 16/2/2012: Netrunner 4.1, More Ubuntu 12.04 Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 6:36 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas, ranked number 64 on Esquire’s Best Bars in America 2011 list and landed spot number 31 on Complex Magazine’s 2010 list of the 50 best college bars in America. Since opening back in 1993, this popular local bar has been best known for its pinball machines, ice cold PBR, mix of colorful characters, and some of the best live music you’ll find anywhere. Few people know that inside this dark little bar, Linux servers and some open source-based scripts are keeping an eye on liquor and its link to the bottom line.

• A new study set to be released by career website Dice.com and the Linux Foundation paints a very rosy picture of the Linux job market.

• Now the fact that the Linux Foundation is involved in this study means that it could potentially be seen as self-serving (but hey what PR isn’t), but the trends are unmistakable. The survey found that the vast majority (81%) of companies were going to making hiring Linux people a priority for 2012.

Desktop

• I have been an observer of developments in information technology for decades and I enjoyed what ACER has done with the netbook and devices using ARM processors. These are areas of IT that fit well with ACER’s sustainability initiatives. Clearly, the world loves small cheap computers so this area also meets ACER’s business model.

• When smartphones and tablets using ARM processors and Android software cut deeply into the netbook market, ACER suffered a difficult year financially. Unfortunately, the management of ACER has responded by developing small expensive computers like the ultrabooks.

• I recommend that ACER increase consideration of the effects of products in the hands of the end user. It is good to consider ACER’s corporate impact but the products in use have a much larger impact. Clearly, x86/amd64 processors use more silicon and power per unit of productivity. By increasing emphasis on ARM processors, ASUS can greatly cut the cost of making products and the cost of energy and the environmental impact of that energy in the hands of end users.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has released long-term kernel 3.0.20 and stable kernel 3.2.5. Both contain just a single bug fix that allows PCIe power-saving technology ASPM (Active State Power Management) to be used on systems with a BIOS that activates ASPM on some components, but states in the FADT (Fixed ACPI Description Table) consulted by Linux that ASPM is not supported.

Applications

• Airtime is free open source radio automation software developed by Sourcefabric. It enables you to take the complete control of your radio station via the web. Airtime offers a number of very useful tools like intelligent archive management, powerful search, easy to use playlist builder, simple scheduling

• calendar and robust automated playout. Airtime also offers highly advanced features for those who want to take the make the best of it and these include managing staff, recording and rebroadcasting the live show etc.

• Task management tools are a branch of computer software which enable users to create a list of tasks to be completed. This list is sometimes known as a to-do list or things-to-do. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘task manager’ should not be confused with monitoring software which provides information about programs and processes running on a computer.

• The list of activities that may form a to-do list include chores, grocery lists, reminders for important events (such as purchasing wedding presents or birthday gifts), self management, software development, project / business management, and so on. Task managers help to organise your day, ensuring that you know in an instant what you need to do.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Cooperative Linux (coLinux) is a very interesting project i stumbled upon a few days ago. The idea of this project is to allow a Linux Kernel to run at the same time (cooperation) with the Windows system instead of doing virtualization or emulation. The result is an amazing speed if compared to VirtualBox or other virtualization solutions expecially in I/O and network operations.

Games

Desktop Environments

• Compiz was first released to SUSE users in January of 2006. The product of Novell engineer David Reveman and the result of investment in Xgl, Compiz provided a hardware-composited windowing environment with software-rendered OpenGL. Shortly thereafter, AIGLX was released by Red Hat and Compiz was quickly ported to it by a team led by Kristian Høgsberg in March of the same year. AIGLX allowed hardware-accelerated OpenGL applications to be run underneath an OpenGL compositor, and thus Compiz could run fully-accelerated OpenGL applications. It would take a few years for all the quirks of AIGLX to be worked out and for Xgl to eventually be abandoned.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• 1. The worst bug: sometimes while editing a file, Kate will start typing right-to-left instead of left-to-right. There’s no switch for this on any menu. The only fix is to close the file and reopen it. This is a known bug.

• 2. Sometimes it won’t scroll to the bottom of a text file. Neither the scroll bar, nor the mouse wheel, nor the Page Down key, nor down-arrow in the text, will take it to the last lines of the file. The only thing I’ve found which works is to search for text which appears at the end of the file.

GNOME Desktop

• Yeah, yeah….we’ve been over this a billion times but I don’t think it’s been so eloquently detailed as it has been here. Gnome gets, what I consider to be, a deserved bi*ch slap for their utter stupidity and lack of vision and foresight. Heaven knows they’ve been run through the wringer but just for the sake of clarity, this author puts them through another spin cycle just to make sure they hear the message.

• One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we’ve done it in the past.

Distributions

• It is “a Good Thing(TM) that Gnome is open source; projects like Cinnamon can ‘route around’ the damage,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. At the same time, “the existence of Cinnamon is also a symptom of the churn that is becoming the norm. There’s nothing wrong with trying something new … but at some point, all these warring implementations start inducing a sense of battle fatigue.”

• Miklós Vajna proudly announced on February 12th, the immediate availability for download of the Frugalware 1.6 (Fermus) Linux operating system.

• The first release of the KDE 4.8 series of Chakra has been released , codename Archimedes, Chakra GNU/Linux featuring Linux 3.2 and KDE 4.8. With this release KDE is updated to 4.8.0, kernel to Linux 3.2.2. A new theme, Ronak is introduced. Updated Qt, boost, subversion, phonon packages, libxcb stack to name a few of the newer base packages included. A switch to GRUB2 has been decided on, to be more compatible with any other Operating System.

• With the help of open source tools, penetration testing can now be conducted easier (although it can also be hard sometimes :p ) and cheaper. Linux has gained popularity in the area of penetration testing and information security. Not just because of its security but because of its efficiency because most Pentesting Linux distros that can just be booted using your flash drive or a live CD which makes wherein you don’t need to install it on your HDD. These live penetration testing distros contains a package of tools for hacking or cracking a system. Each pentesting distro has its own pros, cons and specialty which includes web application vulnerability research, forensics, WiFi cracking, reverse engineering, malware analysis, and many more.

• Now forked from Fedora, Fuduntu has a new release strategy, a subtle facelift and thousands of new packages to choose from…

• Alan Baghumian announced last night, February 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r2 operating system.

• Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r2 is the second and most probably the last update for the Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7 (Raul) distribution.

New Releases

• Accompanying the release of Netrunner 64bit version, we released the 4.1 version for 32bit with the following changes compared to 4.0:

• - switched to Hybrid ISO - Kernel 3.0.0.15 - KDE 4.7.4 (latest stable) - Muon 1.2.95 - kde-gtk-config module for easy gtk2+gtk3 configuration under KDE - several bugfixes, including system freezes during automatic update

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon 8 has been released on 8th Feb, 2011 which originally based on Gentoo Linux operating system. Sabayon believes in outof box experience so they try to give most of basic packages in-built. Its tagline is “Open your source, Open your mind”. Apart from that it has dashing look and available in many flavors like GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Openbox.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is continuing to push forward its new storage vision this week with the release of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• The cloud computing market is caught between its head and its heart.

• The head is closed. The head buys VMWare’s (VMW) vSphere hypervisor, which is proprietary. The head buys Amazon (AMZN) Web Services’ (AWS) public cloud, also proprietary (but with an open API).

Fedora

• Red Hat’s new Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron has a lot of work ahead of her as she helps to grow one of the world’s largest Linux distribution communities. Bergeron was appointed the new FPL last week, succeeding outgoing FPL Jared Smith who had held the position since June of 2010.

• One of Bergeron’s goals as FPL will be get a better handle on all the statistics that surround Fedora.

• “People will ask where is Fedora going and I’ve always been a big fan of knowing where you are first,” Bergeron told InternetNews.com. “It’s always good to have a good handle on where you are as it makes it far easier to measure your milestones and know that you’re actually going someplace.”

Debian Family

• The developer version of Debian GNU/Linux (“wheezy”) contains 17,141 packages of software, or 419,776,604 lines of code. With that figure, James Bromberger estimates that Debian would cost about $19.1 billion to produce. Bromberger also looks at the cost of individual projects like PHP, Apache and MySQL. Even at more than $19 billion, the figure is likely far short of what it would actually cost to produce.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Once upon a time, there was a processor architecture that was everywhere. Consider the ubiquity of ARM in mobile phones and tablets. In the 80′s and 90′s there was a parallel to this. The 68k series from Motorola. This guy was everywhere! In your Amiga or your Atari ST. Your Sega Genesis and your NEO-GEO. Your Mac.

• One of the great advantages of Linux is it has great support for older systems and legacy hardware. This week, we take a look at how Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ runs on an older system running older hardware. I found such a system in my very own office. In fact, the system that I am writing

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu was promoted to the LTS (long term support) version recently, which means Kubuntu 12.04 will be supported for 5 year. This special status makes it important for the team to pick right tools when features are frozen.

• Softpedia is proud to introduce today, February 7th, a new Linux distribution, called Comice OS, which is actually a redesigned version of the Pear OS Linux.

• Remember Pear OS? It’s that Mac OS looking (see screenshots below) Ubuntu-based operating system introduced last year on our Linux section.

• Softpedia was proud to introduce yesterday, February 7th, the brand-new Comice OS 4 Linux operating system, built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment and customized to look like Mac OS.

• Comice OS 4 is based on both Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS distributions, containing Linux kernel 3.2, GNOME 3.2.2, Mozilla Firefox 11.0 Beta, Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0 Beta, LibreOffice 3.5 Beta 2, Clementine, Shotwell, Totem Movie Player, BleachBit, Adobe Flash Player plug-in and Synaptic Package Manager.

• Both of the latest releases of these particular distributions came out this week. Also, Linux Mint now has a partnership with Netrunner for Linux Mint with KDE; hence, this comparison test may be the last meaningful one between the distributions while they remain as separate as possible, because I think they will converge in the coming months. Finally, Kubuntu just lost its funding at Canonical, so like Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Edubuntu, after (but not including) version 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” it will be recognized by Canonical as an official derivative but will only be supported by the community. This means that there will need to be a new top dog for Ubuntu-based KDE distributions, and these two distributions seem like the most likely candidates. That is why I am comparing these two distributions now.

• When Linux Mint fans trumpeted that it was the most downloaded Linux distro in recent years, the distro was throwing itself open to debate on the ways and mechanisms by which it became the most downloaded or most viewed distro on opensource platform watchdog-Distrowatch.

• Linux Mint 11 and now Linux Mint 12 are great versions that have grown in usage, thanks to the continuity, its founder developer Clement Lefebvre offers for Gnome users. While Ubuntu, backed by Canonical’s steady but firm vision of moving towards a ‘touch-based user experience’ for Ubuntu, continued with Unity desktop as default, Linux Mint proved to be a ‘fresh Mint of Gnome’ as it offered what Ubuntu users yearned for- the ultimate, satisfying experience of Gnome platform.

Devices/Embedded

• In a recent interview with Linux User & Developer, Raspberry Pi developer Eben Upton got a chance to talk about the performance of the upcoming SoC that is due out later this month.

• “Raspberry Pi, in terms of multimedia, outperforms any other dev board in existence – which is nice,” explained Eben, “In terms of general purpose computing, it’s got this 700MHz ARM11, and our benchmark shows it’s about 20 per cent slower than a Beagleboard for general purpose computing. But, you know, it’s a quarter of the price.”

Phones

Android

• Since the early days of the PC, the software industry has operated according to a pattern described in Michael Cusumano’s classic The Business of Software: The successful software companies are the ones which gathered the largest number of users. The best practitioners were Microsoft and, later, Google. Both followed similar strategies: lower costs, add distribution partners, add users, and branch into related products.

• Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company’s own brand, according to people briefed on the company’s plans.

• Amazon is reportedly preparing to launch an updated 7-inch Kindle Fire alongside a brand new 9-inch tablet this summer. Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley on Thursday raised his full-year Kindle Fire shipment forecast to 14.9 million units, up from his earlier estimate of 12.7 million.

• A leaked RUU file for the upcoming HTC Endeavor has confirmed all the pretty little details that we’ve come to expect out of HTC’s upcoming handset. Landing online this past weekend and promptly getting broken apart, the RUU file tells us that we’re in for quite a tasty device come Mobile World Congress.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Samsung has introduced its first line-up of tablets for 2012 with the launch of the GALAXY Tab 2. The 7 inch tablet is available in 3G and WiFi versions. The tablets will be running Google Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The tablet will also feature an upgraded Android Market which enables access to more than 400,000 applications.

Free Software/Open Source

• Research In Motion (RIM) has announced that its BlackBerry 10 Native Software Development Kit (SDK) will be bound to open source.

• Hewlett-Packard announced plans to release the code behind webOS this September under the Apache License 2.0.

• The license allows developers to mix open-source code with their own inventions and sell products using the code.

• OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.

• Much of the early development of Sugar took place in the MIT Media Lab. We began in the spring of 2006, in parallel with the work of the teams responsible for developing other aspects of the XO laptop’s software, including device drivers, power management, and security. One might ask how OLPC was able to create an entirely new learning platform from whole cloth, and do so with almost no investment in software engineering. The short answer is that they didn’t. OLPC solved the problem of how to develop the Sugar software with limited resources by attracting external resources—not creating them from scratch—while articulating clearly defined objectives. OLPC built upon decades of research into how to engineer software to promote learning and amplified OLPC’s staff resources by leveraging key partnerships within the Free Software movement.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• Adobe’s Flash Player plugin is among the most attacked pieces of software on the Internet today. While Adobe rapidly moves to fix urgent flaws as they emerge, they have also been moving towards a sandboxing approach that mitigates the risk of any potential flaws in Flash. After first appearing in Google’s Chrome browser, the Flash sandbox is now on its way to Mozilla’s Firefox.

• The new Flash Player sandbox for Firefox is currently in a public beta and it aims to go beyond the process protections that Mozilla already affords to plugins.

• Wiebke Lips, Senior Manager of Corporate Communications at Adobe, explained to InternetNews.com that Firefox today runs Flash Player and several other plugins in a separate process called plugin-container.exe.

• Mozilla launched a new project last year called Boot2Gecko (B2G) with the aim of developing a mobile operating system. The platform’s user interface and application stack will be built entirely with standards-based Web technologies and will run on top of Gecko, the HTML rendering engine used in the Firefox Web browser. The B2G project has advanced at a rapid pace this year and the platform is beginning to take shape.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle adds enterprise support for the R statistical programming language to Oracle Database 11g.

Public Services/Government

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics?

• Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. And back in the day, a well-built HeathKit radio was every bit as good as the store-bought ones.

Programming

Leftovers

• Coherent is a full fledged Unix that runs on a simple 386 with a few megabytes of memory – incredible, but true. The kernel is just a few hundred KB, so it boots in an instant. It lived happy together with MS-DOS in its own 40 MB partition. But the best thing was its price: only $100. Needless to say I spend a lot of hours with that little beast, porting my C programs and UUCPing with that “monster” machine back at work.

Security

Finance

• A Goldman Sachs stock analyst has been drawn into the government’s sweeping investigation into insider trading at hedge funds.

• Federal investigators are examining whether Henry King, a senior technology industry analyst for Goldman based in Asia, provided confidential information to the bank’s hedge fund clients, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Censorship

• Paris, February 16th, 2012 – The European Court of Justice rendered another decision in defence of freedoms online. In the SABAM vs. Netlog case, it declares that forcing a hosting service to monitor and filter online content violates EU law. This is a crucial and timely ruling, just when initiatives such as ACTA and the revision of the IPRED directive aim to generalise private and automatic online censorship to enforce an outdated copyright regime.

Privacy

• From the earliest days of Usenet to the huge leaps of the last decade, online socialization has come a long way, bringing with it interesting redefinitions of words that are part of everyday speech. If you hate an organization, you still have to hit ‘Like’ to get updates in your Facebook newsfeed to know what they’re up to. Someone “befriending” you can mean different things, often pretty much removed from reality.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, following a recent anti-piracy legislative debacle with SOPA and PIPA, will lead his second effort of 2012 to push Internet-regulating legislation, this time in the form of a new cybersecurity bill. The expected bill is the latest attempt by the Democrats to broadly expand the authority of executive branch agencies over the Internet.

• Details about the bill remain shrouded in secrecy. Clues available to the public suggest that the bill might be stronger than President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity proposal, which was released in May 2011. Reid said that he would bring the bill — expected to come out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, chaired by Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman — to the floor during the first Senate work period of 2012.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• All I wanted to do was share a funny “Downton Abbey Meets Spike TV” skit that was on Saturday Night Live this week. Unfortunately, there’s no authorized version of the sketch online from NBCUniversal. That made me hesitate, but apparently it wasn’t a problem for iVillage, an NBCUniversal-owned site. Nor was it an issue for Time, owned by internet piracy hating Time Warner. Come along. This is a sad tour of failure all around.

• The battle over the Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States may have concluded with millions of Internet users successfully protesting against the bill, but many Canadians are buzzing about the possibility that some of its provisions could make their way into a copyright bill currently before the House of Commons.

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.