● 02.16.12

● Links 16/2/2012: Scientific Linux 5.7 and 6.2, Mozilla Firefox 10.0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:10 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Desktop Linux as it was, as it is and as it ever will be, never had a chance at unseating Windows as a DE replacement. You know, maybe an unfortunate stumble out of the starting gate could have been recovered from. Unfortunately, someone deemed it necessary to weld our gate shut before the starting bell sounded.

• The Linux Foundation and Dice have released a report titled ‘Linux Jobs Report’ which shows the increasing demand for Linux talent across industries. The report includes responses from more than 2,000 hiring managers at corporations, Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), government organizations, and staffing agencies from across the globe.

Desktop

• Of these, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is regarded as one of the most fully developed operating systems and for this head-to-head, we’ve compared the current Ubuntu 10.11 (‘Oneiric Ocelot’) to Windows 7. In particular, we’re interested in its interface and software capabilities from an end-user’s perspective, plus the ease of installation, security and maintenance considerations for administrators.

Server

• Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has released its third annual survey of the Ubuntu Server installed base to show what is going on out there among the Shuttleworth faithful. The survey comes just as Canonical is getting ready to put its next big server release into the field in April.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The Mesa project has released version 8.0 of Mesa 3D – the first version of the OpenGL implementation and 3D driver collection to support OpenGL 3.0 and version 1.30 of GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language). As usual, the features supported are dependent on the hardware and drivers used: the i965 driver for recent Intel graphics cores should already include everything required for OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30. According to a presentationPDF given by a group of Nouveau developers at FOSDEM, Mesa 3D driver NVC0 also supports both technologies. NVC0 operates as a driver for many Fermi generation graphics cores, which are primarily used in GeForce 400 and 500 series models.

• X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2.

• Red Hat’s Peter Hutterer who originally devised Multi-Pointer X (MPX) for X.Org and other input advancements in recent years was one of the developers (along with Daniel Stone and Chase Douglas) responsible for X Input 2.2 for these improvements. Peter spoke this past weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM 2012 about these input improvements.

Applications

• Many people’s initial exposure to science is through astronomy, and they are inspired by that first look through a telescope or their first glimpse of a Hubble image. Several software packages are available for the Linux desktop that allow users to enjoy their love of the stars. I look at several packages in this article that should be available for most distributions.

• Time Drive is a Userfriendly Utility for backup that allows easy and clean to backup your Any Files, Music, Videos, Photos, and Documents. With Time Drive you can add as many files and folders as you want and restore them later in a single click with support of incremental backup.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

• This is not 100% confirmed, but the news that Fedora is dropping Compiz from release 17 can only mean one thing — Compiz is dead. Gentoo, openSUSE, GNOME, and a list of others had already dropped Compiz, leaving only one distribution holding onto the compositing software — Ubuntu. That’s right, the little desktop that could still uses Compiz as its compositor. There are also plenty of outstanding bug reports whose issues, it seems, will forever be unresolved. This all clangs out a death knell for the compositor that really brought something to the Linux desktop that no other had.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The Chakra team has announced the release of the latest version of Chakra which is based on KDE 4.8. Chakra Archimedes will not only give you an ‘out-of-the-box’ Linux eperience, but also let you explore KDE 4.8.

• Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I’ve trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally.

• Disclaimer: I work in the same role as Jonathan at SUSE, a competing Linux company that sponsors the openSUSE project. This is my personal opinion, not that of the openSUSE Board or SUSE Linux GmbH.

GNOME Desktop

• Mutter is a window and compositing manager that displays and manages your desktop via OpenGL. Mutter combines a sophisticated display engine using the Clutter toolkit with solid window-management logic inherited from the Metacity window manager.

Distributions

• The world of desktop Linux is often portrayed these days as a battle primarily between longstanding leader Ubuntu and up-and-coming challenger Linux Mint, frequently with the suggestion that Mint is winning.

• Popular community site LinuxQuestions.org has published the results of its 2011 Members Choice Awards, which have yielded results that might be a bit surprising for those who believe the Linux community has turned away from Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution.

• Every year LinuxQuestions.org hosts a members choice awards, which lets members of the site vote for their favorite Linux distributions and open source applications. There’s not a lot of change in the results from last year, but the results do show a few interesting changes. GNOME has been unseated as favorite desktop, the GIMP has gone up in the polls even further, and LinuxQuestions.org has its first-ever tie in the NoSQL category.

• Chakra doesn’t need any introduction, it is fast growing in popularity among the KDE users. But, I will give you a brief history of Chakra. It started off as KDEmod, a modular software package for Arch Linux which was phased out last year, transforming Chakra into an independent Arch based operating system. Since Chakra is still going through the transition things will change and improve over time. Which puts Charka in a ‘still in the making’ distro. We reviewed Chakra last year and we are back to check what’s new with the latest version.

• British developer Philip Newborough has released updated images of CrunchBang 10, his Debian Squeeze-based Linux distribution with an Openbox-based desktop. The R20120207 update is available as two sets of images – “stable” and “backported” – instead of just one. Newborough says that the change came about because of some concerns expressed over the default use of backport packages. “The new images do not constitute a new release,” he notes “at least not for anyone who is content with using the previous 20111125 images”.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• During a webcast today, Scott Crenshaw, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said he’s glad to see VMware working with partners to develop its cloud business but insisted that VMware’s is a lock-in solution.

• “VMware will be open the day they open source vSphere … everything else is window dressing,” said Crenshaw, saying that VMware is taking what is a closed proprietary solution and trying to make it more open through standards and partnerships. “They’re taking baby steps but I wouldnt call it open.”

• We want to thank everyone who has contributed, tested, and given us feedback. We know that the 6.x series is a priority for most sites which is what makes the feedback we’ve gotten on this latest 5.x release so special.

• Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack development for some time. Unlike the bulk of companies involved, however, Red Hat has gone about its work quietly and without “officially” joining the effort. Red Hat still isn’t saying exactly what it hopes to get from OpenStack contributions, but Brian Stevens did divulge a bit about the company’s involvement.

• Stevens is Red Hat’s CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no “confirmed” product plans for OpenStack but the company is “just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward.”

Fedora

• The Fedora community is working hard on the upcoming release of Fedora (17). Adam Williamson has filed a request for Alpha RC.

Debian Family

• The recent FOSDEM was great this year, and Belgium still had beer left before, during and after. Still lots of people, though with an extra building open – it was a little less crowded. There were over 400 sessions on themes from Mozilla, Java, cross-distro and embedded to Ada and law.

• An analysis by Debian and CPAN developer James Bromberger concludes that it would cost about $19.1 billion (£12.1 billion) to develop the software currently included in Debian Wheezy (7.0) from scratch. For his analysis, the developer used the Sloccount program to count the lines of source code of the software that is in Wheezy; he then calculated how much it would cost to have developers on an average salary write the almost 420 million lines of code.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• While there’s still two months left until Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” will be officially released, here are the first benchmarks of this forthcoming long-term support release. Included are desktop and workstation benchmarks along with a look at the boot performance and power consumption. The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS releases are compared to earlier Ubuntu Linux releases going back to the 10.10 release.

• From 2nd – 4th March 2012 we will be running the Ubuntu Global Jam. This is a global event in which we ask Ubuntu users and contributors to organize events in their local areas to meet other Ubuntu people and help contribute to Ubuntu.

• The Ubuntu Global Jam is a fun event, and a great way to meet other Ubuntu and Free Software folks. It is also really easy to organize an event if there is not one near you.

• If you’re as keen as we are that the Ubuntu sound theme is on brand, now is your chance! We are calling for pitches for the Ubuntu sound theme!

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• HP has published a blog post that describes the Open webOS governance model. The project will adopt a similar approach to that of the Apache Software Foundation. Code will be developed in public repositories and key community contributors will be able to earn commit privileges. The standard of inclusiveness and transparency set by this governance model will make the Open webOS project more open than Google’s Android open source project (AOSP).

• Motorola began delivering the much anticipated Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich update to WiFi only Xoom tablets mid last month and appears to be opening up to more planned over-the-air deliverables for existing devices.

• “Motorola Mobility is able to provide the following guidance on Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich, abbreviated as “ICS”) upgrade availability based on where each product is in the Motorola Mobility Development Cycle described above,” according to a posting on the Motorola Mobility web site dated Feb 15, 2012.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• So where is Microsoft in the tablet sector? Pretty much nowhere…yet. Windows 8 is still to appear to the mainstream consumer and with Apple and Android products on the lips of everyone, as I observed a while ago, it will be Windows Phone 7 hell for Windows tablets when they finally have a real showing. Lets not forget even after its released we will probably have at least half a year of “baking” whilst Microsoft tells people the features they don’t need. (Remember the cut and paste episode)

• Diversity in the tech world is finally emerging. The Windows imposed desktop is becoming less of an issue and riding high on the popularity of the new(ish) form factor are alternatives to Microsoft. Exciting times for consumers.

• Upcoming Linux-based Spark Tablet is already anticipated by everyone around the world, including myself. While we wait to see its release, we will get to see another awesome new Linux-based tablet. Actually this one will be running on everyone favorite Ubuntu OS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Olson helped build the open source Berkeley DB database in the early 90s — before the Linux boom — and as the CEO of Sleepycat Software, he turned the database into a successful business using something very similar to the GPL, the free software license that was so essential to the rise of Linux. The GPL — or GNU General Public license — said that if someone modified free software and distributed the code with a larger product, they would have to contribute their work back to the community.

• Simon Phipps is a renowned computer scientist and web and open source advocate. Phipps was instrumental in IBM’s involvement in the Java programming language, founding IBM’s Java Technology Center. In this exclusive interview with Simon Phipps during FOSDEM 2012, Swapnil Bhartiya discusses new risks to our freedom. We discussed about ACTA, ebooks, copyrights and much more.

• ownCloud is one of the most promising and important projects as we are heading towards cloud-centric computing. Free Software users fought a long battle to keep control over their computing, and cloud poses a threat to both — the control over your computing and data. Projects like ownCloud ensure that users can still have control over their data and computer yet reap the benefits of cloud. We have been covering ownCloud for a while now. We met Frank Karlitschek, the founder of ownCloud, at FOSDEM 2012 and talked more about ownCloud. Here is an interview…

• JetBrains’ alternative language for the Java platform, Kotlin – which the company has been developing since 2010 and revealed in July 2011 – has now been released as open source under an Apache 2 licence. The released tools include the Kotlin compiler, “Kompiler”, a set of enhancements to standard Java libraries such as convenience utilities for JDK collections, build tools (for Ant, Maven and Gradle), and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin so it works with JetBrains’ own IDE.

• Meet John Scott. He is a systems engineer in Alexandria, Virginia. Scott has worked extensively on open source software policy for the US government and military–and helped found MIL-OSS and Open Source for America.

• On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles–things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. We hope you enjoy getting to know John.

Events

• FOSDEM concluded in Brussels this month. The weather took a strange turn and just the day before it started to snow heavily here in Brussels. It was freezing cold. The colorful city of Brussels turned white. The venue was only 6km away from our house so we drove through the snow.

Web Browsers

• Having released the first elements of its webOS mobile operating system as open source at the end of January, HP has taken further steps on the road to creating a completely open source platform. The company has now made the user interface widgets for Enyo 2 – the HTML5 framework that was released in January – available; it has also released the new Isis web browser that implements Nokia’s QtWebKit browser and the JavaScriptCore JavaScript parser. HP also announced details of the governance model for the webOS platform’s future development.

Mozilla

• Mozilla, developers of the popular Firefox web browser, have just released an update for the browser’s stable branch that moves the version to 10.0.1. The release may come as a surprise to users of Firefox 10, who were updated to that version only ten days ago.

• Those who have been following the Firefox release tracking tables will not find any surprises, but the list certainly serves as a guide of the baseline of new features and changes Firefox will see by the end of the year, when we will be using Firefox version 17.

• Mozilla has released its 2012 roadmap for the Firefox browser, and to say that it is ambitious would be an understatement. Of course, Firefox was moved to a rapid release cycle in February of last year, and the company has been delivering updates to the browser at such a fast pace that it has even faced some backlash from users and IT administrators. There is a huge laundry list of updates to come for the browser this year, with a strong emphasis on adding social features and privacy enhancements along with preservation of open web standards.

• Mozilla coders are arguing among themselves about the open-source outfit’s Metrics Data Ping project, which was designed to monitor Firefox usage metrics. Several coders in the Mozilla camp have expressed concern about how some developers are proposing the project should collect data from users of the browser.

Databases

• As an intern with the Monty Program AB, Vangelis Katsikaros recently had an opportunity to ask the project founder and MariaDB creator, Michael Widenius (aka “Monty”), a variety of interesting questions. Vangelis generously offered to share that conversation exclusively with Linux.com readers. Here is the transcript from that interview.

• EnterpriseDB is trying to pump up the PostgreSQL database to do battle with Oracle 11g and, to a lesser extent, IBM’s DB2 and Microsoft’s SQL. So the database upstart is upgrading its Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.1 – and kicking it onto Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud to peddle it alongside Amazon’s own Relational Database Service.

• As El Reg previously reported, the open source PostgreSQL relational database was updated to the 9.1 release level last September, with a lot of the work being done by a team at EnterpriseDB, which has become the “Red Hat for PostgreSQL,” led by Robert Haas, the senior architect at the company.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The LibreOffice 3.5 release is due out shortly, and this release comes with a number of improvements that free office suite users will find useful. From grammar checking to better importing for Microsoft Office documents, LibreOffice 3.5 contains a number of useful improvements. This release also contains preliminary work for porting LibreOffice to the Web and mobile devices.

Education

• The name Michelle Rhee most likely rings a bell because of all the hard work she put towards reforming the Washington, DC public schools as Chancellor from 2007 to 2010. During that time period, she hosted hundreds of community meetings, even creating a Youth Cabinet to bring students’ voices into DC Public Schools reform.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey for February 2012, Nginx was “the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month” by picking up 0.27 percentage points. Good news for the upstart Web server, just as the brand-new company behind Nginx takes the wraps off its commercial packages.

Public Services/Government

• The UK Government has started the process of consulting on Open Standards. The process was promised after the government was found to have withdrawn its previous recommendations which had defined open standards as royalty-free. That original recommendation was reportedly heavily lobbied against by Microsoft which led to its withdrawal and the apparent restarting of the process to define open standards.

• The idea of getting more SMEs into the government’s roster of suppliers ranks somewhere alongside kittens and rainbows in terms of popularity. But it’s easier said than done – central government IT continues to be dominated by the usual suspects.

• Liam Maxwell, the government’s director of ICT futures, is the man charged with getting the public sector to use more small suppliers.

• But with the spectre of ‘doing more with less’ haunting many government departments, can IT minnows really deliver the economies of scale that the stretched public sector needs?

• Maxwell thinks so. The idea that SMEs can’t deliver the required savings is “fundamentally not correct,” he told Guardian Government Computing at the recent Cloud Expo in London. “You do business with SMEs, you get a better deal.”

Licensing

Programming

• The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as “Harmony”. It is due by the end of next year and it is going to be the most comprehensive upgrade in the history of this language.

• Stephanie Taylor from Google’s Open Source Programs Office has announced the grand prize winners for the 2011 Google Code-in contest. Five of the ten overall winners are from India, while two are from Romania; the remaining students are from the US, UK and Canada.

• Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of “R,” the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances.

• Oracle Advanced Analytics consists of Oracle R Enterprise, along with the vendor’s existing Data Mining module. It’s available as an Oracle 11g database option and costs US$23,000 per processor license. Data Mining will fall off the price list and be supplanted by Advanced Analytics.

Leftovers

• CHFSS kicked off the Winter 2012 Big Thinking series on January 31 with Professor Jeremy de Beer from the University of Ottawa. Held in partnership with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), the event drew over 150 MPs, Senators and public servants, as well as many university presidents who were in town as part of AUCC’s Day on the Hill.

Security

Finance

• A federal judge in Florida on Friday approved a $9.8 million settlement by Goldman Sachs’ clearing and execution division in connection with a Florida Ponzi scheme that unraveled in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Privacy

• Twitter also under scutiny as it is revealed some apps take copy of contacts without fully alerting user

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The economy of the future is digital. Already today it’s hard to think of many jobs where familiarity with computers and the Internet is not helpful: in the near future, 90% of jobs will require some level of digital literacy.

DRM

• Let me reiterate the central point about DRM. The fight is over controlling the content on our computers. Even with complete physical control and administrative authority we are unable to prevent unwanted material (spam, viruses) from appearing on our computers. What are the chances that a third party (the RIAA, the MPAA) can successfully keep material that we want but they don’t (pirated music and movies) off of our computers?

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• I had a Twitter conversation yesterday with Tim Lee regarding my post about copyright enforcement, and today he responds at greater length. My contention is that copyright enforcement in the digital realm, though it’s obviously had a pretty bumpy history, isn’t self-evidently impossible. In fact, it might well be technically feasible.

• As part of its recent “new Vimeo” platform revamp, Vimeo has added support for browsing and searching for videos made available under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. The site has supported the CC license suite since July 2010, but the latest change should make it easier for users to find CC-licensed videos to “rework, remix and reimagine”. Now, when searching for videos, users can select “Show Advanced Filters” and filter by CC license type, such as Attribution-ShareAlike or Attribution-NonCommercial.

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