● 02.23.12

● Links 23/2/2012: Ubuntu Uses Qt, Many New Android Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A recent study from The Linux Foundation has found that Linux talent is a hot commodity among many hiring companies. The conclusions made sense to many on the Linux blogosphere. “Linux and open source are becoming strategic investments in many companies and have been for years,” said Chris Travers of the LedgerSMB project. Others, however, took issue with the study’s methodology.

• When Tomasz Sablinski was working in pharmaceutical R&D, he was often frustrated by the demand for secrecy in the clinical trials process—a misdirected effort, he says, to keep competitors in the dark about what drug companies were up to. “The price you pay when you hide what you’re doing is you only get feedback from a precious few people,” he says. “There is very little new blood in the ideation process.”

Desktop

• Last year, Dell announced selling Ubuntu/Linux at 200 stores in China. Today Dell announced they will expand to 1000 stores.

Kernel Space

• In his seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond put forward the claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He dubbed this Linus’ Law, in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but as the Wikipedia page points out the notion has its detractors. Michael Howard and David LeBlanc claim in their 2003 book Writing Secure Code “most people just don’t know what to look for.”

• While the Linux 3.3 kernel is still weeks away from release, there’s more building up to look forward to with its successor: the Linux 3.4 kernel. A few months down the road when Linux 3.4 makes it out, there will be some additional Intel performance improvements.

Graphics Stack

• Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.

• The 12.02 graphics driver is basically what was Intel’s quarterly package release under a new numbering scheme. Instead of being the “2012Q1″ Linux driver package, it’s now 12.02 to reflect its release in February of 2012. Back in October I wrote about Intel working on a new release cycle and this is part of their new development process.

Applications

• Oracle has released a second beta version of “DTrace for Oracle Linux”. The Linux port of the tracing software that was originally developed for Solaris now implements a provider for SDT (Statically Defined Tracing), providing in-kernel static probes; the developers say that they have also fixed a number of bugs.

Games

Distributions

• A few days ago, I experienced a motherboard failure. This gave me ample opportunity to do a fresh Linux installation. The first disk on hand was Pardus Kurumsal 2 for AMD64. I thought it would be interesting to give the distribution another spin.

• Upon a first boot attempt of the Pardus Kurumsal 2 installation disc, I was met with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Using ALT+Left, I determined that this was merely a failure of Xorg to start. The disc was automatically set to attempt usage of the best drivers possible, but at the time of the Pardus release, the NVIDIA GT520 was no where near the market. Running X -configure and then setting the driver manually to vesa allowed me to run the installer without further complication. Although, this problem did reassert itself after installation and upon the first boot of the newly installed system. This time, I wanted to have higher resolutions and improved performance, which prompted me to fire up Lynx. After navigating to nvidia.com, I downloaded the driver I needed. The next thing is the installation of the Pardus equivalent to Slackware’s D package set as well as the required kernel headers for module building.

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• “Canonical doesn’t intend to offer a public cloud as part of our business strategy,” Jane Silber, the company’s chief executive, said on Wednesday. “We have no plans to do that right now.”

• Because of Canonical’s close ties with the OpenStack cloud project, it doesn’t want to go down the Red Hat route, Silber said.

• Ubuntu 12.04 development hits the User Interface freeze tonight. This is also evident from all the user interface updates trying to meet the deadline. One such update brought a significant update to the Ubuntu One control panel.

• We all know about Ubuntu One, sync service developed in house by Canonical. In this update, the Ubuntu One developers have released a new interface based on the toolkit QT. This new interface is going to be the standard interface on all platforms like Windows, Ubuntu and MAC OS. A step in trying to bring about some integrity and commonality in the Ubuntu One usage on all platforms. It also helps with the Ubuntu One branding.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• We recently came to know about HTC’s new name branding, and the two phones under this branding are HTC One X and One S. HTC One X is actually the HTC Endeavor/Edge which will be launched at the Mobile World Congress next week. Our friends over at Pocketnow managed to get their hands on leaked shot of the HTC One X, and the device looks familiar (reminds me of Sensation).

• Toshiba is now telling customers it’s targeting the “end of spring” to provide the Android 4.0 upgrade to its flagship 10-inch tablet. Company reps have been openly discussing the Thrive’s Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade plans via the official @ToshibaUSA account on Twitter in recent days. Up till now, Toshiba hadn’t said much of anything about if or when the Thrive would get ICS.

• We’re at t-minus three days until the festivities start in Barcelona, and Asus isn’t letting the likes of HTC and LG have all the premature fun. In a new video posted to YouTube, the company teased a high-resolution tablet with an abstract, 17-second commercial before Mobile World Congress. There’s no hardware on display (a drawer with colored balls stands in for a Honeycomb/ICS home screen) but the teaser “twice the detail, twice the fun” leaves little room for doubt. Presumably, Asus is talking about a tablet with more than the standard resolution – i.e., more than 1280×800.

• Most interesting among the bunch is without a doubt the “Best Cloud UX Device,” which offers two 4.3-inch displays that open and close like a book — a hell of a lot better than Kyocera’s attempt, if you ask us. Also among the mix will be a 5-inch “Large Screen in One Hand” model, along with another 4.3-inch “Stylish” unit. Unlike previous products, the latest trio fully embrace the design philosophy of Ice Cream Sandwich and eschew the dedicated navigation buttons from bygone days.

Free Software/Open Source

• Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• One of the challenges companies often face when using Hadoop to aggregate massive volumes of structured and unstructured data is finding a way to efficiently control and manage user access to that data.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice, the OpenOffice fork, is a very popular open-source office suite. But, while it has great support from Linux distributors, like openSUSE and Ubuntu, LibreOffice has never had a major corporate backer on the Windows side… until now. Intel is now offering LibreOffice to Windows users via its AppUp application store. I wonder how Microsoft feels about this.

• According to The Document Foundation (TDF), the newly incorporated group behind LibreOffice, “LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE is available in Intel AppUp Center as a special, five-language version featuring English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. As a validated Intel AppUp Center app, LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE features a new, smooth, silent installation flow and improved un-installation cleanup.” This version of LibreOffice for Windows is now available from the Intel AppUp store.

Public Services/Government

• “By challenging developers to leverage government data in new and innovative ways, they’ll help businesses fund new activities, learn about and evaluate opportunities in the US and abroad, support education and training, and more,” the contest announcement says.

Open Access/Content

Leftovers

Finance

• Although last week’s $26 billion settlement between the Obama administration, attorneys general from 49 states, and five large banks over unscrupulous lending practices appears to have been deeply flawed, it may provide a modicum of relief for two million homeowners nationwide, including a half-million Californians. The agreement, however, does nothing for cities like Oakland that are trapped in expensive and toxic financial deals with some of Wall Street’s biggest players. Oakland’s bad lending deal is with Goldman Sachs, and it’s already cost the city $26 million. By 2021, the total pricetag for local taxpayers could reach $46 million.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Late in the evening, on February 22, the Wisconsin Legislature turned back the clock gutting key provisions of Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act (Act 20).

• Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison), a long time women’s rights advocate lamented: “It’s like we’re going back to 1912. We are fighting the same fight our mothers fought, just to be treated equally.”

Censorship

• Last month, we noted the odd propaganda film from ICE director John Morton, in which he seemed to be trying to pat himself on the back and pump up the morale of ICE agents for their hard work in illegally censoring the internet. Perhaps it’s because he knew that ICE agents apparently hate working there. An anonymous person pointed us to the news that in a recent ranking of government agencies, ICE ranked very near the bottom — 222 out of 240 agencies. It seems that morale isn’t particularly high there.

Privacy

• Good news today as the White House supports efforts for online service providers and web browsers to implement a “do not track standard”– just as we have been doing here in the EU.

• On March 1st, Google is going to combine its 70 different product-specific privacy policies and terms of service into one super-duper privacy policy. You’d think from all the screaming out there that Google was kicking in your door, ripping your credit cards out of your wallet, and taking your children hostage. Would everyone please chill already!

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is touting a victory in a copyright lawsuit that had the potential to shut down the database that all Linux and UNIX-based platforms and many time-based applications use to keep track of the ever-changing global timezones.

Copyrights

• There’s proposed legislation in the US (sponsored by Lamar Smith) and in Canada (sponsored by Vic Toews) and in the UK that uses various flimsy justifications for the mass collection of data on telecommunications users. The data covered by these proposals varies, but includes things like URLs, phone calls, text/instant/email messages, and other forms of communication. Some of this proposed legislation deals with communication metadata, e.g., sender, recipient, time, etc.; some of it deals with communication content, e.g., the full text of messages.

• Not this again. Ever since SOPA/PIPA were shelved, we’ve been hearing from MPAA and RIAA officials about how important it is that they “sit down and meet” with “the opposition.” Part of the problem is that they still can’t figure out who the opposition really was. They usually blame Google. And sometimes Wikipedia. We keep hearing these requests to work together, but when people take them up on the offer and agree to meet… they seem to chicken out. Another big part of the problem is assuming that the only answer to the challenges they’re facing is more legislation… but that’s clearly not true.

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