● 03.12.12

● Links 12/3/2012: Debian 5.0.10 Released, Skolelinux 6.0.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A big task was pending since a very long time in my todo lists. It was installing and trying out Linux. Having heard about many features and praises about Linux and programming on the LAMP stack from a few of my friends and colleagues, I decided to give it a try myself. So I went about learning and researching Linux & LAMP, formatted my hard-drive, created new partitions and installed Ubuntu 11.10 (a variety of Linux that ships with the GNOME desktop environment). The first emotion I then felt was that of regret – Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why was I focused on programming in a closed-source OS environment with bloated software, and a runtime with just two options to code – VB.NET & C#. Being enlightened about the open-source legends and milestones achieved by Linux and the secure way it handles its file-system, I couldn’t help but wonder at its marvel.

• I was at the bookstore last Sunday and I found my first Vietnamese language Linux book. Amazing!!!

• What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

• I’m currently running Mandriva 2011 on both my desktop and my laptop. Depending on the project I’m on I can either be working at home for extended periods (as I am currently) or on the customer site. I recently spent a few months on a customer site in Malaysia, and in that case my laptop becomes my main system.

• I’ve previously dabbled with Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu and others, but I have generally been very happy with Mandriva. I have always preferred the KDE environment over GNOME. In the early days when KDE2 came out (and I was running Redhat) I used to compile the latest KDE releases to use on my system. These days things are more mission-critical and I prefer to have a supported, packaged system. Whether I change this in the future depends on Mandriva’s future.

• My laptop is actually a triple boot setup, and also has Windows XP on it. I often do a lot of hands-on work on customer’s systems and for this I find Linux simply much more productive and powerful than Windows. The only time I use Windows is when a customer project mandates the use of a particular piece of software. In practice I find this doesn’t happen often, but having WIndows allows me to support this when it does.

• Linux skills are in growing demand in today’s IT hiring landscape, and there are many ways to bolster those skills both online and off.

Desktop

• Joe Brockmeier wrote an insightful piece on ReadWrite entitled “What We Lose in a Post-PC World” that starts off with this: “Tim Cook, Ray Ozzie, and a host of others have proclaimed that we’re in a “post-PC world.” Well, not quite yet, but you can see it from here.”

• [...]

• Meanwhile, technology marches on and as evening falls on the pre-Post-PC era — which might be called the post-pre-Post-PC era by purists, opening another argumentative can of worms as a sideshow — Blender developers will actually get an Android version for tablets up and running, just proving the point that you can do it, but ignoring the important question around why you would make software to run on something that’s not built for the job.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Linux server users won’t have to wait long to benefit from the new Intel Xeon E5 processor, announced earlier this week. Hardware vendors and Linux operating system vendors alike are ready to leverage Intel’s latest server chip architecture.

• How do Linux kernel devs figure out which kernel will be the basis for their enterprise distros?

• The Linux kernel community is made up of lots of different developers working at different companies. But as it turns out, those companies don’t really control their own kernel roadmaps as much as they might think.

• While it looks like there’s still another week before the Linux 3.3 kernel will be released and thus marking the merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel opening, here’s some of the DRM graphics changes you can expect to see merged.

Graphics Stack

• GLSL 1.40 is a requirement for OpenGL 3.1, which Intel is now attempting to support in Mesa now that they have OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support for their Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics driver. There’s been talk of possibly having OpenGL 3.1 in place for Mesa 8.1, which will be released this summer, and GLSL 1.40 is part of this.

• APITrace was introduced in April of last year as a way to help graphics driver developers debug the graphics stack. This free software program allows for easy OpenGL API tracing regardless of driver. APITrace 2.0 was then introduced in September to support the latest OpenGL 4.2 specification and to provide other new functionality. Today the program has reached the version 3.0 milestone.

• If you have been desiring better video playback support on the open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack, the days of being frustrated may be limited. There’s some code concerning UVD — the GPU’s Unified Video Decoder engine — that will be going through internal code review at AMD this coming week.

• One of the Gallium3D drivers yet not fully supporting the OpenGL 3.0 specification is the LLVMpipe software rasterizer. However, if you’re curious of what’s left before this CPU-based graphics driver can handle GL3, here’s a list.

• Some new details have emerged concerning the 2012 X.Org Developers’ Summit, which will take place this September and commemorate 25 years of X11.

• First of all, while it’s not been officially announced on the mailing lists or elsewhere yet, XDS2012 is expected to happen from the 19th to 21st of September. It’s been mentioned on the XDS2012 Wiki page and elsewhere and discussed for weeks, like back at FOSDEM, but I believe Egbert Eich will be sending out the formal announcement soon.

Applications

Proprietary

• Lauterbach has announced support for the Beyond Semiconductor’s BA22 family of microprocessor cores with its debug tools.

• Lauterbach’s TRACE32 tools provide BA22 processor debugging through a standard JTAG interface for the complete debug process, including code download, flash programming and source code debugging.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• The open-source Xonotic gaming community has released version 0.6.0 of their DarkPlaces-powered Nexuiz-forked game. Xonotic 0.6.0 offers up some mighty improvements as Xonotic nears version 1.0.

• Google is leaving no stone unturned in developing and promoting Native Client (NaCl) to game developers. Not only indie game developers are being attracted but Google is striking deals with big game production houses like Square Enix and Ubisoft.

• If you are still not aware about Native Client games, read our articles on it from here. All these games are playable in Chrome/ium browser in sandboxed mode. All you have to do is enable hardware acceleration and whitelist your graphic card.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The source of the problem is the fact that kded is sometimes frozen by one or more of its modules. Plasma NM < 0.9.0 used to do several synchronous calls to networkmanagement module in kded, specially to get the signal strengh of wifi access points and 3G connections. You can imagine how often wifi access points (all access points in range, even the ones you are not connected to) can trigger signal strengh… signals :-/ Yes, every often.

Distributions

• No, I’m not. Because I never left, hihihihi. The title is a clickbait…

• [...]

• Looking ahead into the misty future, I can honestly say I do not know which Linux distribution I will be running on my current and new hardware in the coming years, but I definitely know I will be using Windows. That’s the simple reality. No, let me rephrase that. I will be running Windows XP and Windows 7, as Windows 8, if rumors are all true, aims to become the new lead champion in the moronity club. Still.

• Linux Deepin is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses a highly customized GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment. It was initially created for Chinese users only, but there are now different ISO images for both Chinese and English languages.

• I have also excluded three Linux distros that appear on the Distrowatch “Top Ten” list: Arch Linux, Slackware, and CentOS. From what I’ve gathered, Arch Linux and Slackware are better suited to advanced Linux users than to newcomers; and CentOS is primarily for “enterprise” users (those setting up servers). I’ve heard many good things about all three, but they’re probably not distros for the Goodbye, Microsoft audience.

• I’ve included PC-BSD as a representative of the BSD Unix family. While I have not tried it myself, I’m told it’s the “Ubuntu of BSDs” for ease of installation and use, and it is aimed at desktop use rather than servers.

• I mentioned several lightweight distros in late 2009; some have since gone dormant or have been discontinued. (Namely FeatherLinux, SLAX, SaxenOS, BeaFanatIX, U-Lite, Fluxbuntu, and Wolvix.) The only “dormant” distro I’ve included is Damn Small Linux, which, though not updated since 2008, is still popular and useful.

• Arch Linux is 10 years old today. Arch Linux was started by Judd Vinet in March 2002. Judd announced the release of Arch Linux 0.1 (Homer on March 11, 2002).

• Just a few weeks ago, at the end of 2011, I reviewed a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with the OpenBox window manager: SalentOS. That distribution was created by an Italian person who lives in Salento, hence the name.

• I am not sure if Italians have some extreme love of OpenBox, but very soon after that, I heard about another OpenBox-based distribution from that country. This time, though, it is based on Debian. To be precise, on the unstable branch of Debian – Sid.

New Releases

Gentoo Family

• This time around, I’m reviewing Sabayon Linux 8 in its Xfce 64-bit edition. Honestly, I chose the Xfce edition because my USB stick is 2 Gigabytes, and the GNOME and KDE versions are too large to fit. But I can confirm that you can use UNetbootin to install Sabayon onto any laptop that lets you boot from a thumb drive.

• Sabayon is a distribution based on the Gentoo version of Linux. Gentoo is a long-established distribution that is one of the very few using source compilation to provide you with the software you install. While this allows you to customize your system to an unprecedented degree, it also requires the desire and the confidence to do much more “under the hood” work than most distributions expect. One of the aims of Sabayon is to make the initial installation of Gentoo painless, and they succeed in that.

Red Hat Family

• Open-source technology thrives by letting anybody know how it works and encouraging them to come up with new ideas and to tailor software to their own needs.

• Could your nonprofit work the same way?

• Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session today at the South by Southwest Interactive conferene.

• Q. Tell me about the culture of your company.

• A. Since we were founded in the 1990s on the idea of leveraging broad open-source communities, we naturally adopted that approach in our culture long before the Facebooks of the world even existed. So we’re on the bleeding edge of what so many companies are going to face because of this whole millennial generation coming up. It just does not like this idea of hierarchy.

• Last year I’ve decided to purchase a license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (self support) to use on my home laptop. For a few years that I had not used Red Hat (or clones) for Desktop. I don’t find expensive at all the 45€’s that Red Hat charges for 1 year license, specially considering that I really don’t have to worry much about security (as the updates flow in quite nicely)…

Fedora

• The Fedora Linux has finally arrived for the Raspberry Pi, after much delay. The Fedora Linux version is titled as the Fedora Linux Remix and is the recommended Linux distribution for the credit-card sized $35 computer. This linux distribution is based on Fedora 14 and is available along with versions of Debian and Arch Linux for the Raspberry Pi.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• The alpha and ia64 packages from DSA 1769 are not included in this point release for technical reasons. All other security updates released during the lifetime of “lenny” that have not previously been part of a point release are included in this update.

• The Debian project has announced the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename ‘lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename `lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• Debian Edu (aka “Skolelinux”) is a Debian Pure Blend specifically targeted at schools and educational institutions, and provides a completely configured school network environment out of the box. It covers PXE installation, PXE booting for diskless machines, and setup for a school server, for stationary workstations, and for workstations that can be taken away from the school network. Several educational applications like Celestia, Dr. Geo, GCompris, GeoGebra, Kalzium, KGeography and Solfege are included in the default desktop setup.

• Inspired by the interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a more international audience.

• While Debian Edu and Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions, and am happy to share the response with you.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical the company behind Ubuntu has announced the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Poll. The motive behind the poll is to understand how people discover, use and share Ubuntu. The poll is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The results of the poll will be shared with the community some time later.

• The poll takes hardly 5 minutes to fill in and basically looks into how you discovered Ubuntu, your use cases, and if whether you would recommend Ubuntu to your friends and others. This poll if answered by many would give answers to questions like the demographic usage of Ubuntu and many other questions. You can find the polls in the links below,

• Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.

• When it comes to improving hardware support for Linux, there are two traditional strategies: The Do-It-Yourself method, by which geeks write their own device drivers, and the Beg-And-Plead approach, or asking OEMs for open-source drivers and hoping they comply. But Canonical seems to be forging a third path by actually cooperating with upstream manufacturers to bring better hardware support to Ubuntu. Here’s how, and what it means for the lives of Linux users everywhere.

Flavours and Variants

• Netrunner is a KUbuntu based LiveDVD distribution running KDE 4.7.4 and is available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. It takes the best of Kubuntu and adds a bit of their touch to the programs being offered. Netrunner is a distribution based for novice users of Linux.

• Though the KDE desktop has a few obvious advantages over Unity, Kubuntu has always played second fiddle (maybe third) to Shuttleworth’s baby, Ubuntu. While the distro has received critcism and praise in equal parts, one thing has never change. Commitment.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Still thinking of the best method for unifying your smartphone and computer? The best option seems to be the official Ubuntu for Android, which was unveiled at Mobile World Congress. But while we wait for that to come around, you can go the hacking route and install the full Ubuntu OS, yourself.

Free Software/Open Source

• In a nutshell, Open Source Software aims to ‘liberate’ you of the bonds enforced by proprietary software. These bonds restrict your basic rights of freedom to choose between softwares, freedom to modify current programs etc. For more details, do check out Richard Stallman on Wikipedia (Akash has done a post on him too).

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox users who cannot wait to update the stable channel of the web browser from version 10 to 11, can download the new version from the official Mozilla ftp server or third party download sites early. Please note that while it is unlikely that the final version will get replaced in last minute, it has happened in the past. It is recommended to wait for the official release announcement if Firefox is running in a productive environment, or if you do not need to have access to the new feature set introduced in the browser right away.

CMS

• The first-ever Blue Drop Awards are how the Drupal community recognizes peers for pushing open source content management to the limit. The awards are more than recognition–they’re a clever way to help market this growing open source community. And we already know that Drupal and open source go hand-in-hand.

Healthcare

• Skysoft Incorporated, and Orlando based IT Services and Software Development firm, has chosen OpenEMR as the platform to move forward with starting in 2012. Skysoft currently develops software prototypes for the United States Department of Veterans Administration. Skysoft is also developing medical prototypes in-house and will begin to integrate the OpenEMR platform with ours.

BSD

• Porting FUSE to a FreeBSD kernel module has been a long-time coming. The FreeBSD FUSE kernel module port originally began as a Google Summer of Code project, but it wasn’t successful. In 2011, work on the port was restored via another year with Google Summer of Code, but at the end of the summer the FreeBSD FUSE implementation was still unstable and suffered data corruption issues. Now it seems that FreeBSD FUSE is finally getting hacked into shape and may be committed in the coming days.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• From the mailing list announcement, “Julia is an open source language for technical computing that strives to be in the same class of productivity as Matlab, R, python+numpy, etc., but targets the performance of C and Fortran. It is due to LLVM that julia has been able to achieve such good performance (in my opinion), with relatively little effort in a short amount of time.”

• Additional information on the Julia project is available from JuliaLang.org. “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, FFTs, and string processing. More libraries continue to be added over time. Julia programs are organized around defining functions, and overloading them for different combinations of argument types (which can also be user-defined).”

Public Services/Government

• The American internet entrepreneur, 45, will become an unpaid adviser across all government departments to help civil servants develop “innovative” new technology.

Openness/Sharing

Standards/Consortia

• Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

• New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.

Leftovers

• SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has gone into some detail about some of the most obvious changes in the look and feel of the Windows 8 user interface.

• A long Microsoft blog post goes into some detail about the apparently subtle changes that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier to do in Windows 8. We are not convinced.

Security

• So, while I don’t agree with the TSA’s response to this video in which “Blogger Bob” somewhat angrily snaps back about how important TSA scanning is, I don’t think Corbett’s claims are that convincing and I’m surprised at how much press it’s been generating. Yes, the scanners are probably pointless, and it’s all security theater, but that doesn’t mean we should all stop thinking through the details on videos that potentially show some weaknesses in these machines.

• Microsoft yesterday said it would ship six security updates next week, only one critical, to patch seven vulnerabilities in Windows and a pair of for-developers-only programs.

• This year’s March Patch Tuesday will feature three more updates and three more patches than the same month in 2011, but will fix fewer bugs than the March roster in each of the years 2008-2010, according to records kept by Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Now that global oil supply is a zero-sum game, in order for the five billion people in the Non-OECD to consume more oil they need a donation from us, here in the OECD. And as you can see, we are “happily” (recession, unemployment, lack of growth) giving up these energy sources as best we can.

Finance

• In a signal that partisan squabbling in the nation’s capital may be reaching new levels of rancor, a key Republican regulator is pursuing an unusual avenue to overturn a Wall Street reform rule issued by his own agency. Scott O’Malia, one of five commissioners who lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is asking a powerful White House office that has no actual authority over the CFTC to assess his agency’s work.

• If the Office of Management and Budget were to take O’Malia up on his suggestion, it would radically change the way some federal regulations are written and severely hamper implementation of a host of rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

• In the last couple of weeks I’ve been pushing foreclosure fraud. Well, not pushing the fraud but rather arguing that foreclosure is fraud. It has to be. If a mortgage was registered at MERS, then the chain of title was broken. Broken chains mean the bank cannot foreclose. But that was MERS’s business model, and so most mortgages are “infected”. Still, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Censorship

• Tesla and the company’s lawyers are nothing if not determined. After a judge smacked down the electric vehicle manufacturer’s libel suit against the BBC and Top Gear for comments made about the range of the Tesla Roadster, the automaker rallied with a second, amended lawsuit. It didn’t take long for the the same judge to nix the new case, too, saying the amendment was “not capable of being defamatory at all, or, if it is, it is not capable of being a sufficiently serious defamatory meaning to constitute a real and substantial tort.”

• One of the most fundamentally insane things about government and politics is the fact that evidence-based policy is frequently not the norm. It should be common sense that you don’t create new laws and regulations without actual evidence that they will work, or even clear evidence on the scope of the problem they aim to solve. But as we know, things don’t really work that way—it’s a lot easier for politicians and legislators to make their push based on emotion and public perception.

• A scientist’s duty is to science. Researchers must be able to share their findings, and discuss their published work with peers, journalists and the public in a timely manner.

DRM

• Steve Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post about competition in the book selling business link here. He boils the policy issue down to picking your monopolist, Apple or Amazon. That doesn’t really frame the choices consumers face.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Obama administration plans to ask Congress this year to renew White House “trade promotion authority” so it can finish talks on an Asia Pacific trade pact and pursue other possible initiatives, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.

Copyrights

ACTA

• On March 7, 2012, the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk testified before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Wyden (D-OR) asked him about the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), in particular the transparency issues.

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.