● 03.20.12

● Links 20/3/2012: Cyanogenmod 7.2, Humble Android Bundle 2, OSI’s New Board

Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Recently I’ve had the pleasure of digging out a couple of old Mac computers to demonstrate to a few family members out of curiosity. I am definitely a believer in educating the next generation on computing of the past, and how we got from there to where we are today. So one of the computers I fired up is a Macintosh Quadra 900. As usual, it booted right up without problems after sitting for probably close to 8 years. Everybody was amused and it was actually a lot of fun showing them the Mac OS 8 operating system on it.

• The next day, I remembered at one time I had a GNU/Linux server that had Netatalk running on it, so that I could connect from this Mac to the server and back up and transfer files. That server has since been upgraded, and I never really put in the time to get Netatalk running on it again until now. The server is a Pentium III 667 MHz system running CentOS 6.0, with X11 and all of the bells and whistles. The system runs good despite the fact that it is only a Pentium III. It also houses two 2 TB drives with the ext4 filesystem and runs very well.

Desktop

• An attractive option for many reasons, though, is to buy the laptop with Linux preloaded, as I’ve noted before. You typically pay a little bit more, but you also avoid any headaches that may arise from getting everything to “just work.”

• Jon “maddog” Hall is a bit of a legend in the Linux community, so it’s truly an honor to have his participation here. Jon makes a number of interesting (and, of course, provactive points). For instance, he chooses his distribution based upon his client, rather than choosing what he personally prefers. And he gravitates toward software that offers the most functionality, rather than the easiest, which is an interesting counterpoint to the many in the “choose the simplest tool for the job” camp.

Kernel Space

• Just one day after the Linux 3.3 kernel was released, the power management pull request for the Linux 3.4 kernel has already been submitted.

• Rafael J. Wysocki submitted the email pull request with the power management changes for the 3.4 kernel. Key items include the introduction of early/late suspend/hibernation device call-backs, generic PM domains extensions and fixes, devfreq updates, device PM QoS updates, concurrency problem fixes, and system suspend and hibernation fixes.

Graphics Stack

• Last month I mentioned that Intel Haswell graphics driver code would soon surface, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated, but the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are beginning to push the code publicly so that the hardware enablement can land in Linux distributions ahead of the hardware’s availability a year from now.

• Due to varying Linux release schedules and development cycles, plus that the open-source Linux graphics drivers can’t be easily updated by end-users without updating most of the system’s core components, Intel’s OTC developers are left to push out their new hardware support code quite early. Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Linux driver code began appearing a year in advance, so it’s that time of the year for Haswell graphics code to begin appearing for the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and the xf86-video-intel DDX.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Last month was the Humble Bundle Mojam for games made in a weekend while previous to that was their first Android-focused Humble Bundle, with the titles still being available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Desktop Environments

• This past week, I played around with Windows 8. One overriding thought forced its way to the front of my consciousness. How would the Windows users react to the drastic change?

• Change is a topic that has been much maligned and very heated over the last couple of years in technology. What brought this about? Within the framework of 2011 and 2012, the subject became a hotbed thanks to Ubuntu Unity and GNOME 3. Both desktops were drastically different than what users had grown accustomed to. What really surprised me was that the desktop metaphor had gone with little to no changes since the release of Windows 95. That’s quite a long time with little marked evolution. Both GNOME and KDE followed what Microsoft had declared the standard, and even both the open source heavy-hitters played along for quite some time. It wasn’t until the release of GNOME 2 and KDE 4 that noticeable change was on the way. When GNOME split its panels into two pieces, there was a little guff, but nothing more than a few ripples were heard. When KDE 4 came out, the Linux community was turned up on its head. But then, when Unity and GNOME 3 were released, one would have thought the Four Horsemen were about to make their apocalyptic appearances.

• But now, a change is coming to the Windows desktop that is nearly as drastic as was from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 or from Classic GNOME to Ubuntu Unity. Windows 8 begins a new era with the adoption of what looks like part Windows 7 and part Windows Mobile (and inspired by open source designs).

• Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.

• For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that: — What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support? — Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME. — Indeed. But what is the reason? — Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.

Distributions

• Rogue Linux distributions aren’t something that I tend to put much thought into. After all, considering that Linux distributions make their source code open and transparent, how effective would it be for developers to attempt to include harmful elements?

• Yet despite this commonly held belief, it appears that one new Linux distribution wasn’t exactly it what claimed to be.

• The distribution referred to as anonymous OS wasn’t what many of those who downloaded it thought it would be. Those who tried the Ubuntu-based release thought they were going to be testing a distribution centered around personal privacy and remaining anonymous online.

• There are a lot of Russians in the Linux world. Not only in Russia, but also in other parts of the world. The examples? Eugeni Dodonov lives in Brazil, Artyom Zorin lives in Ireland.

New Releases

• The Zorin OS Team are proud to finally release Zorin OS 6 Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users utilizing old or low-powered hardware.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Ubuntu and Mint don’t want it; Linus called it an “unholy mess.” While most other distros are passing up or postponing GNOME Shell, Fedora is full steam ahead. Does Red Hat know something the rest of us don’t? Or is GNOME 3 really as bad as everyone says?

Debian Family

• I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we weren’t able to convert many of them into sustainable installations.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Two years ago in March of 2010, Mark Shuttleworth stepped down as CEO of Canonical Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth moved aside to deal with the strategic technical issues of the project and his Chief Operating Office Jane Silber stepped up to become the CEO.

Flavours and Variants

• The Mythbuntu team has announced that starting with the 12.04 release they will be moving to LTS only releases. Mythbuntu ISOs will only be released for LTS releases.

• The team will continue to provide MythTV packages for non-LTS releases in the standard Ubuntu repositories and the Mythbuntu provided repositories so the users will still be able to install MythTV on non LTS releases.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The CyanogenMod team made news last week when they announced that future versions of their venerable Android build would no longer include root-level access by default, a massive departure from essentially every other custom Android ROM. Some have questioned the move, claiming that removing root undermines the very idea of running a custom ROM.

• ANDROID DISTRIBUTION Cyanogenmod has announced that Cyanogenmod 7.2 finally entered release candidate status. Cyanogenmod’s popular Android distribution has been ported to many devices and while the outfit is busy readying Cyanogenmod 9 based on Android 4.0, it is still working on Cyanogenmod 7.2. The operating system, based on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, has finally reached release candidate status, supporting 70 devices.

• Tweet

• Samsung’s projector phone Galaxy Beam is an impressive device. We played with the phone during the Mobile World Congress and liked it very much. While the release date of the phone is still unknown we got reports that Indians will be getting this phone in April. IBN Live reports that “The device will be launched in India in April”. There is no report on the price of the phone.

• The update to Ice Cream Sandwich just started rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S II last week and has yet to reach users in many regions, but the build’s code can now be found at Samsung’s open source portal. The release won’t be immediately useful for those looking to get Android 4.0 on their Galaxy S II right now, but it will make it a heck of a lot easier for the dev community to create custom software builds based on the latest version of Android.

• Samsung’s long-in-development Galaxy S III may be the first smartphone with LTE-based 4G built into the processor. Apparent leaks from an executive to the Korea Times had a quad-core Exynos processor shipping with both LTE 4G and HSPA 3G inside. The move would supposedly be to reduce the “huge amounts” Samsung has to pay to Qualcomm to get 4G, the anonymous insider said.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Tweet

• Last year in December when Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that “in the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality” it was not clear what he meant by that.

• The rumors were rife that Google was working on its own tablet on the lines on Nexus Phones. A Google tablet is due ever since Google announced ICS, which brings all Google devices under one OS. Now reports are coming that Google has picked ASUS for their tablet and it will be priced to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The tablet will have a 7-inch screen, according to reports.

• The tablet is running Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich on 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex A8 system processor. The tablet features a 7-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen. It has a 2 megapixel main camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The tablets has an impressive 1GB of RAM and comes with 4GB storage. It sports a microSDHC card slot (with up to 32GB supported) so you can expand as much storage as you want. It has a mini USB port and Rechargeable Li-poly 4000MAh battery. It claims to offer up to 25 hours of music, up to 5 hours of video and up to 6 hours of Web browsing.

Free Software/Open Source

• Back in December, we announced that webOS would be going Open Source (thumbs up from me). Now, we have an official word from the webOS Developer blog: Enyo, the JavaScript app framework, is now available for download right here.

• Last Friday the OSI Board held a special meeting to fill vacancies that had arisen by the departure of three directors – Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. Michael Tiemann left the Board after serving as OSI President for many years and leaves a large gap which the board will only fill thoughtfully; as a consequence, Martin Michlmayr, currently OSI Secretary, was temporarily appointed Acting President and the election of a full new President scheduled for the first meeting of the new Board, on April 4th. The Board warmly thanks all three for the contribution they have made to OSI.

• The Open Source Initiative has announced three new board members: Mike Millinkovich, Luis Villa and Deb Bryant. From 1 April, they will be taking over seats on the open source advocating organisation’s board which were freed by the departure of Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. As announced at FOSDEM 2012, for the first time, the OSI board invited nominations for two of the seats from non-directors, specifically the new OSI affiliates; they retained one seat for a board-only appointment.

• Rackspace has been building what is arguably a reasonably respectable pedigree in open source technologies.

• It was summer of 2010 that the company partnered with NASA to launch the open source cloud computing operating system OpenStack. Built to compete with VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Azure, the OpenStack project has seen a list of blue chip vendor names sign up as community members since its launch.

• From today people using Android smartphones will be able to access YouthNet’s online volunteering database, Do-it, through a mobile application.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• CNet reports that Blizzard joined Mozilla in 1998 and spearheaded efforts to transform the web from a series of documents into a software platform running across connected devices ranging from mobile phones and tablets to televisions and cars. Much of Blizzard’s work focused on the HTML5 web standard.

SaaS

• The cloud computing strategies at Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have a common thread. It’s called OpenStack — the open source cloud platform. The VAR Guy therefore asks an obvious question: Is OpenStack a path forward for hardware resellers that are seeking to develop public and private cloud services strategies? Hmmm…

• First, here’s a bunch of background. Within the next two months or less, Hewlett-Packard is expected to unveil the HP Cloud — which will compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Meanwhile, IBM quietly in joined the OpenStack effort in February 2012, though no major announcement was made. And Dell has been an OpenStack proponent since 2010.

CMS

Education

• My husband and I are librarians. We were talking recently about library training, the library profession, the open source movement, and how open source digital content is being distributed today in public libraries. We were struck by the way that open source thinking has infiltrated many areas—but not yet the profession or institution of librarians.

Healthcare

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Last week a large discussion began among GCC developers about their hopes and plans for GCC 5.0. The common theme is for GCC 5 to be more like the increasingly-popular LLVM compiler infrastructure project.

• David Malcolm, a Red Hat developer, initially forked a GCC development list thread and re-titled it to GCC 5? and laid out his views. In his lengthy message he talked about the ongoing work for moving more of the GNU Compiler Collection from being written in plain C to being in C++, the need for a proper GCC plug-in API, and moving GCC towards being a collection of libraries.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

• OpenROV is a project that provides plans and software for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Currently, it’s a series of prototypes, with the goal of a fully-realized design of an underwater exploration device.

• It was originally created to explore Hall City Cave in northern California. The cave has a lake where robbers supposedly dropped gold. The ROV has made a successful journey into the lake, although it hasn’t yet struck gold.

Open Data

Programming

• Google has announced the accepted mentoring organisations for its eighth annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. According to Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith, there were more than 400 mentoring applications for this year’s contest, of which 180 open source projects were accepted – 41 of these are new to GSoC.

Leftovers

Finance

• People are reflected in glass as they walk past Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. Photo by Mario Tama via Getty Images.

• While the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks have unleashed a flood of indignation, condemnation, and protest upon Wall Street, the crisis has exposed a deeper distrust and implacable resentment of capitalism itself.

• Capitalism might be the greatest engine of prosperity and progress ever devised, but in recent years, individuals and communities have grown increasingly disgruntled with the implicit contract that governs the rights and responsibilities of business. The global economy and the Internet have heightened our sense of interconnectedness and sharpened our awareness that when a business focuses only on enriching investors, managers view the interests of customers, employees, communities—and the fate of the planet—as little more than cost trade-offs in a quarter-by-quarter game.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• Crucial discussions going on in the EU Parliament will determine the fate of ACTA. Whereas the rapporteur David Martin is siding with the EU Commission in attempting to defuse the debate and postpone the final vote on ACTA, other members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) insist on voting in the coming months, as originally planned. By urging for a swift rejection of ACTA ahead of next week’s meetings in the Parliament, EU citizens have a decisive role to play.

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