● 03.21.12

● Links 21/3/2012: Fedora 18 Talked About, Many New Android/Linux Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Router lockups have been a problem for me ever since I got my first 802.11G Router in 2004. Since then, we’ve seen companies roll out supposed “power user” routers or routers meant for “gamers,” but for some reason not a single one has alleviated the problem of having to reset the router after running for a few days. After my new “gaming” router locked up while refreshing a server list for a multiplayer game, it was the last straw and I began searching for something a little more robust.

• The Universal USB Installer converts live CDs of various Linux distributions to run on USB keys.

Desktop

• According to Statcounter, it’s more like 40%, but still quite good. Perhaps more of those units are going into homes rather than businesses. Doubling time at 40% per annum is about two years.

Kernel Space

• The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

• If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

• Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman said the reintroduction of 7,000 lines of Android code into the Linux 3.3 kernel will make it somewhat easier for OEMs creating Android systems. App developers? Not so much

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Darktable is an free open source software development by Johannes Hanika and Henrik Andersso.this software designed for users interested in maneuvering photographies including RAW, meaning unprocessed camera captures with zero modifications in a database with numerous options to edit and enhance.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It’s a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it’s Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

• After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• There’s two months until Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is officially released. However, already getting underway is the codename proposal period for Fedora 18. What will succeed the Beefy Miracle?

• There’s still two months prior to the official Fedora 17 release — Fedora 17 Beta isn’t even out yet — but besides coming up with a new codename, we have our first technical glimpse at new features to Fedora 18, which will be released by Red Hat and the community in Q4’2012.

• At yesterday’s Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo), they approved the first batch of Fedora 18 features now that Fedora 17 is well into its feature freeze. The items approved for the yet-to-be-codenamed Fedora 18 include:

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The Zorin OS development team proudly announced yesterday, March 19th, the immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Educational Lite operating systems.

• This major release of the Zorin OS 6 Lite series is now based on the Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating sytem and takes advantage of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, in order to provide an extremely fast and feature-packed desktop experience, especially for low-end machines.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• I have been an Android user since the release of the G1. I was a Linux server admin at the time, and the idea of an open source environment on my phone was something I had been thinking about for awhile. Before the release of the G1, I was even considering diving into the OpenMOKO project, which nobody remembers (as a result of the G1 launch). For me, open source meant that, like my computer, I could adjust things at will that I wasn’t happy with. I followed the Android Open Source Project with eager anticipation, and watched as this community of developers modify and build and bolt on features to the Android that we know today.

• Sony has officially unveiled its first smartphone to come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from day one: the Xperia Neo L MT25i, announced earlier today in China.

• As its name suggests, the Xperia Neo L is the successor to the Neo and Neo V (which were introduced last year running Android 2.3 Gingerbread), although it doesn’t bring major hardware enhancements.

• If you have been eagerly awaiting a first look at the upcoming Huawei myTouch line heading to T-Mobile, then we have good news for you. Thanks to a TmoNews ninja we’ve got a quick look at the upcoming non-QWERTY myTouch device, expected to arrive on store shelves in the coming months. At this point we don’t know much about the device, though we suspect a WVGA 800×480 resolution display and some other mid-range specs. The myTouch line isn’t billed as a high-end line for T-Mobile anymore — more as a “family” phone that has something for everyone. Huawei marks the third such manufacturer to release a device under the myTouch branding for T-Mobile, after HTC and LG.

• Sony released the Xperia S open source archive today, providing all the tools necessary to build a kernel and start cooking up ROMs for the Xperia S from Sony’s source code. In a post to Sony Mobile’s developer blog today, the company also noted that the opening of the Xperia S archive marks the first time Sony has published source code for a product built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S3.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Just a quick heads up that Archos has begun shipping their Turbo editions of the G9 series of tablets. Available in either 8-inch or 10-inch models, you also get to choose between 8GB or 250GB of storage. Price start as low as $269.99 for the (8GB) 80 G9 and go up to $389.99 for the (250GB) 101 G9.

• According to a recently spotted NenaMark benchmark test entry, the followup to the Sony Tablet S could be in the works — and it carries a quad-core Tegra 3 processor. The device that was subject to the test was running Android 4.0.3 and featured a display with a 1280×800 resolution (the same as the Tablet S).

Free Software/Open Source

• Amol Sarva, the man behind Peek, recently made waves by giving away his remaining stock of discontinued Peek devices to hackers interested in reusing them for something interesting (the company is still around, but it’s focusing on cloud-based software services now — the hardware, and the cellular service that underpins it, is dead). This all happened less than two months ago, but we’ve already got an open source application framework from a coder by the name of Ryan Krumins available for Peek hackers to take advantage of.

• Possibly. Open source was all the rage in the tech press for years as it promised to lower costs while improving enterprise IT freedom. Ultimately, a few start-ups cashed out big time (MySQL, JBoss), but for the most part the real value in open source came as both IT vendors and in-house IT organisations turned to open source to provide raw material for their software projects. Open source became less about sales and more about code, which was exactly what it was designed to do.

• Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems launched a new open-source, freeware version of its IBEAM Web portal to the agent and lender community.

• The company highlighted this new version of IBEAM — available after April 15 — will be specific to repossession and invoice management, providing all the capabilities of asset tracking, real-time monitoring of updates, online condition reports and complete transparency throughout the recovery process.

• The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says Nigerians need open source software if the country must be a full participant in the software industry.

SaaS

• To broaden its reach in the big-data arena, disk-array maker EMC’s Greenplum division, which peddles data warehousing and Hadoop appliances and software, announced that it will open source its Chorus management and collaboration tools. EMC also has acquired Pivotal Labs, experts in agile programming, to help it build better big-data software and, equally importantly, help others do so.

• EMC has always been serious about data, but in case you haven’t noticed it, the company is now very serious about big data and the software that is used to chew it up and regurgitate useful bits of information.

CMS

• The Drupal Association, hosts of the biannual DrupalCon conference, announced the opening of its North American DrupalCon in Denver, with more than 3,000 Website designers, developers, site architects and IT managers in attendance.

• The first day of full conference events at DrupalCon is March 20. Drupal is an open-source content management platform that powers millions of Websites and applications. Drupal is built, used and supported by a very active community of people from around the world, and that community comes together for DrupalCon.

Healthcare

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is due out in April 2012 – a second release candidate was released last week. Discussions on the future direction of the utilities collection are currently underway. Musings over making GCC 5.0 more modular have attracted considerable attention. These have been inspired by the increasingly popular Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure part-sponsored by Apple.

• RMS: The term “investment” is not applicable here, because that implies spending money on a business to obtain a larger subsequent profit. I set out to do a large job, but it wasn’t a business and the purpose was something more important than profit.

• I quit my job at MIT when I started writing code for the GNU operating system because I wanted to make sure MIT would not be able to claim copyright on the code I wrote for GNU.

• Evidently, financial support was not crucial at the beginning, because I made progress on my own, which drew others to help.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Files to remain in state-owned data centre for hundreds of years.

Programming

• Is not – as Adam Leventhal, Jason Hoffman and Randy Bias hastened to point out – functionality. From a pure technology perspective, in fact, they could hardly be less distinct. Boundary is a SaaS based network monitoring service, DTrace an in kernel observation and tracing system. One is focused on the network at scale, the other on the performance and runtime characteristics of a single node.

Leftovers

Finance

• In the news release, Founders of Marvell Technology Group Are Among the Largest Victims of Greed at Goldman Sachs, issued 19-Mar-2012 by Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP over PR Newswire, the source should be Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP, rather than Marvell Technology Group as originally issued. The complete, corrected release follows:

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