● 03.26.12

● Links 25/3/2012: Bodhi Linux 1.4.0, Many Vivaldi Orders

Posted in News Roundup at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Sabre did look at that other OS but decided they did not want the lock-in. Having decided to move to Intel processors, they did not want to have to change software again if they moved to another CPU and GNU/Linux runs on everything…

Desktop

• Ah, statistics! How we love to deceive ourselves with them! Sometimes we tend to forget they are numbers applied to measure a reality, but they are affected by many variables. Therefore, statistics become a useful prediction, but a prediction is, ultimately, a guess nonetheless.

• I am saying this because, since I migrated to Linux in 2009, I have been listening to Windows fanboys chanting that “according to Netmarketshare and StatCounter, Linux accounts for a skimpy 1% of the total market”. And the funny thing is that they believe it!

Kernel Space

• For those owners of Intel’s latest-generation Core i3/i5/i7 “Sandy Bridge” processors, here’s a quick look at the impact of some GCC tuning options specific to these latest AVX-enabled Intel processors.

• Con Kolivas announced this weekend the release of an updated BFS scheduler for the recently-released Linux 3.3 kernel. The new BFS scheduler is at version 0.420 and is codenamed “Smoking”, with “a fairly large architectural change” since earlier versions of this out-of-tree kernel scheduler.

• If Android is Linux’s prodigal son, the two parties came a little closer to reconciliation recently with the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel, which merges Android back into the Linux mainline. Despite all this geeky jargon, this is a change that could actually matter even to people who aren’t programmers. Here are the details in plainer English, and why they’re worth noting.

Graphics Stack

• As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early “beta” builds of AMD’s Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly.

• First pointed out earlier this morning was an “OpenCL1.2betadriversLinux.tgz” package from AMD’s web-site. This OpenCL 1.2 beta driver Linux package was joined by an updated Windows driver too with improved OpenCL support. The beta Linux driver is from the fglrx 8.96 release stream, which is what will be Catalyst 12.3.

• There’s a few updates concerning Linux benchmarks of NVIDIA’s brand new GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card, the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3 platform, and other Linux performance topics.

Applications

Proprietary

• Opera web browser is almost available for every device we have these days such as desktop, tablet, mobile devices and it’s available for the major platforms. Now, Opera software ASA will provide a new web browsing experience called “Opera TV Browser”, which will allow you to have a full browsing experience through Linux and Android based TVs.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Ryan “Icculus” Gordon will be talking about using open-source tools for game development next weekend at the 2012 Flourish conference.

• As written about last week, Ryan Gordon will be talking once again at the Flourish conference in Chicago at month’s end. Last week his topic wasn’t disclosed for this open-source conference, but it’s since come to light: Open Source Tools for Game Development.

Desktop Environments

• There’s new releases of some key EFL — Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — packages. This round of Enlightenment package updates has also introduced some new components.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

• The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, March 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings more fixes to the existing bugs.

Distributions

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

• Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT): HP (NYSE:HPQ) plans to work with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to develop Linux code for mission critical operations, according to The Inquirer. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Linux will begin gaining market share in mission critical computer, HP believes, the publication stated.

• Red Hat is an undisputed leader of the Linux world. The company has broken all records by registering a whooping $909 million in revenues for 2011. The company is a great example of profitability from open source. Red Hat now powers more than 50% of the global trading volume. The company claims that 100% of the Top 5 Asia Pacific stock exchanges, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora

• Swapnil: Can you tell us more about the Fedora Audio Spin, what is the goal of the project?

• Brendan: Traditionally Fedora has been known to walk the leading edge in free and open source software development but for some reason this has never been realised in the realms of pro-audio/music creation.

• We see the Fedora Audio spin as a great way to encourage people to use Linux audio and strengthen and invigorate the community surrounding Fedora Audio. We are aiming at producing a spin which allows Linux audio enthusiasts to quickly setup up and configure their audio workstations for audio and music production.

Debian Family

• Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers.

• After a year when there was just a single candidate, the incumbent, standing for the post, 2012 will see three developers slug it out for the post of leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Unity 5.8 has landed into Ubuntu 12.04 with new features and fixes. It seems lots of work has gone under the hood as I have never seen Unity interface so fast.

• Its just flying and for a moment I really thought that its Unity 2D as after Unity 5.8 update, the dash menu got lots of UI tweaks and it now looks very much like Unity 2D’s dash.

• Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (long-term support) is being built with the latest Linux kernel and OpenStack IT and is currently undergoing integration and quality assurance testing with Dell’s version of OpenStack.

• Ubuntu Unity get bumped to version 5.8 bringing with it many bug fixes improving its polish and perfection. Most of the bug fixes are barely major but improves the overall Unity interface. Lets go through them one by one.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released, in this quarter update, Enlightenment has been built from a fresh SVN pull from March 20th and the default Midori browser has been updated to the latest version, a more current build of Linux Kernel ( 3.2.0-19 ), software in repositories were updated to the latest version (Firefox11, chromium 17, LibreOffice3.5…) , also this release comes with some minor improvement, this include include resolving an issue that had prevented PCManFM’s application menu from working, E17′s everything module calculator feature now works out of the box and more.

• Bodhi Linux is a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution that uses Englightenment as its desktop manager. It is geared for those who have older hardware or who prefer lighter desktops compared to the heavier GNOME or KDE.

• Bodhi comes as an installable LiveCD which when first started, is quite similar to that of Ubuntu’s startup so if you’ve used Ubuntu before, you’ll feel well at home.

• The amount of diskspace needed is very low at a whopping 1.2 GB for those who want to install it instead of using it in a Live environment. Installation was quite simple with going through a few configuration steps and then from there and not too long after it’s installed. Installation times will vary depending on your hardware specifications.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Amazon has updated its Kindle for Android app, brining support for Kindle Format 8 and a larger assortment of illustrated children’s books, comic books, and graphic novels to Android devices. It’s great news for comics fans as you can now read your favorite comics or graphic novels in stunning visuals on your Android devices.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Meet Vivaldi, the new opensource tablet from the gang over at MakePlayLive. You might already know a thing or two about the Vivaldi, because it used to be called the KDE ‘Spark’ Tablet. What you should really know is that at heart, it is just a giant Google Nexus S. But what makes it so special?

Free Software/Open Source

• Numerical computation tools that run on GNU/Linux platform such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora are a huge blessing for all mathematical computation ‘freaks’, be it students or researchers. The expensive proprietary utility, Matlab, may be a leader in terms of introducing newer applications, but the Free (as in ‘freedom’) Software alternatives available are not lagging in any way.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Tweet

• One of the major gripes about Google’s ambitious Chromebooks is its price. It is quite expensive given the limitations it has. If reports are to be believed Chromebook may become extremely cheap.

• One may wonder what future holds for Google’s Gentoo Linux based ChromeOS. The initial sales of Samsung and Acer Chromebook was not impressive. There were many reasons for the slow sales of the Chromebooks, but the future is bright as we move towards cloud-based computing.

• The ChromesOS is gaining popularity among hardware players, after Samsung and Acer now Sony is also joining the elite Chromebook club. Sony has reportedly submitted a filing for its first Chromebook to FCC. FCC E-filing is showing a Sony device which fits the bill of a Chromebook. Any doubt over it being a Chromebook is removed on the ‘manual’ page which specifically points at ChromOS:

• According to some FCC leak and rumoring, it looks like Sony is about to release a new Chromebook and the FCC info may point towards it running on an ARM Processor! T25 is the leaked processor info, that sound like the Tegra 250 T25. I think the thinking was T25 is intermediary between T20 and T30, in between Tegra2 and Tegra3. Basically, I think, the hope should be that if it’s a Tegra2, that it has a new faster memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed compared to the “first generation” Tegra2 devices that were released back since the end of 2010!

SaaS

• When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• Drupal is a hugely popular content management system, but for all of its flexibility and power it’s missing a key component: an easy way to manage image galleries. If you need to create and manage image galleries in Drupal, here’s an easy approach that won’t cost too much of your sanity.

• Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program when he was six years old — even before he could read.

• Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one of the world’s most successful open source projects.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• XBMC, the very well known open-source multimedia / HTPC project, has finally reached its XBMC 11.0 (codenamed “Eden”) milestone.

Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

Finance

• The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

• For the first time in several years, the rate of growth in Los Angeles County food stamp use has slowed. That’s little consolation however given that total participation zoomed from just above 600,000 to over 1,000,000 people since the onset of the financial crisis. As longtime readers know, I’ve tracked the series as a backdoor view on rising energy costs–and in the case of LA County–gasoline costs in particular. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a complaint today with the Government Accountability Board (GAB) based on newly discovered documents revealing that numerous Wisconsin legislators have received corporate-funded gifts through their connections to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.

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