● 03.27.12

● Links 27/3/2012: Pear Linux Comice OS 4, XBMC 11.0

Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• On top of its impressive performance stats, the 7508 also showed off multiple redundancy and load-balancing mechanisms and recovered quickly from failures. And it did all this running on Linux, with all the extensibility that comes with Unix-like operating systems.

• The fallout from all this will be that Android/Linux tablets will become the norm in 2012 and ARMed devices will be abundant to take Android/Linux. Intel tablets will need huge batteries to last more than a few hours, also raising the costs. GNU/Linux will be available to offset their higher hardware costs… Love it. Wintel is feeding the fire of */Linux. Using the opponent’s weight to the opponent’s disadvantage is a winning strategy. The cloud will slurp up a huge market from Wintel this year and next.

Desktop

• I am Philip Newborough. I am a web developer and GNU/Linux enthusiast. I produce an unofficial Debian derivative known as CrunchBang. At the moment, I am working full time on CrunchBang, trying to improve its quality and purpose. I love working on the project and I love learning more about the Debian system.

• This Linux OS distribution is one of the most famous in the world. There are almost no people who are acquainted with Linux, but never heard of this OS. At this moment of time, it is on the 29th place in the Distrowatch rating, somewhere between Xubuntu and GhostBSD.

Kernel Space

Applications

• How many reasons do you need to use Linux? Free, stable, inordinately fashionable. And now, a way of automatically backing up every single application you’ve installed.

• For those that know, APT is Debian’s incredibly easy and useful package manager. You want some software? Use the command line sudo apt-get, or the Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Manager of the Debian distro of your choice, find the software, click install, and there we go.

• When I upgrade to a new version of a Linux distribution, whether it’s Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I always do a clean install, as I find it far less troublesome.

Proprietary

• For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.

• Feeling a bit disorganized? Looking to take control of your projects? Take a look at Tracks, an open source Web-based application built with Ruby on Rails. Tracks can help you get organized and Get Things Done (GTD) in no time.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• For many people out there one of the biggest challenges of moving from one operating system to another is finding applications to do all the things a person did with their first operating system. After all, the majority of the population isn’t as interested in what operating system they have, rather they focus on which applications they can run. With this in mind CodeWeavers has a product called CrossOver. The CrossOver suite allows a user to install and run Windows applications on Linux distributions or Mac OS X. If the mission of CrossOver sounds similar to WINE that is because CrossOver is based on the WINE project, but with additional effort put into polishing the user experience and testing compatibility. With the recent release of CrossOver XI the folks over at CodeWeavers offered a free trial and, as many of our readers are new to Linux and will likely benefit from the ability to run Windows applications on their new OS, I gladly accepted.

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• KDE deployed a new mirror network this weekend. The mirror network is used to spread released software to users. In the old system, users had to select a mirror server manually. The new system selects a mirror automatically, based on the country where the user is located. If there is no mirror for that country, a mirror is selected based on continent. In either case, mirrors that are geographically closer are preferred. If there is an even better mirror—such as one in the same network as the user, it is preferred over all others. Here is the current list of the official KDE mirrors.

GNOME Desktop

• GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.

• The release notes coming out on Wednesday when GNOME 3.4 is to be officially announced will exhaustively cover the changes to GNOME 3.4 since the 3.2 release last September. However, in looking over the change-logs for the GNOME 3.4 packages being checked-in and with testing of GNOME 3.3 development releases, here’s some of the most interesting GNOME 3.4 features that go on my list.

• As the three followers of my blog may have noticed, I am unhappy with the direction both Gnome and KDE have taken. The tablet is a great portable media consumption tool, and minimal productivity tool, also a game machine, but really limiting for all around computing.

• Moving desktop interfaces in the direction of the pinch/swipe/poke/prod tablet interface LIMITS their usability. Point Of Fact. Limit is the key word here. The major desktops have fewer customization options, far fewer gadgets, so to speak.

Distributions

New Releases

• A new version, simply labelled “2012_3_24″, of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick Verner, the update fixes a number of issues related to interaction between the BusyBox tool collection and Clonezilla, and upgrades a number of the included applications.

Red Hat Family

• Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have climbed 23.8% over the last three months to close at $51.54 on March 22, 2012. The company is looking to keep that trend going when it releases its fourth quarter results on Wednesday, March 28, 2012.

Debian Family

• I have always been a Debian fan and had planned on just installing a vanilla Debian desktop on this machine with my own customizations. I recalled then that Mint was getting their direct Debian based version going. I have really liked the “Mint treatment” in terms of user interface and end experience functionality, I just can’t stand ubuntu because of the horrible things they do to security in the name of “user friendliness”.

• Clement Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint, has announced the updates to the Linux Mint Debian Edition. With this update, for the fist time, Linux Mint Debian users will get access to Gnome Shell, MATE and Cinnamon. This update brings Linux 3.2 kernel, MATE 1.2 (with mintMenu and mintDesktop now fully ported to MATE), Cinnamon 1.4, KDE 4.7.4, Gnome Shell 3.2.2 and Xfce 4.8.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR”.

• With an eye toward easing the deployment of private clouds, Dell said this week at the WorldHostingDays conference in Germany that it had partnered with Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical to deliver its Cloud Solution product in Britain, Germany and China.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Wishtel, a company based out of Mumbai, India has come up with its own series of Android-powered tablets under the brand name ‘IRA’. The 3 tablets are called IRA Thing E, IRA E and IRA Icon E. All of these tablets have a 7.0 inch screen and are running on either Android 2.2 Froyo/ 2.3 Gingerbread OS or Linux OS.

• The Vivaldi tablet is a 7 inch tablet and open source KDE Plasma Active software. The €200 tablet is expected to start shipping in May, but the folks behind the official Vivaldi user forum at OpenTablets.org got their hands on an early unit — and they’ve ripped it apart to see what makes it tick.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sustrick and Lucina, along with some members of the ZeroMQ community, have created the Crossroads I/O fork, which, like ZeroMQ, is licensed under the LGPLv3. The project’s goals are to serve as a user-space implementation of messaging, educate developers about distributed messaging, design for global, 20-year use cases, and encourage a commercial ecosystem to grow around the project. Specifically, they wish to be vendor neutral and implement a “liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy” that allows use of the trademark by third parties.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• According to data from StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser has about 30 percent market share at this point, and it may be on track to challenge Internet Explorer’s share, which has been dwindling for years. A close look at market share data for the leading browsers, though, shows that Chrome’s usage is highest on weekends, and its share numbers tend to drop during the week, suggesting that users favor it at home, but may favor Internet Explorer when at work. That’s a challenge Google needs to overcome.

SaaS

• Free Software advocates quickly demonize SaaS as the ultimate way to take your freedom away. A lot of them dismiss the advantages of having data online highlighting (and rightly so) the fact that you may be locked out of your own data anytime. My question is: what if SaaS is in fact the way to go, the future, and just need to hurry the hell up and make sure that it’s easy to install, and use, the great SaaS available under a free software license?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Chakra, the KDE-centric distribution, has moved the latest LibreOffice to the stable repo’s. Thie means “it is no longer needed to install the complete office suite, it is split up in different components, and you can choose which parts to install,” says the project page.

CMS

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Today is a good day. I am back from presenting at LibrePlanet 2012 this weekend.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Iceland has kicked off a migration project to put its public institutions on a strict diet of free and open source software. The move will affect a wide variety of institutions, and it could result in savings for the country’s cash-strapped government. However, just because software is free as in beer and free as in freedom doesn’t mean maintenance will come at no cost.

Openness/Sharing

• Gangplank was created by two entrpreneurs in Chandler, AZ who loved their city, but felt that it lacked the culture to make creative ventures successful. It was started just before the recession 4 years ago. It started by trying to help technical entrepeneurs through seed funding and incubation, but quickly found the community needed so much more. In the last four years the space has increased from 2,500sqft to 14,000sqft and has opened three new locations. It has partnered with two cities (Avondale, AZ and Chandler, AZ) and is activating creatives to get involved in government and their community. Bringing fresh ideas and the concept of iterating through ideas to find success. Gangplank has started a collaborative workspace movement that was highlight this year as one of Entrepreneur Magazines 100 Most Innovative Companies.

Open Hardware

• Quanta’s gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2011 is expected to have dropped to 3.3% from 3.7% in the third, while Compal is expected to see its percentage dropped from 5% in the third quarter to 4.8% in the fourth.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can’t stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn’t have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided. More on that in a bit.

• Jill Stein, a doctor and activist from Massachusetts, is running for the Green Party nomination for President of the United States. Stein is the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, running against comedian Roseanne Barr and veteran Green Party activists Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson. Stein’s campaign, headed up by Wisconsin native Ben Manski, is focusing on getting enough delegates in each state to win the party’s nomination at the July 2012 Green Party convention in Baltimore and on securing November ballot lines in all 50 states.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has drafted a “chemicals of concern” list to restrict the use of certain chemicals and alert the public to their possible dangers. But the list remains secret and dormant because it’s stuck at the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.

DRM

• In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I’m getting back to it with some new ideas. The first is that I’ve concluded that optical discs are a bust for this kind of application, and that the time has come to move on to Flash media, specifically SDHC/SDXC as the hardware medium. This is a more expensive choice of medium, and still not perfect, but it has enough advantages to make it a clear choice now.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• Brussels, March 26th 2012 – Today is the beginning of a decisive week for the future of the ACTA procedure in the EU Parliament. Tomorrow, Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) may decide whether to vote on ACTA in the next few months as originally planned, or to follow the rapporteur David Martin in buying time and defusing the ongoing debate through technocratic manoeuvres. Citizens must call their MEPs now and urge them to face their political responsibility by rejecting ACTA.

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