● 03.30.12

● Links 30/3/2012: Valve Linux Interests, Final Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million,” (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.

• The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006.

• The CSU does not have to be worried that the Vienna scenario is going to happen in Munich, Ude assured the city council. If the city had maintained the Windows infrastructure as it was in 2005, the associated costs would have amounted to €11.8 million. However, since then the number of computers increased significantly, and Munich would have spent an additional €1.65 million on new software alone, Ude said.

Kernel Space

• It seems to be a bad time to be a Linux website. After a September 2011 breach on kernel.org and several other Linux Foundation web sites, it appears that community site Linux.org has been down for quite a while as well.

• The reason for Linux.org’s removal is not completely known, though it does not seem to be the result of an attack, but rather a planned renovation of the popular site. The renovation plans are not outlined publicly, nor is any timeline, but signs of life are indicating that Linux.org is about to come back to life eventually.

Graphics Stack

• Here are some updated benchmarks of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 “Southern Islands” graphics card under Linux with the proprietary Catalyst driver.

• The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card.

Applications

• The long-awaited and much anticipated 2.8 release of GIMP is right around the corner! Wait, I know, you’ve heard this before. You were expecting it at the end of 2010, and then in 2011, and so on… Well, fear not because it’s really coming in less than 45 days! Want proof? Nothing could be more clear than this infographic.

Proprietary

• Update: I’ve now been able to attain independent confirmation with Valve (here). This isn’t an April Fools’ Joke or anything else. They’re in need of more Linux folks; will try to get more information to share after the first of the month, since many Phoronix Forums users remain unconvinced about any Valve Linux interests.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt

• From the mailing list message describing these iOS-porting problems, “As this is a bit of a show-stopper as far as I’m concerned (as a widget-only version of Qt5 doesn’t add any value over a widget and QML version of Qt4.8), I’m not seeing any point in doing a Qt5 port to iOS if V8 is a hard requirement (unless the above issues can be resolved somehow)…There’s no platform plugin yet either, so no way to even test V8 on iOS AFAIK. If anyone knows a way to test V8 without GUI, Declarative or OpenGL, then that may be a starting point at least, because IMHO there’s no point in starting a platform plugin until this issue is resolved.”

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Open source software company Red Hat Inc., believes that companies like VMware Inc., and Microsoft Corp., are skewing the definition of open cloud by claiming that their virtualization products are open when in fact they are closed.

• Speaking at a round table conference in London this week, Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said that several virtualization vendors have started to claim they are open as a marketing gimmick.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Time for a personal confession: I hate using Windows. I think Android and Linux go together like peas and carrots, or whatever that famous movie said. Because Android is so Linux-based, with similar file structures and terminal commands, it is worth any Android enthusiast’s time to learn some basic Linux tools. One of the most commonly used Linux distributions is Ubuntu; it’s extremely user-friendly, and you might actually be surprised how easy doing work involving ADB on your phone can become once you invest a brief amount of time in Ubuntu. The biggest complaint I usually hear regarding ADB is that it’s an enormous pain to get it installed and set up properly, and then there are those dreaded driver issues. One RootzWiki developer and script writer, Tahl, has written a script for use in Ubuntu that can make your life a lot easier.

Devices/Embedded

• The ambitious Raspberry Pi is in troubled waters again. After recovering from the manufacturing hiccup when the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. Now, it is facing a new challenge. The distributors of Raspberry Pi, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have refused to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark.

• So far, everyone scrambling to get their hands on the much sought after Raspberry Pi seem to be hoping to use it as a media player. The cheap Linux computer is capable of decoding 1080p video, and its low profile makes it ideal for the living room. Clearly, everyone needs to think a little bigger. One enterprising user has managed to port a ZX Spectrum emulator to the computer for some retrotastic gaming.

Phones

Android

• A report from the Guardian that Google only generated $543 million in revenue from Android is based on bad information, says a source close to Google.

• Android/Linux is a global product made from the Linux kernel globally and Android developed by Google. It mostly runs on ARM (UK) but is invading the x86 space as well. Retail shelves around the world usually display Android/Linux devices prominently and in many regions, consumers and businesses can buy GNU/Linux PCs sometimes locally produced but also supplied by global OEMs.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• OSI is very pleased to welcome two important new members to the Affiliate scheme for community groups. They are CENATIC and Debian.

• The Kubatana initiated open source project, Freedom Fone, won an award for Innovation in Media technology at a ceremony organized by the Index on Censorship. The award category recognized Kubatana for innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. The category is supported by popular web giant, Google.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• Mozilla has launched an online game that runs completely inside a web browser. Which means, the game doesn’t use any plugins to run in your web browser as it is fully developed using HTML 5 and JavaScript.

SaaS

• Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.

Education

• Sakai CLE, a learning management system, is open source software. This makes Sakai different from its competitors because it is engineered by a community of developers, rather than being developed solely by The Sakai Foundation.

FSF Events

Public Services/Government

• “Data belongs to all of us. Sooner we realise as government… better it is for all of us because then government and citizen will collaborate with each other. This project tells us what data can be shared and can be put in public domain,” Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said while launching the Open Government Platform (OGPL).

Openness/Sharing

• The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on Kickstarter.

Open Data

• Azavea’s OpenDataPhilly.org open source code has popped up in an open data catalog at Open San Diego, which launched in beta last week.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• Karlsruhe, 28 March 2012 – 1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.

Leftovers

• The other day when I was trying out Haiku, I had a sudden brain wave. How many operating systems – old or otherwise can I really name? And how many of these have I actually used? To tell you honestly, I could name only a few including the ones I have used. Of course, I lumped all Linux distributions as one entity.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• EIA Washington recently published data revisions to global oil production, going back at least twenty years. Here, I update annual average oil production for Non-OPEC, which used to account for 60% of total global supply but has had trouble sustaining increases–even in a high-priced oil environment. As of 2011, Non-OPEC supply fell to 57% of total global share, the difference being made up of course by OPEC.

Finance

• The unemployment rate in the United States fell from 9.1 percent in the summer of 2011 to 8.3 percent in February. This decline, the largest six-month drop in the unemployment rate since 1984, has surprised many economic forecasters. The decline is even more surprising because recent real GDP growth appears to have been around trend at best, whereas in early 1984, growth was more than 7 percent. Our next six posts in Liberty Street Economics will discuss prospects for the U.S. labor market given this surprisingly quick decline in the unemployment rate. In this opening post, we outline some of the themes examined in this series and provide a brief summary of our conclusions. But first we develop a simple framework to place the unemployment rate in context with the rest of the labor market.

• In an earlier article, EU’s selective Lessons from Greece, we saw that EU Parliament’s investigation of the financial crisis (CRIS), and the hearing Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578), lacked the resolve to address the Greece/Goldman secret loan that was allegedly improper and exacerbated Greece’s ills.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Federal authorities are investigating two Wisconsin nonprofits associated with Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block, former campaign manager for presidential candidate Herman Cain and former director of the state chapter of the Koch-founded-and-funded Americans for Prosperity. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting such an investigation last November.

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