● 04.01.12

● Links 1/4/2012: Munich Enjoys GNU/Linux, Gentoo 12.1 LiveDVD is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Last night I shared a preview of the best and worst case examples of power consumption on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. In a good case, for newer PC hardware, an Intel notebook was going through nearly 40% less power while idling on Ubuntu 12.04 compared to Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier releases. However, for older PC hardware, Precise Pangolin’s power consumption was up sharply — 30% higher than when the Intel “Dothan” was in its prime.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

• As I reported earlier this week, Cairo 1.12 was released earlier this week after being in development for the past year and a half. Besides other new features, the performance of Cairo 1.12 should be better than previous releases.

• As mentioned in the earlier Cairo 1.12 article, “For bringing the Cairo performance improvements, the library’s rasterization pipeline was overhauled and now allows for the different Cairo back-ends the ability to implement their own specific pipeline while being able to leverage a library of common routines. Clipping was also overhauled, stroking was made faster, and there’s also four new anti-aliasing hints.”

GNOME Desktop

• GNOME 3.4 is the second release aiming at countering some of the complaints that greeted the release of the version last year.

• Users were unhappy with the mobile phone-like interface, which seemed to mimic the Unity interface used by Canonical for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

• From some time that I’ve been working on ‘Moniz’ after Martim Moniz. Moniz is meant to be a Linux remix which defaults to European Portuguese, and will be based on GNOME 3 with Cinnamon by default (GNOME Shell is also available). There’s also some intention to make this more ‘Iberian’ compatible, which means that the languages spoken in Spain should be supported in the Future.

Distributions

• I decided to try something else, which I had been hearing about a lot, Mint. I decided to try with the LXDE interface, because I like my desktop to take little memory and be responsive.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the OpenBox Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. It is available only as a PDF since all the articles have already appeared in the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• CentOS 6 is arguably one of the least expected best distributions for your desktop. While it is intended for servers, it does a splendid job at home, too. It’s fast, light, stable, robust, and supported unto eternity. And with some medium-hard work, you can significantly improve the overall look & feel and productivity. I have elaborate on these so-called pimping efforts in a series of three articles, all of which introduce a new range of programs and tools that are not included by default. To name a few, Java, Flash, LibreOffice, Chrome, newer versions of Firefox.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Over the past few years, competitive debate has moved toward a digital, paperless workflow, but that creates problems for school debate programs that don’t have the extra dough to shell out for laptops and software licenses. Chris McCool, a debate coach at Ballard High School in Seattle, Washington, decided to create a free, open source solution that would work on older, used laptops. On the project’s Kickstarter page, McCool explained:

• xpected to be unleashed in autumn of 2012, Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest gamble in the desktop market is making millions of eyes turn even before its release. Loaded with a brand new yet somewhat contentious Metro interface, the touch-friendly desktop will not only be seen on laptops and PCs, but will also find its place in the swanky upcoming tablet computers.

• That said, the main target group for Redmond would be the desktop, a field that they’ve been dominating for decades. Windows 8 will aim to obliterate all the competition by giving users an interface that will look and behave the same way across all devices. Sadly for them, and quite obviously too, Metro isn’t the first to try out this unified concept. Our very own Ubuntu has been busy for a couple of years trying to polish Unity, its unified interface for computers, tablets, smartphones (see: Ubuntu For Android: Do We Really Need it?), and even TVs (see: Ubuntu TV vs. Google TV: Battle of the Linux-based Smart TV). Some even go as far as to say that Microsoft might have actually ‘borrowed’ that idea from its old penguinian buddy.

Flavours and Variants

• After months of developing and testing, on March 23 David T has finally released Comice OS 4, the last version of Pear OS, a Linux distro that is based on Ubuntu and has the look and feel of Mac OS. Although I’ve tried the former versions of Pear OS and found them not very usable then, Comice OS 4 is totally different and it really impresses me this time. I downloaded Comice OS yesterday and tried it on my laptop, and here is my review for Comice OS 4.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Android 4.0 code named Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) was released more than three months ago. Google’s own Galaxy Nexus is perhaps the only device that ships with it at the moment. And because of that, there are only a handful of Android apps available whose design has been updated for Android 4.0+. That will change as time goes by. But which all are the Android apps whose design has been updated for Android 4.0 ICS at the moment? Let’s find out.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• 2011 was great for tablets, Apple’s tablets. 2012 will be different. Google, realizing Android/Linux tablets have respectable but not great share of the market, is gearing up to actively promote Android/Linux tablets. All the pieces needed for great competition will soon be in place:

• * great products, * great and numerous combatants, and * great prices.

Free Software/Open Source

• This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.

• Lord Torgamus asks: I want to join an open source project for the same reasons as anyone else: I want to help create something useful and become a better coder.

• Revolutionary movements require revolutionary progress. However, at the start of a Movement, such progress may not be immediately evident to those whose views of progress have been tainted by commercial software, where progress is measured by feature enhancements, quality improvements and user satisfaction. These are false idols and the shallow view of progress they support are irrelevant for true free software.

• Rejecting the repressive capitalist view of progress-as-production and production-as-consumption, and the doctrinaire emphasis on results-oriented metrics, we instead adopt the dialectic of progress-as-being and being-as-becoming, with metrics illustrating not what is produced, but what is willed. Rather than galley slaves, prodded by whip lashes to “row harder!”, our motto shall be: “row louder!”

• AUSTIN, TX, March 28 — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has released a new open-source software package called DisplayCluster that is used to drive large-scale tiled displays and allows scientists to interact and view high-resolution imagery and video up to gigapixels in size.

• It’s been an open secret all month, but two new members have joined the Affiliate scheme at OSI – Spain’s CENATIC (the national open source competency centre that’s been so important to the government adoption of open source in Spain’s regions) and the venerable Debian Project. Both bring a much-needed international flavour to OSI, along with a wealth of hard-won experience.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Education

• Blackboard has just announced its acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, two companies that help provide support and deployment services for schools that use the open-source LMS Moodle.

• “Wait. What?” is an acceptable, albeit mild response.

• This is, after all, the LMS giant — one that once claimed the patent on e-learning technology and sued other companies who provided competing software. Blackboard now says it is embracing open source — “Ours is no mere dalliance with open source, but a very committed plunge into the pool,” says the company’s Ray Henderson. To that end, Blackboard has also announced it’s creating an Open Source Services Group that will help institutions manage their open source LMSes, including Moodle and Sakai.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• With cross platform development comes some important questions of software freedom. There would be no true software freedom if we said we would permit our software to compile and run only on specific platforms, that is after all what proprietary software vendors often do. However in GNU Telephony we do principally develop and test our software on GNU systems specifically and do not have expertise in or interest in supporting proprietary ones.

• If people wish to work on or support other platforms also, they are certainly free to do so. As one of our goals in GNU Telephony is ubiquity, this is essential. However, unlike some groups who choose such goals, or distributions who choose “popularity” as their essential goal, we will never do so if it means also compromising the freedom of our contributors and users. Given this, if people want to submit patches for building and running on other platforms, we are happy to take such patches in, so long as they do not break features or functionality on free software platforms, and do not impose any additional restrictions on how we convey software to others.

• GNUtrition is a diet and nutrition analysis program for the GNU Operating System. The US Department of Agriculture Nutrient Database of Standard Reference is used as the source of food nutrient information.

• The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is celebrating open standards today in an annual event called Document Freedom Day. The event, which was first held in 2008, is observed on the last Wednesday of March. The purpose of the celebration is to raise awareness of the critical role unencumbered interoperability and open standards play in protecting data from vendor lock-in.

• According to the FSFE, 34 organizations are hosting 48 events in 17 countries to honor the occasion. The FSFE’s list of Document Freedom Day partners includes The Document Foundation, the KDE eV, the Pirate Party of Baden-Württemberg, and many regional Linux user groups.

Public Services/Government

Open Hardware

Programming

Leftovers

• Thanks to our friends the Millers, I learn that yesterday was World Backup Day. I don’t know why it was especially important to be backed up on March 31st, unless because of worries that Anonymous was going to carry out their threat to bring down the Internet. If that had happened, and you use the “cloud,” you’d want a local copy.

Hardware

• Evidently tired of smooth running graphics, lightning fast processing and bags and bags of available memory, programmer Dmitry Grinberg decided to go back to computing basics. And then some. As Linux was developed on a 32-bit machine with 1MB of RAM, this has always been considered the minimum system requirements to run the open source OS.

Finance

• A U.S. appeals court was asked on Friday to decide whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc and TCW Asset Management Co should have foreseen the housing market implosion that caused a $37 million loss for German state-owned Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg.

• A three-judge panel on Friday did not make an immediate ruling on a trial judge’s decision last September to dismiss the German bank’s lawsuit claiming fraud against Goldman and TCW, an investment advisor.

Privacy

• So now we start getting some of the actual facts and not the bold headlines or the wishy-washy text from the BBC. So it appears, no, your actual data activity will not be monitored in real time, just your affiliations whilst in cyberspace. So the requirement of a warrant still is in place for anything more and I’d suggest that if an intelligence agency has a level of interest in you which would have your affiliates logged, then there would be a warrant on the cards anyway. A lot of fuss from the average user about nothing and a good way for the UK to look as if its not completely lost on its tech vision. Remember “digital Britain”? And how about your digital contract with your ISP? If I interpret mine correctly, I’ve already agreed for them to give my particulars away to any law enforcement agency if so requested – without warrant. In respect of my ISP, no new law or even warrant is required to get this information. More likely this is a good chance for the UK Government to pretend they are doing something. In the UK we’ve seen the expertise the courts and the criminal/civil justice system operate under – dealing with a chap who recorded a movie on his phone in a cinema in order to post it on the net for nothing but having an “image”, blundering through a circus like the ACS:Law case, where in the end, it was the law firm itself (not the alleged File-sharers) that ended up with big problems.

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