● 04.03.12

● Links 3/4/2012: Fuduntu 2012.2, Ubuntu 12.04 CD Cover

Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I have been quite absent from Unixmen for almost 2 weeks now. I do apologize, but have been very busy with other work tasks and projects. I actually started this article during my absence, but there was a reason it has taken me so long to finish. Read on and see why.

• There’s an ugly side to Linux. Or to be more specific, Ubuntu Linux. It has suffered from the evil grips of what I describe as ‘Commercialism’.

• A very short time after both my brother and I migrated to Linux, we began experiencing the frustration of seeing the reality of the computer world: lazy technicians that charge to destroy your data, incompetent tech support staff who think that Linux is an anti-virus, unscrupulous companies that avoid their responsibilities and blame their helpless users by chanting their eternal mantra: “Your computer must be infected”…

Desktop

• The article which I am referring to is titled: “Difference engine: free is too expensive.” The blog in which the entry is made is titled Babbage. That, of course, gives it respectability – Charles Babbage is a man whom every computer science student knows about. But the entry itself is mostly specious.

• The author first tries to get the Linux crowd on-side – he/she/it has used Linux, and the software (oh, how condescending can you be?) has several good points. Why it can even run on an old Pentium!

• But then we get to the meat of the confused reasoning – the large number of distributions and the fact that one distribution may have a different file layout to another is a big minus, and unless Linux conforms to the same pattern that Mac OSX and Windows do, it will not succeed in business. We all need to march to the same tune; monoculture will save the earth.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, the famed Linux game developer, in the past has sharply criticized open-source Linux graphics drivers as not being mature and putting the Linux desktop into a dangerous position. In speaking to Ryan this weekend, his views on the open-source graphics drivers have changed.

Applications

• Monitorix is an free and open source system monitoring tool that allows users to monitor via web browser. Monitorix also monitoring services including CPU temp and load, Active processes, Allocated memory, Hard disk temp, Kernel usage, Network activity,Graphic Card temp and usage, and More.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Quake2World, a standalone game built atop the id Tech 2 engine but with sharply better graphics and other improvements, has finally reached a beta state. There’s a number of features to this latest open-source first person shooter.

• Reaction 1.0, a game derived from Quake III, has been released in beta form after being in development for the past decade.

• There’s some more Linux gaming news this weekend: the Linux client of Trine 2 has finally been released.

• Trine 2 is the side-scrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming and the successor to the original Trine game that also had a native Linux client.

• Dear Linux gamers, the wait is over, as Frozenbyte unleashed a few days ago the Linux version for its award winning Trine 2 cross-platform game.

• Trine 2 is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure/action game developed by the Finnish studio Frozenbyte, will be ported to Linux and officially launched sometime during 2012.

Desktop Environments

• I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the state of compositing with the Enlightenment desktop. In two recent reviews of Bodhi Linux the authors mucked up a few of the details concerning compositing and E17. I can’t really fault them for their misinformation (as a whole both are really good write ups) because the details about compositing and E17 aren’t very well documented. Today I would like to clarify a few things about using compositing with Enlightenment DR17.

• For those unsatisfied with the state of GNOME 3.x Shell, Ubuntu’s Unity interface, and other Linux desktop options, Xfce 4.10 is approaching with an official release planned for later this month.

• As the first major Xfce update in more than one year, Xfce 4.10 Preview 1 is now available. “The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.10. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.10 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on April 28th, 2012.”

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

• The developers behind the GNOME project have announced GNOME 3.4, a new version of the desktop environment. The update brings several significant new features and a number of design and usability improvements.

• GNOME is an open source software stack that provides a desktop shell, applications, and development frameworks that are commonly used on the Linux platform. It is the default desktop environment in Fedora and several other Linux distributions. It’s released every six months on a time-based development cycle.

• I want to revisit this article for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I think enough has changed in the last 6 months to invite some commentary. Journalism is sometimes just the ability to speculate widly and then put those crazy, wide-eyed presumptions onto paper. That said, not everything in this piece came true, and at the same time some of this things are still developing.

Distributions

• It is my hypothesis that there is a very real lack of knowledge of Linux basics even by many long time Linux users and especially by many members of the Linux press. This knowledge gap is exhibited by the fact that a large number of Linux users actually believe there are huge differences between Linux distributions. The media especially is rife with comparisons of different distributions (distros), reviews of distros and stories about each distro.

• First and foremost, RapidDisk 2.1b is now released and available. Second, the RapidDisk LX project is now listed as part of the Open Invention Network. Third, I just uploaded an initial RapidDisk LX 1.0 alpha release image to the project website.

New Releases

• The second Fuduntu quarterly ISO, Fuduntu 2012.2 is now available for immediate download. As with all Fuduntu releases, this release continues our tradition of small incremental improvements. It is important to note that existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to this version through the normal update process, and do not need to download or reinstall from this media to benefit from this release.

Gentoo Family

• Coming out of the Gentoo camp is the Gentoo Linux 12.1 LiveDVD release with several new features.

• Packages at the heart of this updated Gentoo LiveDVD include the Linux 3.3 kernel, X.Org Server 1.12, KDE SC 4.8.1, GNOME 3.2.1, Xfce 4.8, Fluxbox 1.3.2, Mozilla Firefox 11, LibreOffice 3.5.1, Blender 2.60, Amarok 2.5, VLC 2.0.1, and others.

• Gentoo released 12.1 on April Fool’s Day. I included it in my jokes roundup. But the Gentoo announcement has added a message to users and jokesters today: The installer is real.

• I said in that post that the best jokes are the ones you almost believe. But perhaps that wasn’t quite accurate. Maybe the most crafty of all are those that are real but seem like a joke. That’s the sum of the Gentoo installer. A Gentoo installer is a difficult beast to construct, I understand that. At one time the very nature of Gentoo conflicted with the traditional binary installer. However, the Gentoo team has been promoting Stage 3 installs for quite some time. What is a Stage 3 install? It’s the nearly complete install of a binary system from a tarball that needs to be rebuilt before adding all your goodies. So, why not have an install wizard like Sabayon?

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We can exclusively share with you the official disc artwork for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS CD and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server releases.

• Having recently converted to Android from my iPhone 4, I have been very happy with the range of apps to replace what I had on iOS. In many cases, I’m finding the apps better. The Android ethos seems to be more about function, rather than design and aesthetics. However, one area where I’ve found the Android to be lacking is in respect of the “todo” category.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Sony says its customers should avoid upgrading their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich, adding that many of them won’t get the option anyway.

Free Software/Open Source

• London’s claim to being the hub for tech startups in Europe got a boost last week, when Google opened the doors of its latest effort, Google Campus, a seven-story centre for startups, which it has launched in partnership with several existing organizations, and big ambitions to galvanize some of the tech activity that has already marked out London to take it to the next level.

Events

• At the end of last year, Computerworld’s Eric Knoor had this to say about the state of cloud computing: “If I had to sum up in one word the most exciting thing that happened to cloud computing in 2011, I’d have to say it’s OpenStack. This open source project, launched by Rackspace and NASA in late 2010, is assembling a private cloud ‘operating system’ for the data center that promises vast increases in operational efficiency.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• With the evolution of HTML5 standards gathering pace, and developers increasingly looking to produce apps for multiple platforms, Mozilla’s plans to deliver an HTML5-based operating system for smartphones could have a major impact.

SaaS

• Wondering what comes after the cloud? Literally, usually sunshine — haha. But metaphorically speaking, the next great frontier may well be big-data. And Hadoop, an open-source project enjoying ever-increasing buzz as of late, will likely be at the fore as that niche evolves. If you don’t know much about Hadoop, it’s time to learn. Here are the basics.

Semi-Open Source

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.

• (You can check the original post at http://www.meanmicio.org/2012/04/gnu-health-wins-fsf-project-of-social.html ) Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.

• OpenMRS began as a research project spanning Indiana University and Eldoret, Kenya’s Moi University.

Public Services/Government

• The Indian government launched an ‘Open Government Platform (OGPL)’—an open source software platform which aims to provide enhanced public access to government data and documents.

• The OGPL, a joint effort from India and the United States, will make government data, documents, applications, tools and services publicly available. “By making data available through OGPL developers, analysts, media, and academia can develop new applications and insights that will help give citizens more knowledge for better decisions,” the government officials said in the press release.

Open Hardware

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• This magic comes about by the use of “virtualisation” – which simply refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than an actual) version of something. With the right software and a reasonably powerful PC, you can build virtual “compartments” inside your computer that look and act like a whole separate machine. That allows you, for example, to run Linux and Mac on Windows, try out a new web server or run an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2, all without disturbing your current system – or having to reboot. “Guest” systems can communicate with the underlying (or “host” operating system) via shared folders, networking or the clipboard, and you can install and run as many VMs (virtual machines) as you like, with disk space and memory the only real limitation. More amazingly, the extremely clever software is open source. And that means it’s free.

• VirtualBox, from virtualbox.org, is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and requires 40-90MB of disk space depending on your operating system. There’s also an Extension Pack containing some extra goodies and an extremely detailed manual on the site.

Finance

• Prof. William K. Black, you are the pre-eminent Hero of We the People in our time. You are the Man of Light, Truth, and Justice for the century. May your name ring forever in the pages of history, on a par with that of your namesake, William the Conquerer (“Johnny the Concaloo” in early R&B, you may recall), but with a higher purpose. William K. Black, you are our pre-eminent *Leader of Light*.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.