● 04.06.12

● Links 6/4/2012: KDE 5.0 Wishlist, Fedora 17 Delays

Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For a number of years, many Linux users (myself included) struggled with Wireless on Linux. Simply put, Linux distros didn’t always correctly recognize or work with the Wireless hardware on the user’s laptop. That has changed in recent years.

• Speaking on a panel at the Linux Collaboration Summit this week, Linux Wireless maintainer John Linville said that wireless on Linux has matured.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• There’s growing interest in being able to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM/Clang compiler as an alternative to the kernel’s long-standing love-affair with GCC.

• Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer who’s the lead developer of the Btrfs, just finished a session at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about his promising and feature-rich file-system.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Avadon: The Black is an old school crpg game created by the legendary Spiderweb Software which created many other old school crpg’s.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• First week of the month is typically when the KDE team releases its maintenance updates. These releases are nothing to get excited about — but they still hold water for us users. Why? The project steers clear of the glitches introduced with point zero releases towards stability, by squashing bugs and adding minor feature improvements.

GNOME Desktop

• Gnome 3.4 was released several days ago. This update brings a plenty of improvements to the user experience, including many bug fixes and small enhancements. Most of the applications have also gone through a redesign and have become more Gnome3-ish. Best of all, this release also brings an improvement to its performance and is now running faster and better. Let’s check it out what is in store in Gnome 3.4.

Distributions

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• At the Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip the Beta by an additional week[1]. Minutes follow below.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Tweet

• This story is special, as it was created in an open source manner. The story was written in collaborative fashion by 2-3 dozen people working on it simultaneously. The story is a shining example of the collaborative power of Google Docs. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this story.

• The Linux Foundation recently published its annual report about the development of the Linux kernel. As usual, Red Hat and SUSE topped the list as major contributors to the development of Linux kernel. Even Microsoft made it to the top 20 due to their code cleanup of hypervisor. But Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was missing from the list again.

Flavours and Variants

• The package comprises of 14 winners from Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpaper Contest plus the new ‘incrementally updated’ default wallpaper (tweaked noise version).

• Many of the community contest selections differ from those previously proposed following copyright, quality, and CD space considerations.

Devices/Embedded

• Tired of waiting for Raspberry Pi? With delay after delay, and no fixed release date in sight, maybe it’s time to look for an alternative

• Follow @LinuxUserMag

• The Raspberry Pi is no doubt a very exciting device, with an unmatched ratio of size, power, and value. However, after months of delays and false starts ranging from manufacturing problems to certification issues, the open source wonder board hasn’t actually been delivered to those who have bought it, or would love to buy it.

• All is not lost though, as there are several alternatives available that might just pique your interest.

Phones

Android

• Or you can pick it up from your local Asda supermarket. The Walmart-owned chain didn’t say how many of the low-cost e-readers it has in stock, and we note the comments from some Reg readers who tried to take advantage of the offer the last time Asda slashed the price of the Kobo and found stores without them.

Free Software/Open Source

• Bubs thinks you should just go out with the bingers and act like a crazy person right along with them – they won’t know the difference! Fair enough, but I’m not interested in ‘partying hard’, I want to talk with like-minded people about subjects I don’t necessarily get to talk about at the office. For example, we don’t use Node.js at work – so I go to JSConf to chat and learn about it in a casual atmosphere. Except I don’t get to do that. It’s always the same: talks, then binge time.

• The roboticist on the panel argued that AI is an intellectually challenging field where the problems are difficult, and therefore can be solved only by highly intelligent people working on obscure mathematics and algorithms. The future, he argued, will look much like the past: a series of incremental, hard-won improvements in very narrow fields.

SaaS

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice has breathed new life into the stagnated open source productivity suite. Under The Document Foundation it is moving ahead aggressively. We talked to Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder & Director, The Document Foundation, to understand the development process of LibreOffice, the current status and future plans.

BSD

• I’m not trying to start a flame war, but OpenBSD packs a lot more current, useful information into fewer pages than does FreeBSD into its still-excellent, more-massive Handbook. The same is true for NetBSD’s also-excellent documentation when compared to what OpenBSD has to offer.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• While we have seen that Intel’s Sandy Bridge is doing well on the new GCC 4.7 compiler (along with LLVM/Clang 3.1), has AMD’s Bulldozer CPU architecture advanced at all for this leading multi-platform compiler? Up today are benchmarks of GCC 4.7.0 — with comparative benchmarks going back to GCC 4.4 — from an AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core Bulldozer setup.

• The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor applications deal with the kernel directly. Instead, almost all interactions with the kernel are moderated through the C library, which is charged with providing a standards-compliant interface to the kernel’s functionality. There are a number of C library implementations available, but, outside of the embedded sphere, most Linux systems use the GNU C library, often just called “glibc.” The development project behind glibc has a long and interesting history which took a new turn with the dissolution of its steering committee on March 26.

• In its early days, the GNU project was forced to focus on a small number of absolutely crucial projects; that is why the first program released under the GNU umbrella was Emacs. Once the core was in place, though, the developers realized they would need a few other components to build their new system; a C library featured prominently on that list. So, back in 1987, Roland McGrath started development on the GNU C library; by 1988, it was seen as being sufficiently far along that systems could be built on top of it.

Open Access/Content

• Tufts University is taking its enterprise content, course, learning, knowledge, and curriculum management system for health sciences, known as Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), open source. Medical schools around the world now have the opportunity to install TUSK at their own institution, customize it to suit their own needs, and optionally contribute their customizations back to the TUSK source code.

Programming

Leftovers

Copyrights

• Hollywood and Obama should’ve learned: No form of censorship will be acceptable to Internet users, and we’re fed up with corrupt, back-room deals that are driven by the rich and well-connected. Any major Internet policy changes should be negotiated in the light of day, so the millions of people who’d be affected can have their say too.

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