● 04.08.12

● Links 8/4/2012: LF Collab 2012, OpenStack Essex

Posted in News Roundup at 10:12 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

Kernel Space

• Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett talked this week again about the troubles in supporting UEFI under Linux.

• With Linux support for PCI Express ASPM having been corrected to address the notorious Linux kernel power regression of last year, Matthew Garrett’s latest topic and focus of work has been on UEFI for Linux.

• Matthew’s commonly talking about the UEFI problems with Linux, especially when it comes to the Secure Boot functionality. Some past examples (and some reading for reference) include UEFI Secure Boot Still A Big Problem For Linux, Going Over The Good & Bad For UEFI On Linux, and Myths About Secure Boot: Security, Microsoft, Etc.

• There’s a new Linux graphics driver for allowing mini/pico/compact/handheld USB-interfacing display projectors to work under your favorite distribution.

• Earlier this week an email hit the Phoronix news inbox from Antonio Ospite, who has been working on this new driver support along with a Reto Schneider. While some of these small projectors have a VGA/HDMI interface (in which case no special Linux graphics driver is needed under Linux), a growing number of them are USB-based where only a Microsoft Windows driver is available. (If you’re not familiar with these types of mini/handheld projectors, see the Texas Instruments projector demo from X@FOSDEM.)

• The 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit concluding this week in San Francisco. In case you missed out on any coverage of the interesting sessions from the event, here’s a run-down of the worthwhile information that was shared and discussed, plus a few other extra tid-bits from the invite-only event.

Graphics Stack

• Unigine Corp has announced a set of improvements to their cross-platform and visually-stunning Unigine Engine. With the Source Engine on Linux finally looking to be imminent for entering the public spotlight, new improvements to Unigine couldn’t come at a better time.

Applications

• TermSaver is a pretty cool screensaver that can run from the command-line interface or terminal in Ubuntu/Linux. TermSaver isn’t supposed replace other screensavers that come with your desktop such as GnomeShell, Unity,KDE, or other Desktop Environment. And it also might not be able to carry out the actual purpose of a screesaver since it lacks a lot of pixel movements (screen animations), which otherwise helps to prevent “screen burns” on display devices

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Kickstarter is doing lots of good to Linux gaming as more and more developers are adding Linux support.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop

• Gloobus Preview is an quick file previewer which supports images, documents (pdf, odf, ods, etc.), source files, audio (mp3, wav, ogg and more), video (avi, ogg, mkv, flv, etc.), folders, archives, fonts, plain text files and more.

• Gloobus Preview was recently fixed so it now works with Ubuntu 12.04 too. Besides the Ubuntu 12.04 fix, the latest Gloobus Preview from BZR comes with GTK3 support, support for password-protected documents, a rewritten documents plugin, WebM support, fixed ttf, pdf and video plugins and other fixes.

Distributions

• I had tried out all these distributions again last week (during spring break) and this week, but I didn’t think that each of them warranted their own posts (and this is also why there were no posts last week), so I have decided to combine them all into a short summary of my experiences. I’m doing this because I’m seriously trying to figure out what I should start using after Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME. I tested the 64-bit (because my computer has 64-bit hardware) live USB sessions of all of these using MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what each is like.

Red Hat Family

• It’s certainly been an interesting week on the open source cloud platform front. GigaOm reports that IBM and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) are planning to announce their respective support for OpenStack, perhaps as early as next week. Neither company was commenting on the deal, but it sounds like a fait accompli, albeit one that hasn’t been announced yet.

• If not next week, we may wait for the announcement until the OpenStack Design Summit starting April 16 in San Francisco.

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Sure Red Hat just crested the $1 billion-revenue mark with almost $150 million in profit while Canonical, maker of Ubuntu Linux, still isn’t profitable after seven years in business.

• I was bored yesterday and this Yahoo! feature got my attention. It is about how tell if your “PC has a virus”.

• I might be mistaken, but the image they used to illustrate the first symptom of those annoying virus infections that plague Windows users seems to have come from… a computer running Ubuntu!

• For the past 6 months we’ve been travelling around conferences talking about juju and charms. We’ve had charm schools and training events, but it’s been difficult to explain to people the differences between service orchestration and configuration management, especially with a tool that wasn’t so complete. Thanks to the work for some volunteers though, we’ve managed to have 58 charms available in Ubuntu so far.

• Midsize businesses that are considering the transition from Windows to Linux might want to take a look at the results of a recent user survey from Canonical.

• Canonical, responsible for products such as Ubuntu and Launchpad, polled over 15,000 English speakers (as well as more than 1,800 Spanish speakers and 1,700 Portuguese speakers) in an effort to better understand its user base. But the answers the company received might not be what some would expect.

• South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth has spent many years and huge sums of money producing the Ubuntu operating system. It’s the third most popular desktop operating system in the world and not only because it’s free, but also because it is extremely competitive and improving constantly.

Devices/Embedded

• Good news! We just received confirmation that the Raspberry Pi has passed EMC testing without requiring any hardware modifications.

• Google Glass is Google’s effort at wearable technology, a display that projects contextual information and communication information onto glass that you wear (like a pair of regular glasses kinda/sorta). Little is known at this point about the actual hardware/software technology and to be honest at first, I thought this was an April 1st joke — but it’s not.

Phones

Android

• Samsung Electronics has said it expects its profit for the first three months of the year to almost double as its smartphone sales continue to grow.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• This is a valuable report, because it points out a general problem not specific to OSS.

• OmniTI announced OmniOS, an open source operating system for application developers in the Solaris community looking for data-intensive application deployment.

• OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete OS.

Events

SaaS

• In the wake of Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy, it still seems clear to most observers that OpenStack and CloudStack are headed for fierce competition. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All the way back in 2009, open source platforms were emerging as the best way for IT departments to guarantee flexibility in their cloud deployments. But what many people are still missing is that support is going to be the key differentiator between OpenStack and CloudStack, and other cloud platforms.

CMS

• The community supporting the popular Joomla open-source content management system announced that it has been downloaded more than 30 million times.

• The community attributes the continued growth in the number of individuals, companies and organizations using the CMS to an aggressive development road map that included the release of Joomla 1.7 in July 2011. The CMS also began adhering to a six-month release cycle meaning more product enhancements being introduced more often. New features in the latest version included multi-database support, one-click version updating, predefined search options and language-specific font settings.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Another one of the interesting presentations from the LF Collaboration Summit this week in San Francisco was covering the improvements made to GCC 4.7, which is the latest GNU compiler update with several new features for developers.

• At this week’s invite-only event Qualcomm was highlighting LLVM and Clang as a great compiler infrastructure and shared their ambitions to build the mainline Linux kernel for ARM with LLVM/Clang, while Oracle’s Paolo Carlini was covering GNU Compiler Collection 4.7 and C++11.

Public Services/Government

• As a non-partisan, non-profit organization, the Sunlight Foundation is taking the ethos found among the open-source software movement and applying it to government. It’s one goal is to publish the government’s public data in an easy-to-access location, at no cost to users.

Licensing

• The latest “why we don’t need the GPL” argument comes from one Donnie Berkholz of an analyst firm called RedMonk. It begins with a falsehood: “In the early days of the GPL and copyleft software, it played an important role in forcibly training companies how free/open-source development worked.” No, it did not. The GPL, being a free software licence, had nothing to do with open source at all; it was about ensuring freedom for users, freedom of the political kind.

Leftovers

Finance

• No doubt, a few economists and some business leaders will be inclined to argue that the trend is not entirely negative. Fair enough. Perhaps it indicates flexibility in US labor markets, especially as the economy tries to recover through the formation of small business. Also, it makes sense that an economy trying to recover would first add back part-time work in equal amounts to full time work, before stepping up to the array of benefits extended to the full time worker. But therein lies the problem: American workers desperately need health-care coverage, which is not typically offered to part-time workers. Meanwhile, deleveraging of household balance sheets since the high debt levels of 2007 has been mild. The result is yet another way to see how deeply consumer demand is restrained: there’s not enough work to both pay down debt, and restart consumption.

• Rebecca Kaplan was once a rabbinical student, and the Oakland City Councilmember still knows her scripture well. On Wednesday afternoon, Kaplan quoted the books of Isaiah, Leviticus and Exodus while speaking during a teach-in about the city’s bond debt with Goldman Sachs at Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland.

• In 1997, Oakland and the investment bank Goldman Sachs agreed to a rate-swap deal relating to $187 million in city debt. The deal allowed the city to convert floating interest rates on the debt into a fixed rate of 5.6 percent. But what appeared to be a good deal at the time has proved costly in the long run, after the market collapsed in 2008 and interest rates dropped to below 2 percent. The city has come out on the short end of the deal, and has already paid out $26 million more than it owed and is currently paying $5 million annually.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Privacy

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