● 04.17.12

● Links 17/4/2012: Wine 1.5.2 Released, Raspberry Pi Starts Shipping

Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Based on that incredibly important criteria, I hereby declare that Linux has reached the pinnacle of true success. Send the marketing folks home, ladies and gentlemen, we’re done here, because everyone and their brother is now officially trying to the “the Linux of” whatever the sector within which they are seeking to succeed.

• The latest company to hang this label on their product line is VMware, which has declared via CTO Steve Herrod that their new Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will be the “Linux of the cloud.”

• The truth is you are thousands of times more secure with GNU/Linux than that other OS. The count of malwares proves that. The incidence of malware infections proves that. The prevalence of GNU/Linux servers on the web proves that. The fact that M$’s servers are becoming more like GNU/Linux machines with time is another. Heck, M$’s 2008 server can even run GUIless and uses scripting. Where have we heard of that? Oh, GNU/Linux back about 1995.

• It is a standard military manoeuvre to seek out an enemy’s weakness and exploit it. If you are trying to run IT are you charging the enemy’s centre with it’s heavy artillery, enfilade fire and mines or are you going to flank him and cut his supply lines? We must do the same in IT. M$ has proven thousands of times that its software is insecure. We should run GNU/Linux. It’s the smart thing to do.

Server

• According to survey results released earlier this year, Ubuntu still has a lot of room to grow in the cloud space. But it seems to be doing just that, the latest indicator being HP’s release of cloud products based partially on Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters for the Ubuntu world in particular.

• Last week, HP announced the public availability beginning May 10 of its HP Cloud platform, which began life as a private beta about six months ago. Most of the HP Cloud features are not very unique — it’s the same basic deal as other popular hosted cloud infrastructures, like Amazon EC2 — but one of the characteristics HP seems to be pushing is the open-source technologies on which its solutions are built, freeing users from vendor lock-in.

Kernel Space

• Say what you will about the mainstream viability of Google Plus, but anyone who has spent even a few days on Google’s rapidly developing social network can tell you that the userbase seems unusually knowledgeable and tech-savvy. There have been numerous posts and articles attempting to explain this phenomena, but the most common theory seems likely enough: the early invitations were given out to primarily technical users (developers, tech journalists, etc), and they predictably shared their invites with like-minded individuals.

• Ubuntu and Canonical have done quite a bit in expanding the ecosystem and market for Linux, which used to be practically unusable on the desktop. By aspiring to a better, easier and more polished UI, Ubuntu has lifted other Linux distributions and their UIs along with it. This does not absolve Canonical of the responsibility to engage in upstream kernel work and contribution, though, and the company stands more to gain than lose by putting resources toward Linux.

Graphics Stack

• There is another new open-source Linux graphics driver entering development and it has already showed signs of success with basic 2D acceleration working. This new open-source driver is for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon / Adreno and who is leading the development of this driver is also quite interesting.

• The Nouveau Kepler Gallium3D code that was published yesterday does indeed work for allowing OpenGL acceleration on the GeForce 600 series using this reverse-engineered open-source code. In an odd story to end out the weekend, the Nouveau Kepler graphics driver consumed nearly 120GB of hard drive space while running this open-source driver on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.

Applications

• Transcoding is the process of the conversion of digital data (typically video and audio files) from one format to another. It involves extracting tracks from a digital media file, decoding the tracks, filtering, encoding, and then multiplexing the new tracks into a new container. Transcoding will reduce the quality of the tracks unless lossless formats are used.

• RSSOwl is a free and powerful news feed reader. RSSOwl lets you organize, update, gather,save informations and search news in a convenient. RSSOwl easy to use interface with endless flexibility.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• In the Indie game “The Great Jitters Pudding Panic“, done by the German developers kunst-stoff, you are a Green pudding and your goal is to exit from an haunted house without fainting from fear, while at the same time trying to scare the monsters in the maze.

• 0 A.D. is a free and open source ancient warfare real time strategy game, that has drawn a lot of attention around it for a good reason. This game started as a very ambitious project which is always good, but also very difficult. This Monday we meet Aviv Sharon, in an effort to learn more about the details behind this fantastic game, that many people already “love” although it is still in alpha state.

• When it comes to ioquake3, the open-source id Tech 3 game engine, it’s almost always being used for powering a first-person shooter. However, released on Friday was a major update to an open-source multi-platform game running on ioquake3 but is not yet-another-FPS title. However, it’s also arguably the oddest game to be powered by this engine that was originally designed for Quake III.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma Workspaces provide a graphical interface and lots of eye candy for the desktop Linux experience. Many would argue that it is equal to or even better at this than Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. KDE, however, is not only a graphical frontend for Linux. It comes with a set of applications and also with a set of system administration tools that can help power users take control of their desktops or laptops without dropping to the command line.

Distributions

• For Slackware, it’s been no exception. Some of you faithful Slackers may have noticed lately that the Slackware home page has been offline. I posted about this at Jeremy’s Linux Questions forums. Alien Bob (Eric Hameleers) replied stating that it was an old hardware/lack of funds issue. This is sad.

New Releases

• A new sets of Slackel KDE 4.8.2 edition. A collection of four KDE iso images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as 32-bit and 64-bit live images that can be burned to a DVD or used with a USB drive.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Last week, I received, in CC:, an email from a Mandriva Linux developer. This email was entitled “A foundation for Mandriva Linux *NOW* or Mandriva Linux to *DIE*?”

• That suggested to me that maybe Mandriva was not going very well. This, of course, hurted me. At the same time it leads to the interesting question of a Foundation for a project like Mandriva Linux.

Red Hat Family

• There were a number of points in Cormier’s blog post, however, that could be interpreted as being less complimentary toward the Redmond giant. A reference to Red Hat having attained its current status “not without opposition” may well be a veiled dig at Microsoft, as could a line asserting that “some of the new entrants [to the open source world] are surprising.”

• While Red Hat might be one of the largest open source providers in the world, Jim Totton, vice president for the company’s platform business unit, is surprisingly coy about mistakes the company has made and learnt from in the decade since it launched.

• Coming up to its 10-year anniversary in May, Totton is in Australia from the US to celebrate. However, discussing mistakes Red Hat has made over the years doesn’t appear to be on the agenda.

Debian Family

• * Debian project leader elected * Registration open for DebConf12 * Personal BSP initiatives * The state of Debian s390x * Interviews * Other news * Upcoming events * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?

• Siduction 11.1 is a fork of the Aptosid distro. Siduction comes in KDE, Xfce or LXDe spins. You can get 32-bit or 64-bit versions of each spin. Siduction is based on Debian Sid and includes Linux Kernel 3.1-6 and X.Org server 1.11.2.902.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Windows is great, but after a while, it can get cluttered up with too many programs and become intolerably sluggish. Backing up your files and reinstalling it can help, but an alternative is to try the free Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu isn’t too demanding and can make even a lowly netbook seem sprightly compared with running Windows on it.

• Ubuntu GNU/Linux has been global on the web but Canonical/Mark Shuttleworth has a larger project in mind. So far they have created business relationships with most of the large OEMs and provided cloud services and content-distribution portals.

• Two weeks ago a Linux Foundation report showed that since version 2.6.32, Microsoft had committed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical. Since then, Canonical has faced claims from rivals that it does not contribute to Linux as much as it should given its popularity.

• We need to ensure we get total coverage of our different ISO images; the different images that you can download and install from. Each of these images has a small set of mandatory tests that we need to run through to ensure everything is working. We want to ensure all of these mandatory tests are run so that we can find any problems before the release and get them fixed.

Flavours and Variants

• Y’all should know by now that I’m a Linux user. I write in Linux, I game in Linux, heck, my house has been Microsoft-free for about three years and I’ve never looked back. (The only exception being my day-job laptop. I’m stuck with Windows there.) The only thing that really bugs me about Linux is the uncertainty of upgrades.

• I’ve been using Linux Mint for a while now. Since version 8, I believe, when I changed over from Ubuntu. I find Linux Mint more user friendly than just straight Ubuntu and this is important. I’m a very plug-and-play kind of person. I don’t want to sit around installing drivers and slogging away at software installs. I want to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work. When I installed Linux Mint 8 for the first time, it did just that.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux system about the size of a credit card, is fully baked and ready to eat… er, ship.

• The system was designed by a British nonprofit with the idea of encouraging people everywhere, particularly young people in developing countries, to become more interested in programming.

• Free Software is resilient, Raspberry Pi has proven it again. After a month full of challenges and hurdles whether it be wrongly soldered LAN port or requirement of getting a CE mark the tiny devices are now shipping. For those who missed to order, the Raspberry Pi boards from RS and Allied are priced at £21.60 plus a shipping charge of £4.95 to any destination worldwide, plus VAT and import duty as applicable.

Phones

Android

• This screenshot tour was created to accompany DeviceGuru’s forthcoming post describing how we rooted and tweaked an Amazon Kindle Fire. The tour comprises more than 100 screenshots, which showcase the Kindle Fire’s standard homescreens and settings, the utilities and process we used for rooting and tweaking it, and the overall end result.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• When Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and other executives take the stage at this week’s Cisco Partner Summit, The VAR Guy wonders: Will Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) executives be armed with Cius tablets? The answer to that question could reveal how Cisco is feeling about its purpose-built tablets, which run Google Android and leverage the Cisco AppHQ app store.

• Cisco Cius tablets don’t seek to compete in the consumer tablet market. Rather, the devices are designed for corporate executives who leverage unified communications and video applications. Cisco Partner Summit 2012 (April 16-19, San Diego), could provide a prime stage to update partners on the Cius.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of the most exciting up and coming trends in the world of networking in the last few years has been emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the core of the SDN revolution is the open source OpenFlow protocol which has helped to define the entire SDN space.

• The hits just keep on coming for the Android mobile operating system–albeit this time from European telecom vendors that are insisting the Linux-based operating system would help prop up the flagging Lumia smartphone sales… if only the Lumias ran Android instead of Windows Phone 7.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Databases

• MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase. MariaDB 5.5.23, which according to developer Colin Charles has “1.5 million additional lines of code compared to MySQL,” pushes forward the development of an open-source database with features that aim to match those of Oracle’s commercial-only MySQL releases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice/OpenOffice//Calligra

• For home and enterprise users alike, software like LibreOffice has made desktop Linux a whole lot easier. A reliable office suite is a key part of using a modern computer for most people. Given that important, it’s worth noting that a new Koffice fork has been developed. It’s called Calligra Suite.

• Unlike LibreOffice, which doesn’t reflect the styles of one desktop environment over another, Calligra Suite is based on Qt and was definitely designed with the KDE user in mind.

• It’s here at last! oi_151a_prestable2 AKA oi_151a3 is the third update since OpenIndiana 151a was released in September and the first since then to be available as freshly pressed ISOs.

BSD

• A few weeks ago I asked if readers would be interested in seeing reviews of network-attached storage (NAS) projects. The feedback was really positive and so I present the first of what I hope to be a series of reviews covering NAS solutions. This week we will be looking at FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based project sponsored by iXsystems.

• Before we get started I think it’s only fair that we address the question of why we might want to run a dedicated NAS operating system rather than a generic server system. For instance, this week we’re looking at FreeNAS, what motivation do we have for using it instead of FreeBSD or a popular Linux server distribution? The answer is largely one of specialization. People looking at network-attached storage are looking for a place to store files (usually a lot of files) and aren’t interested in other features a server operating system might provide. A NAS box will be focused on storing and transferring files, it’s probably not going to serve up e-mails or websites or provide DNS services. With that in mind, a NAS should come with all the tools we might need to easily add new disks, take snapshots, perform backups and, being focused on these tasks exclusively, it can cut out any extras, providing a lightweight solution.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Security

• Cyber attacks on IT systems would become a criminal offence punishable by at least two years in prison throughout the EU under a draft law backed by the Civil Liberties Committee on Tuesday. Possessing or distributing hacking software and tools would also be an offence, and companies would be liable for cyber attacks committed for their benefit.

Civil Rights

• Congress’ latest attempt at a bill that affects the way people use the Internet has many scared, with some calling the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is “worse than SOPA,” the bill that caused widespread Internet outrage and blackouts before ultimately being shelved. Experts say the danger level associated with CISPA depends on the answer to one question: Which Constitution amendment do you care about more, the First or the Fourth?

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

• In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

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