● 04.21.12

● Links 21/4/2012: Linux on the Watch, More Migrations to Linux in India

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The operating system of all the official computers in Southern Naval Command (SNC) at Kochi is switching over to an exclusively designed Linux from Windows.

Kernel Space

• The Millenium Technology Prize, awarded every two years, is a Finnish award designed “to improve the quality of life and to promote sustainable development-oriented research, development and innovation.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee won the prize in 2004. The finalists this year are Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who has been contributing to the area of stem cell research, and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The 2012 Grand Prize winner will be announced on June 13 in Helsinki, Finland.

• As has been widely reported now by various publications, Intel is expected to launch their next-generation Ivy Bridge processors on Monday, 23 April. On the day that Ivy Bridge launches, you can expect to see a load of CPU and graphics benchmarks for their next-generation Core i7 processors under Linux on Phoronix. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS they will be compared to the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer and various Sandy Bridge processors.

• There’s already a number of changes building up when it comes to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) sub-system for merging into the Linux 3.5 kernel.

Graphics Stack

• In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process.

• Keith Packard has been working on the X window system since the early days, but more recently has been doing lots of work to enable its replacement. X has long held the position as the way that graphics is done on Linux (and other Unix) systems, but that is changing. He came to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held April 3-5 in San Francisco, to talk about the Wayland protocol and the Weston server, and how they could interoperate with X. Wayland looks to be an interesting change for desktop graphics on Linux.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• US Linux operating system provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) expects to see 50% revenue growth in its Latin American operations in fiscal year 2013, regional sales manager for Spanish-speaking South America, Germán Soracco, told BNamericas.

Fedora

• Fedora has a long history of release names. Some have been serious (Verne, Goddard, Cambridge), while others have been a little less so (Werewolf, Moonshine, Zod). Perhaps the silliest of them yet, Fedora 17 will be “Beefy Miracle,” a release name that’s been floating around for quite some time. Apparently, some consider Beefy Miracle to be offensive, because it refers to food made with beef. Given the complexity of selecting a “safe” release name, should Fedora drop names altogether?

• Linux distro names started to get ‘weird’ when Ubuntu arrived on the scenes with Weirdly Wacky African-inspired Animal names. Other distros, notably Fedora have taken a more democratic approach where community members vote on the release name, but that could soon change. “

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With the release of Ubuntu 12.04 due out next week, Mark Shuttleworth will soon be announcing the codename of the six-month successor to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which carries the codename of Precise Pangolin.

• Following in past tradition for Ubuntu codenames, the Ubuntu 12.10 should be a codename that’s two words with each letter beginning with a Q for the 12.10 cycle. The first word is generally an adjective followed by the name of an animal. This name is decided internally by Canonical / Mark without a community voting process like what happens with Fedora.

• Canonical has put out a call for more Ubuntu application developers, possibly highlighting a lack of traction in this area just one day before such a gap was pointed out by a competitor.

• Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon put the word out on his blog Wednesday, stating his team’s intention to start working on an application developer community that would be fundamentally different from all the other communities that have been built up around the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.

• Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS will have an optional fast track for future OpenStack releases available alongside the OpenStack Essex release that the operating system ships with. The plan, dubbed the Ubuntu Cloud Archive, was announced in a blog post by Robbie Williamson, Canonical’s Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Server.

• HP will certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, due to land on 26 April, for selected ProLiant servers, making this the first time users of the Linux distro can receive HP’s hardware warranty support. Newer ProLiant servers will be added to the list after the launch.

• June 7th, 2012 – Alpha 1 release June 28th, 2012 – Alpha 2 release August 2nd, 2012 – Alpha 3 release September 6th, 2012 – Beta 1 release September 27th, 2012 – Beta 2 release October 18th, 2012 – Final release of Ubuntu 12.10

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• There are still Firefox users out there that are using the Firefox 3.6 branch of the browser. Motivation to do so differs, from disliking the design and interface of newer versions of the browser to using add-ons that are not compatible with never versions of Firefox. And then there are users who have turned updates off, or not enough privileges to run the updates. With Firefox 3.6 reaching its end of life this month, Mozilla and Firefox 3.6 users are in a predicament.While there are currently no known security vulnerabilities for version 3.6 of the browser, Mozilla fears that criminals will exploit the end of support to attack Firefox 3.6 users on the Internet.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• So the new GIMP 2.8 release is currently in the Release Candidate stage, the final release may come any time now (wild guess: the Libre Graphics Meeting conference is taking place in a couple of weeks and it will bring together a number of its developers), previews and reviews are starting to appear, is a big deal since this release is about 1.5 years late – it was expected since December 2010 but got delayed again and again – probably it was not sexy enough for the developers, who are excited about the next release, 2.10, which is going to deliver more meaty stuff.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Programming

Leftovers

Finance

• A telling taboo in elite circles is the issue of corruption. At INET last year, after a panel discussion on the financial crisis, Jamie Galbraith said he was astonished that there was not a single mention of fraud. His observation was met with a resounding silence.

• The answer is a ‘cold’ inflation, marked by a steady loss of purchasing power that has progressed through Western economies, not merely over the past few years but over the past decade. Moreover, perhaps it’s also the case that complacency in the face of empirical data (heavily-manipulated, many would argue), support has grown up around ongoing “benign” inflation.

• If so, Western economies face an unpriced risk now, not from spiraling deflation, nor hyperinflation, but rather from the breakout of a (merely) strong inflation.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The two companies “owning” the drugs, however, are refusing to enter serious negotiations. Instead, they seem to be guarding their current patent monopolies and the profits generated thereby, while offering the public pablum justifications for not getting on with a deal that seems obvious and hugely in the public interest.

Copyrights

ACTA

• A leaked G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and USA) document gives the strongest indication yet that the leading countries behind ACTA are working on the basis that the Agreement is now in serious trouble and needs to be fundamentally re-thought and re-worked – and in its current form even abandoned.

• The leaked document, apparently prepared in the context of law enforcement working groups, appears to consciously address some of the criticisms that have been made of ACTA. In particular, the document avoids repeating the most obvious failure in ACTA – seeking to propose a “one size fits all” solution for every IPR issue from counterfeiting to unauthorised copying of digital goods. Instead, it narrows its focus wholly to counterfeit goods and medicines.

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