● 04.29.12

● Links 29/4/2012: Linux Steam Client, CISPA Backlash

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The community debate around Linux Australia possibly changing its name has soured this week, with some community members badmouthing a key conference associated with the peak Linux organisation.

Desktop

• The new desktop paradigm originated on the very successful Linux desktop designs of the early netbooks: the ASUS Desktop OS (developed with Xandros) introduced the current style of desktop on the ASUS Eee PC in 2007. Those sold like proverbial hotcakes. Linpus Lite on the Acer Aspire One followed after that. It was Microsoft who suddenly realized they couldn’t ignore that market. In response they began pushing the aging Windows XP instead of Linux. Microsoft also successfully used strong-arm tactics to get retailers and OEMs to drop Linux, including Android. In the meanwhile millions of netbooks with Linux and the current desktop paradigm were sold.

Server

• While Red Hat and SUSE are throwing their support behind IBM’s new Linux POWER servers, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has opted to sit this one out.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a couple of hours ago, April 27th, the immediate available for download of the fourth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.3 kernel series.

Applications

• Text editors that get out of the way and minimize complicated features can be desirable, depending on what you’re doing and how you like to work. But Advanced Easy Editor takes “bare bones” to a painful extreme. Both strains of the app are reminiscent of sitting at a terminal running Unix. Perhaps they’re just what’s needed for a certain kind of job, but without so much as a text wrap feature, their appeal is highly limited.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• It’s all over the news. Steam for Linux is real and not another cruel April Fools prank. The gamer inside me is extremely excited about this, and after re-reading Phoronix’ article a dozen times, about how Gabe Newell is now a Linux Evangelist, it makes sense. If you believe the rumors, anyway.

• Followers of Linux gaming have known that Valve had a few employees dabble in Linux before, but not make commitments or investments in it. So a CEO saying “We want to fix this.” Is a major change and improvement.

• Gameplay 1.2, a cross-platform, C++ game framework designed for learning and writing mobile and desktop games, has been released.

• Gameplay is an open source project hosted on Github and developed by Sean Paul and Steve Grenier, both graphics and game developers at Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry® smartphone and PlayBook tablet computer.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After another long “getting the details sorted” session on the phone with our manufacturing partner this morning, it looks like I’ll be able to sign the purchase order sometime next week so that the first shipments of Vivaldi tablets can be put together. Which in turn means orders will be turned on shortly thereafter.

Distributions

• When I first started this blog, I tended to write mostly about pocket-size distributions. SLAX and Puppy Linux were my first ones. And I still love them.

New Releases

• ClearOS Community 6 has arrived! A lot of time, resources and development have gone into making ClearOS the best next generation small business server and gateway. The underlying framework was redesigned to make it easy create new and innovative apps. The new Marketplace now provides a quick way to install both open source and paid apps. There’s also 64-bit support, a shiny new graphical installer, improved usability, better VM support, a modernized build system, and the migration to the latest upstream 6.x version. Whew.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• It took me literally hours to figure out which Linux distributions I would want to download and test. The choices are so varied and there are so many features each distribution offers that it was difficult just choosing. In this little article I will try to go over some of the basic features of one of my favorites, Mandriva.

Red Hat Family

• Just over four months after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2, Red Hat has made a beta of version 6.3 available. The developers have added Virt-P2V to the distribution; this is a new tool that enables physical Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to be converted into virtual images that can then be run as KVM guests under RHEL or RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation). In 6.3, it will also be possible to allocate up to 160 virtual processors to a guest system (an increase from the present limit of 64); in addition, KVM guests can now be configured with up to a maximum of 2TB of memory rather than 512GB.

• If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source, collaboration, and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day.

• I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently about the open source culture at Red Hat and he told me it is a journey, not a destination. According to Whitehurst, the tenets of open source permeate all aspects of the culture at Red Hat.

• Red Hat announced yesterday, April 24th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 operating system is ready for download and testing.

Debian Family

• A few weeks ago, when Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 4 was released, Clement Lefebvre said that a new set of ISO images including the latest update would be available “in the coming days/weeks”. Today he made good on that, with the release of LMDE 201204, with both Gnome and Xfce versions. This removes the final hurdle to my whole-heartedly recommending LMDE to anyone interested in Linux. There are a lot of good Linux distributions available, no doubt, but in my opinion this is one of the best because Clement and the rest of the development team think about their users first, all the time.

• The Debian Project produces an entirely Free operating system that empowers its users to be in control of the software running their computers. These days, more and more computing is being moved away from user computers to the so-called “cloud” – a vague term often used to refer to Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. We are concerned that, without the needed care, this trend might put in jeopardy most of the freedoms that users enjoy when running (on their computers) software that is Free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The wait is over. The final version of Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin is out. To download your copy of this popular Linux distribution head to the Ubuntu download page. If you’re already using the last version, Ubuntu 11.10 you can now upgrade automatically upgrade to 12.04 with Update Manager. If you need more help with your upgrade see the Upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 LTS page.

• LTS, you ask? That stands for long term support. This is the Ubuntu version that will be supported for five years, through April 2017. If you have a business, and you’ve been thinking about using Ubuntu on your desktops or servers, this is the version you want.

• Making money — or trying to, at least — in the Linux world became just a little bit easier recently with simplified settings for creating commercial projects in Canonical’s Launchpad software-development portal. That’s all good and well, but the news got me wondering: How many commercial projects are actually using Launchpad? With some quick-and-dirty bash scripting magic, I was able to gain an idea. Read on for the results.

• The latest version of Ubuntu brings significant improvements to the stability and speed of the Unity interface. On the server side of things, the developers have clearly concentrated on trying to make Ubuntu a serious contender in the cloud computing space.

• Ubuntu 12.04 is released on 26th April, and Canonical’s Precise Pangolin will be the biggest Ubuntu yet. Here are five reasons why…

• With today’s updates, Canonical upgraded the default web browser in its just released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system to Firefox 12.0.

• The Mozilla Firefox 12.0 web browser was officially released on April 24th, brining some interesting features, such as:

Flavours and Variants

• I tried the 64-bit version (because I also want to seriously see whether it could reside on the hard drive of my 64-bit computer full-time) using a live USB made with MultiSystem, and I did not test the installation procedure. To be honest, I would have liked to have tried the GNOME 3/Cinnamon and Xfce editions too, but I only have time for the MATE edition now. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

• When it comes to Linux distributions, it’s truly different strokes for different folks. Some folks want software that is truly free, meaning that they can do with it as they please. That’s where distros like Trisquel come in. Trisquel is based on Ubuntu, but it provides only free software. You will not find proprietary software included with it.

• Canonical announced yesterday, April 26th, that the highly anticipated Precise Pangolin upgrade of its popular Ubuntu operating system, including the Kubuntu 12.04, Xubuntu 12.04, Lubuntu 12.04 flavors and Edubuntu 12.04 LTS, is available for download.

• Edubuntu 12.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means it will be supported for five years.

• Canonical unleashed yesterday, April 26th, the highly anticipated Precise Pangolin upgrade of its popular Ubuntu operating system, including the Kubuntu 12.04, Xubuntu 12.04 and Lubuntu 12.04 flavors.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• The reasons for Nokia’s decline in recent years are well known. The company invested heavily in operating system research, and spent far more on software R&D than any of its competitors, but appeared to lack the focus and direction to make its investments pay. Nokia suffered not from a lack of imagination or innovation, but a failure to tie the ends together and bring product to market.

• The fall from grace was accentuated by the leaking, in early 2011, of the “burning platform” memo written by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, which prepared the way for the adoption of Windows Phone and the redundancies that were to follow.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• With all the recent hubbub about OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and other open source cloud computing platforms and tools, it’s no secret that the open source community will help drive cloud computing for years to come. Perhaps with that idea in mind, The Linux Foundation has just announced a brand new event: “CloudOpen, a technical conference that will bring together in a vendor-neutral environment the open source projects, products and companies that are driving cloud and big data ecosystems.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Licensing

Leftovers

Intellectual Monopolies

• The vote followed the debate on amendments, several of which were passed. Among them was an absolutely terrible change (pdf and embedded below—scroll to amendment #6) to the definition of what the government can do with shared information, put forth by Rep. Quayle. Astonishingly, it was described as limiting the government’s power, even though it in fact expands it by adding more items to the list of acceptable purposes for which shared information can be used. Even more astonishingly, it passed with a near-unanimous vote. The CISPA that was just approved by the House is much worse than the CISPA being discussed as recently as this morning.

• CISPA authors and supporters have tried everything they can to avoid another SOPA protest – except tell the truth about their bill.

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.