● 05.21.12

● Links 21/5/2012: Linux 3.4 Released, Dream Studio 12.04

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

• Leonard Tsai (shown), a key executive at Taiwan ODM Compal Electronics, is trying to navigate the unknown waters between today’s Wintel PCs and tomorrow’s ARM/Linux tablets.

Desktop

• We have hardware manufacturers and OEMs willing to crank out supported systems. The last barrier to adoption are retail chains catering to the Wintel monopoly. Read all about it in a thoroughly researched report by The Association of Open Source Software Companies of Portugal.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• After another seven Release Candidates, Linus Torvalds proudly announced a few hours ago, May 20th, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.4.

• Just two months back, we got the news of Linux 3.3 Release that had Android support included. And now, Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 3.4. Apart from the new drivers and fixes, among the major features in the 3.4 release, we have several Btrfs updates. It includes support for more than 4KB metadata blocks with better performance. A new X32 ABI ((Application Binary Interface) allows us to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers. The GPU drivers have been updated as well. It supports early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 ‘Kepler’, AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and also support of Intel Medfield graphics.

• The new version sees a number of important changes affecting graphics drivers. The x32-ABI promises the advantages of x86-64-CPUs without the overhead of 64-bit code. Btrfs is reported to be quicker, and Yama prevents processes from accessing each other’s allocated memory.

Graphics Stack

• ARM has published a new open-source X.Org DDX Linux graphics driver while working to enable support for their next-generation ARM Mali T6xx graphics core.

Applications

• Version 2.52 of Transmission, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, is now available for download.

• Shell prompt fans! here’s a microblogging client for Twitter and identi.ca you can use through the command line interface. Twidge allows you to view the recent tweets, add a new tweet, view messages, replies, retweets by those you follow and many other features.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Indie game studio SkyGoblin has released a new point and click adventure game The Journey Down: Chapter One. The game is a commercial remake of their free adventure game with same title but it comes with new content, fully voiced cast and HD art and animations.

Desktop Environments

• EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply said, desktop that doesn’t get on your way.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week we heard about the death of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. People within the KDE Community were shocked and upset by this tragedy.

• Claire was a vibrant person with strong ideals. She will be remembered for pursuing these ideals, and as a good friend and colleague. She also thought a lot about how KDE as an open source community could find connections to the real business world. Her energy, fresh look at things, positive mindset and intense commitment inspired many people. So did her dancing.

Distributions

• In the world of Linux there’s plenty of choices to choose from, whether it be distribution or desktop environments (KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 3, XFCE) but then there are those who would like a new distro with an older desktop environment.

• SolusOS is a Debian “Stable” based distribution that uses GNOME 2 as its desktop environment. Currently SolusOS is only available in 32 bit but will see a 64 bit release in the near future. SolusOS is also an installable Live distribution.

• Installation of the distribution was quite straight forward and feels like an Ubuntu based distribution being installed. There were very standard options to choose from when installing your distribution from keyboard language, to setting up your first user account.

• Last year Mandriva partnered with Moscow based ROSA Labs to create a new look for their once popular and user friendly distribution. The result was the attractive but seriously flawed Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen release and a rebranded version called ROSA Desktop 2011. Since then ROSA Labs and Mandriva appear to have parted company. ROSA Labs has forked the Mandriva distribution, creating a distribution that, while still resembling Mandriva 2011 at first glance, actually has gone its own way in many important respects. The first post-Mandriva release, ROSA 2012 Marathon, was officially unveiled last Monday. This is also the first ROSA LTS (long term support) release, offering security and software updates for five years. The release notes state that ROSA 2012 Marathon is intended for enterprise and small business use and is intended to provide stability, not “bleeding edge technology.”

• The XFCE Desktop Environment has risen greatly in popularity over the past few years. Major credit for it goes to the XFCE team who has been putting out releases with incremental updates and advancements but there is a misconception among many people that XFCE is bland. I encourage you to come on a voyage with me and you may discover something splendorous.

New Releases

• Lucid Imagination has announced the 2.1 release of its open source LucidWorks Enterprise product for search of both structured and unstructured data located across an organisation.

• Utilising Apache Lucene/Solr as its base, LucidWorks Enterprise 2.1 adds features such as Crawler Configuration, the ability to schedule external data source crawling and new connectors for high-speed Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Twitter and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS).

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• When the going gets though, as the saying goes, the tough gets going. That is usually a test of character. When it comes to software companies in a financial mess, that old adage can be paraphrased as: When the going gets tough, we dump our software on the (open source) community.

• It certainly was true of HP/Palm and their webOS mobile operating system. Oracle did something similar with OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice). And is that not what Sun Microsystems did with Solaris/OpenSolaris? And recently, there has been calls from some quarters for Research In Motion (RIM) to do the same with its mobile platform.

Gentoo Family

• Try a source-based Linux distribution so you can tailor it perfectly to your needs. The choices are endless…

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu’s Unity interface made a brief appearance in a popular Japanese ‘children’s’ show last weekend.

• I have become a Linux user since 2008 and my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is currently the most popular Linux distribution and when somebody is talking about Linux, very likely that he is talking about Ubuntu. I personally have a very complicated opinion toward Ubuntu, I both love it and hate it. In this article, I will enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu to justify my love and hate for it.

• I read this article today by someone called Hoo-Ann and I was very disappointed by how short the article was. I have been using Ubuntu off and on since it was Breezy Badger and I can come up with a lot more to say about the advantages and disadvantages of using Ubuntu. So, as someone that believes if someone else can’t do it “right” then you should it yourself, I’m going to list the (much longer) advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally found with using Ubuntu.

• Anyone who knows the world Linux will surely heard of Ubuntu. A distribution that has done so much for Linux and the Open Source world itself! In fact, thanks to the hard work of Canonical, Ubuntu is one of the first user-friendly distributions that have brought many people in the Linux world. Especially those most skeptical! But if Ubuntu is a distribution that has done so much in the past, now we must curb our enthusiasm. In fact, for some time now, this same distribution is becoming a lot more criticized by veterans of the Linux world.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• While the main thing that would make Raspberry Pi’s diminutive $25 / $35 Linux setups better would be if we could get our hands on them faster, the team behind it is already working on improvements like this prototype camera seen above. The add-on is slated to ship later this year and plugs into the CSI pins left exposed right in the middle of each unit. According to the accompanying blog post, the specs may be downgraded from the prototype’s 14MP sensor to keep things affordable, although there’s no word on an exact price yet. Possible applications include robotics and home automation, but until the hackers get their hands on them you’ll have to settle for one pic from the Pi’s POV after the break and a few more at the source linked below.

• Wind River has announced that it has been recognized as the continued real-time operating system (RTOS) and embedded Linux market leader by VDC Research Group in its 2012 “Embedded/Real-Time Operating Systems” report. The report covers the global market for commercially available RTOSes and non-real-time operating systems and other related bundled products and services used in embedded applications.

• It’s the hottest thing in computing, it has a price tag of around $45, and it has finally arrived in New Zealand.

• RS Components sales manager Mike Kelly brought a Raspberry Pi Model B into the Computerworld office on Friday to show us how the tiny Linux computer is assembled.

• tive comments, but to me they seem to reflect society’s move away from the concept of “tinkering” with technology. The personal computing revolution was driven by people who were curious as to what makes things tick. They were hackers in the true sense of the world, people who could see hidden potential and find ways to unleash it.

• The next few weeks I want to further explore the BeagleBoard and embedded Linux, in general. To tell the truth, I had planned to do this several months ago when I first got the BeagleBoard, but it didn’t make a very good first impression.

• I got one of the A4 version boards (the 2nd run of PC boards, apparently). There was a hardware bug on the board that prevented the Ethernet port from working most of the time. It took a while to find the answer, which was to remove a surface mount resistor. This has been fixed in subsequent releases.

• The other problem was the Linux distribution. You can load many different operating systems on the board (including Android, and some non-Linux operating systems like QNX and FreeBSD). By default, however, the board ships with a microSD card loaded with the Angstrom Linux distribution.

Phones

Android

• Over the past few months there have been no fewer than three tiny, cheap Linux PCs making headlines, and now there’s a fourth to add to the list.

• Still wishing for some more functionality on Sony’s touch-friendly watch? Well there’s good news if you’re into slider puzzles and music playing apps, as both of these have arrived open source in the SmartWatch’s latest SDK. The music extension will allow devs to start work on their own music player, already including support for Android’s generic music player.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• So, GNU/Linux on netbooks is not dead, just localized… Anticipating claims of “old stock” I looked up this message about interpreting the serial number. The first character is the last digit of the year and the second character is the hex month (1-C). So, this unit starting with “C1″ was made in 2012-01.

• ZaReason, the Linux computer builder, is launching its first tablet called ZaTab. Unlike the company’s desktop computers and laptops that feature Ubuntu Linux, the tab will be powered by Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• PuppetDB is the next-generation open source storage service for Puppet-produced data. Today, this includes catalogs and facts, and will be extended in the near future. The initial release provides a drop-in replacement for both storeconfigs and inventory service.

• We’ve designed PuppetDB to empower Puppet deployments, and built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It’s built on technologies known for their performance, and is highly parallel, making full use of available resources. It also stores all of its data asynchronously, freeing up the master to go compile more catalogs. Beyond that, we’ve devoted copious time to benchmarking and optimizing the performance.

• The centre, supported by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has so far taught 40 students basic GNU/Linux skills along with opensource tools to provide image and graphics software. “We use free software to bring home the idea of equality and freedom. Besides teaching computer skills, we also touch upon the issues of caste and gender discrimination. Also, we emphasise that free software does not mean subsidy for the poor. It’s about freedom from copyright. The focus is on freedom and equality offered by the community software as compared to corporate ware,,” says Balaji Kutty, an IT professional and board member of SFLC who also teaches at the centre.

• The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have developed a simulation tool for the electric industry to analyze geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on their systems.

• Supercomputers are powerful tools for scientists. They are also very expensive, so wasted time can mean a lot of wasted resources. But making the most efficient use of them is not the easiest proposition in the world; it’s not just a case of clicking a button to analyse a protein. However, fitting out the world of supercomputers with a user-friendly, web-based interface is the focus of an open source project based at Western Australia’s Murdoch University.

• Last year Murdoch publicly launched Yabi, a tool equipped with a web interface to make using supercomputers simpler.

• The computational physics community, as an example, may be very proficient in the intricacies of shell scripts and working with a command line, says Professor Matthew Bellgard, Director of Murdoch’s Centre for Comparative Genomics. “They’ve had a lot of experience in the past running their Fortran code using 4000 cores or 10,000 cores,” he says. However, “there are other domains where scientists don’t necessarily have that skill running command line code or porting their code from one supercomputer to another.”

• Good morning. Open source software is enjoying somewhat of a revival in business environments, although the revival is more about perception than reality. IBM‘s decision to swap out Oracle customer-account management software for similar software from SugarCRM was probably motivated at least in part by a desire to inflict some pain on rival Oracle, but also indicates an underlying confidence in the reliability, stability and scalability of open source software.

• While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.

• While there are quite a few budget and even open source logic analyser platforms for recording and evaluating digital signals, each of them usually comes with a custom interface protocol and dedicated evaluation software of varying functionality. Usually, the software only works with one analyser family made by a specific company.

• Open source software has come a long way. From the days when it was seen as a curiosity, to today’s scenario where some of the world’s biggest computer setups run atop Linux including Amazon and Google, it has been an interesting journey. According to IDC, Linux accounts for about 18-20% of the server market by revenues in any given quarter. That’s within striking distance of Unix, which had a market share of 20-22% in the second and third quarters of 2011. Of course, Windows ruled the roost with 45-50% in revenue terms.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Anytime you pay a visit to Mozilla.org, the home page of the open source Mozilla project, you’re landing on a page served by a brand new type of machine. A SeaMicro SM10000 server — a fat box about the size of an air conditioner that houses 64 Xeon processors.

SaaS

• Openness in the cloud depends on open source code, open data and open APIs, according to Marten Mickos, chief executive of infrastructure-as-a-service software provider Eucalyptus Systems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• In fact it is about the difficulty to get started at the LibreOffice project, which is a quite bad thing, because we need supporters and contributors of any kind. In the past, the decade of OpenOffice.org, one thing what we missed were the developers (I was not involved at that time, but I heard it several times and I think it is true…). Now, at the LibreOffice project we have easyhacks (At least I assume this, because of THIS Google search). Loads of things have been done about that. Now, I would really want to show you 2 month old numbers from Italo Vignoli’s blog. On March the 15th, there were ~360 people contributing to LibreOffice and ~21 at Apache OpenOffice.

Education

• Policy makers, industry and many teachers are eager that pupils should learn more about computing. This includes learning how to write computer programs, but also “computational thinking”, a transferable way of solving problems and exploring situations, which has wide applications across and beyond the curriculum. In short, as pupils learn to program computers and the principles of computer science they start to bring the unique insights of algorithms, abstraction and the like to other fields. The same is true for teachers – ideas from computing can dramatically change the way we think about our work, and one of these, agile development, is what I’d like to explore here.

• According to many A-level specifications, students are taught that software projects follow the “waterfall” methodology, starting with agreeing requirements, designing and implementing the software, testing it and then keeping things ticking over when it’s deployed to clients.

• In other words, the sort of approach that has characterised public sector IT projects like the NHS database. Hmm… This doesn’t sound that far removed from how we’ve designed curricula: a top down list of things “children should be taught”, schemes of work, implementation in the classroom, plenty of testing, and the “service pack” of INSET as and when needed.

↺ UK science minister explains move to open source

Business

• One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations.

• That may sound a bit hypocritical. But in truth it just reflects an economic reality. Many solution providers have plenty of expertise available to them. What they are often short on is funding. When faced with the choice of throwing labor at a solution versus parting with cash to acquire commercial technologies, the decision is almost always to “sweat” the labor investment.

• Opsview has around 19,900 customers using its free open source offering and a further 100 customers paying for all the bells and whistles as well as a support package in the shape of the Enterprise version.

• Imagine what “Risk Factors” a hypothetical Open Source Incorporated would put into the regulatory filings that corporations file every year. The process could well provide insight into what the communities of Open Source should be prepared for.

• First a look at the numbers: Nuxeo reported global customer growth of 40 percent adding new customers that included Electronic Arts and InterContinental Hotel Group. It was North America where Nuxeo really took off, as North America became the company’s biggest market with revenue doubling there. Meanwhile, the community also grew. Nuxeo reported that the number of downloads tripled.

Funding

• Bocoup incubates Web startups, fosters open-source community [...] Web app and open-source consulting company that also provides space and funding for startups.

Project Releases

• A new ver­sion of Lightspark has been released yes­ter­day. You can give it a try by get­ting the source code from launch­pad. Ubuntu pack­ages should be avail­able shortly from our PPA

• Apache has dished out another serving of Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database popular for handling big data. The improvements speak to a maturing NoSQL database that’s well-suited for big data deployments. This time around, Cassandra has improvements to its query language, and tuning improvements that will help companies trying to boost performance with a mixture of magnetic media and solid state drives (SSD). Its continued development helps maintain open-source dominance in the big data/NoSQL market.

Public Services/Government

• Ottawa-based open-source community group says proprietary software is wasteful and not conducive to transparency in government

• The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source.

• The government of Aragon, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, is increasing its support for open source, by making it easier for companies to get assistance to create, acquire and deploy this type of applications. It will link public administrations and other enterprises with open source specialists.

• The FDA sits some of the largest datasets in the world on drugs and other regulated products, and the agency’s recently appointed IT chief plans to push for more of those data to become available to outsiders via open source projects. During an appearance in Boston this morning, Eric Perakslis, the FDA’s chief information officer, presented part of his vision for transforming IT that supports regulation of products that comprise more than a fifth of U.S. commerce.

• French government spending on services based on open source software has reached 15% of the public administration IT budget, and continues to grow at 30% per year.

• It maybe says something about the impact of much of the vendor messaging about the Cloud that the European Union felt moved to fund the creation of a formal organisation to promote what really should be blindingly obvious – that regardless of how many sub-divisions of Cloud the vendor community try to introduce for marketing purposes, Hybrid Clouds are the obvious route for business users to follow.

Openness/Sharing

• Tube is an open-source animated film based on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the ancient poem from Mesopotamia. Its collaborative animators seek funding through Kickstarter for the film’s completion and release.

• Researchers at a US energy department lab have released an open source tool to detect malicious cyber activity within an enterprise, Government Computer News reports.

• Open source drug discovery might yield results of several scientists who are toiling to find a cure for the poor man’s diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, say experts. Where traditional drug research by profit-driven companies fail, open source holds a lot of promise of succeeding because of its multi-institutional approach as well as the possibilities of collective work. In a world where a person dies of tuberculosis every 10 minutes, open source drug discovery might provide the answer soon.

• A decade ago, the biopharma industry was nowhere near as open as it is today to joining forces with outsiders to advance research and development. And several efforts in biomedicine have made progress recently with strategies and structures that borrow heavily from the open source movement in software development, IT World reports.

• People interested in donating their own genomic data to science should check out a new standard informed consent form that will let them route some or all of their genetic information to researchers. The goal of the Portable Legal Consent is to create a shared, open-source repository of that data.

• The ability to give such gene data to science at large has been a subject of debate lately. Often a person’s medical data is used for one specific research purpose but is off limits for anything else. In this big data era where there are more tools to sort and analyse huge amounts of information, the accessibility of a big genomic data pool for many projects could be a boon to researchers looking to cure diseases or just better understand human biology.

• Western Australia’s Murdoch University has pioneered an open source project designed to build drag-and-drop style web-based user interfaces suitable for supercomputers.

• Real-time information is now a commuter’s fingertips after TransLink rolled out the latest iteration of its Next Bus mobile site.

• The new features allow people to find out exactly where their bus is (on an interactive real-time map or through text) and its estimated arrival time.

• “The difference is now people will be able to know exactly when their bus is going to be there, as opposed to the scheduled time,” said TransLink spokesperson Drew Snider. “It takes away the uncertainty of not knowing whether the bus left early or is running late. It will also show whether the bus has been cancelled for any reason.”

• The real-time tracking system, found at m.translink.ca, is modeled after similar projects in New York, Boston, Chicago and Portland.

Open Data

• I really think this is one of the shrewdest things that Microsoft is doing at the moment (along with some pretty stupid stuff like fighting true open standards in the UK.) Location is going to become one of the key areas for future applications, as our position is used to modulate the information and services we receive on our main computing devices – smartphones. By supporting OpenStreetMap in this way, Microsoft is ensuring that Google does not end up in the centre of this particular spider’s web. Call it payback for the damage inflicted by Google on Microsoft through its support for open source software.

• But Berkowitz, a web designer, saw the problem as something he could potentially hack. A new breed of technologist increasingly interested in getting government to work more efficiently and transparently, Berkowitz co-created SeeClickFix, a location-based web platform allows residents to document neighborhood concerns and suggest improvements.

Open Access/Content

• The University of Minnesota bookstore has one of the largest textbook departments in the country, with rows of shelves piled high with titles — everything from Algebra One to Nuclear Physics.

• Students can buy Shakespeare’s books for less than $10, but that’s only because the literary rights have long ago expired. The average price of the store’s books is about $50 and some titles fetch as much as $225 — another sign of the rising price of college education.

• Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question. The ‘Academic Spring’ is gathering momentum but what does this mean for the future of the peer-review system?

• It’s a major bugaboo in life sciences R&D: Biopharma researchers waste lots of time and resources doing experiments that have already been done, in part because scientists in one lab aren’t sharing results with their counterparts in another lab. Now Australian researchers argue that open source rules for clinical trials could nix the replication and stymied progress which result from keeping data from studies under wraps.

↺ Researchers call for clinical data to be open source

• The open source software movement can serve as a model for freeing up access to, and connecting up, clinical trial data

Open Hardware

• Open-source software has long since become a key part of government IT programs. One day, open-source hardware might join it in importance.

• The Open Compute Project is ready to shake up the world of data center racks. The open source hardware project today outlined plans for Open Rack, which will seek to set a new standard for rack design for hyperscale data center environments.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) is helping a Slovakian business fined for failing to use that other OS and IE for filing taxation information. It will be interesting to see whether or not the courts can order the Slovakian government to do IT the right way, with open standards for communication protocols and file formats.

• The Open Source Initiative agreed what made a standard open back in 2006 and today collaborated with the Free Software Foundation on a press statement about it.

Leftovers

• Digital media playback in Windows 8 has fallen casualty to the savage economics of the PC industry and changing tastes in consumer viewing.

• We knew Windows Media Center would be sold at extra cost in Windows 8, but Microsoft now says you won’t be able to play DVDs on Windows Media Player in Windows 8.

Hardware

• In a BYOD world, this approach is compelling. By hosting the desktop, IT owns a virtualized generic hardware environment yet can supply that environment to a variety of hardware devices-smartphones, tablets, Linux PCs and even smart TVs, which could be used more readily for high-end, off-site conferences in rented facilities or as a cheaper alternative to more expensive conference room solutions.

Health/Nutrition

• Cigarette-makers had man on the inside of key fire-safety group

Security

Finance

• The Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee’s report on the financial crisis is an important document. It is an exhaustive look at certain main aspects of the financial crisis, a report which heavily criticizes Washington Mutual, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision, the credit ratings agencies, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

• Thousands of nurses from around the world descended upon Daley Plaza, in the heart of Chicago on May 18, to demand that the richest nations in the world put an end to austerity politics and start asking the people who collapsed the global economy to do more to “heal the world.”

Censorship

• The High Court said on Monday that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media would have to block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB), following an earlier ruling in February over the role of the site in copyright infringement.

• For years, the non-profit Tor Project has offered Internet users the world’s most secure tool for dodging censorship and surveillance, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Now two of the project’s researchers aim to help users to not only bypass what they call the “filternet”–the choked, distorted and censored subset of the Internet–but to understand it and map it out, the better to eradicate its restrictions.

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