● 05.29.12

● Links 29/5/2012: Fedora 17 is Coming, Linux Mint 13 Reviews

Posted in News Roundup at 6:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• ZPODD is short for Zero-Power Optical Disk Drive and is one of the features of the Serial ATA 3.1 specification. What this ZPODD technology allows for is to zero-out the power consumption of an idle SATA ODD to further the power-savings benefits. If the SATA device is completely idle, there’s no need to feed it anything.

• Cadillac’s latest model, the 2013 XTS sedan is all set to go on sale from June, marking the company’s first new launch in three years. This latest product from General Motors highlights CUE (Cadillac User Experience), a Linux powered radio and navigation interface designed for infotainment purposes of Cadillac owners. Early reviews suggest the touch inputs to lag slightly, though the voice input feature appears to be top notch, well in contention with the performance standards of BMW’s iDrive and Ford’s Sync.

Desktop

• I love buying gadgets, and I’m not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I’ve ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.

• I wouldn’t want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there’s one I respect above all others, and it’s an old piece of junk.

• My name is Lee Hachadoorian. I am a geographer who recently completed a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. My focus is on using geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial tools for urban analysis. My dissertation was on the relationship between metropolitan fragmentation and spatial inequality/segregation. I currently teach GIS at NYU-Poly and work as a Research Assistant at CUNY Center for Urban Research. I’m a backpacker, yogi, and gamer. I use games in my teaching. Last week I had my students do a treasure hunt in downtown Brooklyn and import their GPS tracks into a GIS software.

Server

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• As the latest Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics benchmarks to publish, here is a comparison of some of the different desktop environment options of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using the Intel Linux graphics driver on the Core i7 3770K with its HD 4000 graphics. The desktop environments being compared include Unity, Unity 2D, KDE, and Xfce. The default Ubuntu Unity desktop with Compiz continues to have problems for the open-source friendly company’s drivers.

Applications

• Sound is one of those portions of the Linux operating system that is often unappreciated and not even given a second thought. When examined from a technical perspective, the sound frameworks and architectures used within Linux are quite fascinating.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• PlayOnLinux 4.1 was officially announced a few days ago, bringing support for Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system.

Games

• From May 24th to June 1st, World of Goo creator Ron Carmel is arranging a sale of 383 indie games by roughly 180 developers in an enormous event titled Because We May.

• The event’s website allows you to view all the offered games and link to their purchase pages. Games are available on Steam, Google Play, App Store, Desura, Indievania and even directly from the developers.

• For those curious what OpenGL gaming frame-rates are like if trying to run LLVMpipe on the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, here are some numbers.

• Wolfire Games has been working on a native Linux port of their forthcoming “Overgrowth” game. This title that’s much anticipated by many Linux gamers now finally has the Linux support available with its new 180 build.

Desktop Environments

• This time we will look at the Xfce 4 dictionary which is naturally included with the Xfce 4 desktop. Use this tool to find detailed information about any words you specify.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In KDE, there are quite a few apps out there to manage your personal photo library with. The prominent ones that come to mind are DigiKam and Qwenview. While both of these applications are fantastic and highly regarded, they miss one huge mark. The average user. DigiKam literally sets the bar as far as Linux editing, collection and workflow is concerned. Qwenview excels at being a general purpose image viewer. Neither of these 2 applications focus singularly on the task of collecting personal photos in an easy and straight-forward way.

Distributions

New Releases

• Robert Shingledecker announced last evening, May 24th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.3 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.

• Here’s a quick note to mention that I’ve posted a couple new Installation DVDs for Dream Studio 12.04.

• At LinuxTag 2012, currently taking place in Berlin, the Kanotix development team announced the release of an update to the Hellfire branch and a preview of the Dragonfire branch of its live Linux system. Kanotix appeared in 2003 as a Knoppix derivative and evolved into its own distribution, based on Debian. Designed for use as a general purpose Live CD/USB Linux system and able to boot on a wide range of hardware and with a full range of applications, Kanotix also happily installs onto hard disks to provide a permanently resident operating system.

• François Dupoux proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 26th, the first point release of his popular SystemRescueCd 2.7 Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia 2, the second edition of the Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux, was released just two days ago. Made available for download, were Live CD installation images for KDE and GNOME 3, and other ISO installation media that allows you to install desktop environments and window managers other than KDE and GNOME 3.

• It has taken a few days to get both of these distributions loaded on everything I have around here, but I finally have it done, and I can write up a quick summary of the results. The news is almost all good, with just a couple of minor exceptions.

• Samsung N150 Plus, Acer Aspire One 522, Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 – On all of these, both Mint 13 and Mageia 2 installed with absolutely no problems, and run flawlessly. All of the hardware is recognized and supported, displays come up at the correct resolution, wired and wireless networking, Bluetooth, Fn-keys, suspend/resume, power management, screen brightness, it all works.

• HP Pavilion dm1-3105ez. The accursed Synaptic “ClickPad” system. Well, Mint 13 at least handles it the same way that Ubuntu 12.04 does, meaning that a two-finger tap produces a right-click, but drag-and-drop and scrolling are still difficult to impossible. Mageia 2 doesn’t handle the ClickPad well at all, it has all the typical problems with right-click, drag-and-drop and scrolling.

Red Hat Family

• As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how traditional enterprises do business, forcing them to gravitate to information to compete. Red Hat’s role in this tectonic shift? Arms dealer.

Fedora

• Fedora 17 will be shipping next week. It’s got a bunch of new features, none of which I contributed to in the slightest. What I did work on was improving our support for installation on x86 Apple hardware. There’s still a few shortcomings in this so it’s not an announced or supported feature, but it’s sufficient progress that it’s worth writing about.

• The Fedora ARM team, through Paul Whalen, announced earlier today, May 24th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Fedora ARM 17 edition is now available for download.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Google recently announced its Google Drive which is clearly positioned as a competitor to iCloud, SkyDrive or alternative to services like Dropbox or semi-open source Spider-Oak. A lot of Linux users are upset as there is no client for Linux at the moment. The good news is Google Drive will be coming to Linux soon. That doesn’t mean that Linux users were cloud deprived. Almost every cloud solution has its Linux client, including Dropbox and Spider-Oak, and excluding Ubuntu One. Then we have ownCloud for those who want complete control over their cloud. That makes one wonder what future holds for Ubuntu One, Canonical’s personal cloud offering?

• Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, rolled out last month. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated software and new features, including the highly-anticipated Heads-Up Display (HUD) interface. The HUD is one of several excellent improvements that have helped to make Ubuntu’s Unity desktop shell even better in Ubuntu 12.04

• Whenever there has been new transition, people have resisted to adapt to changes. Same has happened for gnome 3 based desktops. Specially from people who used to use gnome 2 as their primary desktop environment. Change for just the shake of change is not the best solution in most cases. However changes with desktops is something that can make or break the deal.

• Canonical, through Victor Tuson Palau, announced a few days ago that they’ve published an AMI image in Amazon Web Services, providing an ARMhf (hard-float) Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system running on an emulated hardware system.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• In June of 2010, Cisco announced their entry into the tablet market with the open source Android powered Cius. As is the case with all Cisco announcements, there were bold predictions about how it would change the market yadda, yadda yadda.

• Some people think the Android/Linux phenomenon on ARMed CPUs is all about mobility. Mobility is a good fit. Availability of apps is great. The real story, the one we will tell our grandchildren about is ARM taking over on desktop and server. While touch is advantageous for small gadgets and ARM is great for battery-powered equipment, both of these are useful on systems with monitor, keyboard and mouse (or other pointer) and network/storage servers. Because Linux is unerneath, nothing prevents monitors, keyboard and mice from being added to ARM systems except connectors. “Desktop” units are large enough to hold connectors. The ARM CPUs of today are sufficiently powerful for many tasks done by desktop-users and servers.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s no secret that open source software is playing an increasingly prominent role in businesses around the globe, but a recent survey has uncovered a few surprising findings about adopters’ motivations for choosing it.

• According to a report by the 451 Group, many companies are now identifying freedom from vendor lock-in as an important reason for switching to open source software. In a recent survey by the group, 60% of respondents said that the top factor that made open source software “attractive” was the absence of the dependency on one particular vendor. The second most quoted factor was lower acquisition and maintenance costs (51%) followed by better code quality (43%) and the ability to look at the source code (42%).

• As all geeks know, today is the 35th anniversary of the release of Star Wars (and it’s also Towel Day too). What you may not have known is that today also marks the release of Apache Wookie 0.10.0.

• The Open Source Software Institute, a non-profit group that supports open-source adoption and the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization in charge of all out of country eavesdropping, will co-host an Open Source Software Industry Day on Wednesday, May 30, 2012. The unclassified, one-day event will be held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Conference Center near Fort Meade, MD, which is where the NSA is based. Alas, pre-registration is already over.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash.

• Next up was Android. In just four years, Android exploited consumers’ desire to poke and stroke their phones to become the world’s most popular smartphone OS – burying the iPhone – with 59 per cent of the market.

• Android had a plus: freedom of choice for both coder and consumer thanks to an open-source code base.

BSD

• BSD systems are the technological neighbors many of us meet daily, but few know much about. Martin Husemann of NetBSD explains, analyses, compares and refers to everything there is to know about BSD and NetBSD. Meet this fantastic operating system through another Monday’s interview on Unixmen.

Project Releases

• I have big news for all the people whose lives involve video editing. Today, literaly in few hours, LightWorks will be released, which is an Open Source professional non-linear video editor.

Public Services/Government

• The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.

Openness/Sharing

• Scholarly publishing in the English-speaking world has been in turmoil since the reduction in higher education funding in the 1970s affected university presses and libraries. Scholarly publishing is not about money, at least not directly, but about personal reputation, research dissemination, impact and the advancement of knowledge. Open publishing accounts for a relatively small proportion of scholarly publishing, though its impact is growing and affecting the commercial publishing models. Agata Mrva-Montoya

Leftovers

• Even better is the fact that the company got few complaints — meaning that IE support isn’t a big deal anymore.

• This is fantastic news for Linux users (who can’t run IE) and good news overall that the hegemony of IE is now a thing of the past. Reality of course is that today, desktop users run multiple browsers and developers go mobile first (WebKit/iOS/Android) first in many instances.

• It’s also interesting to see how much more it costs to build an IE website. It’s shocking that it could cost $100,000 more isn’t it?

Security

• Cambridge University researchers find that a microprocessor used by the US military but made in China contains secret remote access capability

Copyrights

• Some Microsoft Advocates often refer to Linux/FOSS users with the derogatory term “freetard” and even if we look past at the apparent double standards Bing employs in comparison with requests made of Google and we ignore the millions of Windows users using the uTorrent client and downloading copyrighted material, we need only look to Microsoft themselves and a very interesting article by torrent freak, who, after researching a few Microsoft IP addresses, find that records show, their machines have been very busy downloading copyrighted material for free too. Hypocricy? Would we expect anything less from a company that employs a man someone like Steve Ballmer?

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