● 05.30.12

● Links 30/5/2012: Red Hat Releases Fedora 17; GPL Compliance Advanced

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

• Kumaran wants to make Linux more popular for desktops as an operating system, and is creating his own distribution system to make it happen. “Linux is faster, virus-free, free of cost, has free updates and never crashes. It is used in laptops using distribution systems like Ubuntu. I’m creating my version of Ubuntu called ‘Freaks 2012′,” he says. Kumaran, a national talent search examination scholar from class 8, began missing school often from the class of six, because of a weak knee. Just as he finished his class 10, he realised that he could not eat anything. “I would throw up, suffer bad stomach aches and not be hungry.

Desktop

• Across the district, computers used to account for nearly 20% of all electricity use. But since they’ve pioneered a new approach to offering computers in classrooms, they’ve cut computer energy use by more than 75%, avoiding costs in excess of 100,000 per year on electricity.

• Google has upgraded the Samsung family of Chromebooks with more powerful hardware and redesigned UI. Android maker has also introduced a new class of ChromeOS-powered device called Chromebox.

Server

• If people didn’t want ARM-based servers, Dell wouldn’t build them, and so with the launch of the “Copper” ARM server sled for the “Viking” C5000 microserver chassis we know that people want ARM servers. And this is not some experiment that Dell is doing, either, Steve Cumings, executive director of marketing for Dell’s Data Center Solutions bespoke server unit, tells El Reg.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Distributions

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

• There’s a Southern expression that goes, “Says easy, does hard.” In this case, it’s easy to say that your company is focused on collaboration and ideas. But many executives conflate the terms “collaboration” and “consensus.” Seeking consensus and creating a democracy of ideas is not what we at Red Hat would call collaboration. In fact, it’s a misstep. Rather, managers at Red Hat make it a practice to seek out ideas from those who’ve shown that they typically have the best ideas — those who have risen to the top of our meritocracy.

Fedora

• The Fedora Project officially served up their “Beefy Miracle” today. The announcement, chock full of hot dog references, introduced the new release, “At the heat of a thousand hot dog cookers, the seventeenth release of Fedora shall be forged by contributors the world over, and it will be known as: Beefy Miracle. The mustard shall indicate progress.”

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the release of an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) image of Ubuntu Server for ARM architecture. The image was originally designed for internal testing and has now been made publicly available for developers who want to experiment with software running under Ubuntu on ARM servers. It enables users to quickly set up a completely configured instance of Ubuntu ARM Server in Amazon’s cloud.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• It appears the reports of webOS’ death are once more exaggerated. True, several key members of the Enyo development team have joined Google, but the project is evidently still alive and well. Another release of Enyo is on the way, and the core of Enyo 2 is “solid,” HP insists.

Android

• …powered by what appears to be Ice Cream Sandwich.

• Designed for “smart devices,” the new panel will feature a 440ppi pixel density, beating out the 330ppi Retina display found on Apple’s iPhone.

Free Software/Open Source

• Microsoft has already ruffled more than a few feathers with the exclusionary potential of its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, and this past week the open source community has been up in arms again.

Databases

CMS

• The open source WordPress blogging platform turned Nine years old on Sunday (first WordPress release was May 27, 2003). It’s hard to believe that it has been that long isn’t it? (I’ve been a user for the last 8).

• WordPress started out as a ‘simple’ blogging platform that valued the user interface and ease-of-use over fancy knobs and deep features.

• The focus on usability and adherence to standards has been the hallmark of WordPress in every release since. It’s a focus that has propelled WordPress to become one of the most widely used open source projects on the web today, powered over 10 percent of all websites.

Education

• I don’t think it’s enough just to teach children how an e-mail client works without also explaining what’s happening behind the screen. I don’t think it’s enough just to show children how to assign variables or manipulate lists without providing some way for them to think about these rather than just using them. It’s just this sort of understanding which we’ve come to label as computational thinking: there’s a strong case for this providing a unique way of looking at the world, with wide applications across (and beyond) the curriculum:

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• Version 2.7 of Apache JMeter has arrived, adding new system sampling for operating system processes, improved JMS, WebService and Test samplers, and improved graphs and reports. JMeter is a desktop application designed to load test applications and measure performance; it can test web, SOAP, JDBC, LDAP, JMS, Mail or native commands using its multi-threaded framework to concurrently sample many different operations.

Licensing

• GPL enforcement within the free software community has just stepped up its game.

• Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced a coordinated effort among several of its member projects to ensure compliance with their Free Software licenses.

• The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that it is heading up a “unified effort” among a number of its member projects to ensure compliance with the free software licences they are distributed under. The conservancy is also launching the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, which will see Linux kernel contributors request that the Conservancy pursue GPL violators over the Linux kernel.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Programming

• Apparently, in Python, it is easier to ask for forgiveness rather than seek permission. That is to say, the normal approach when writing Python code is to assume that what you are trying to do will work properly. If something exceptional happens and the code doesn’t work the way you were hoping, then the Python interpreter will tell you of the error so that you can handle that exceptional circumstance. This general approach, of trying to do something, then cleaning up if something goes wrong is acronymically called EAFP (“easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Leftovers

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Since the uprising in Syria began last year, Syrian citizen journalists have risked their lives to fill a media void and bring the news of the oppressive government crackdown to a global audience. This has been done often with little recognition for the activists who have laid their lives on the line to report on the government’s assault on an unarmed civilian population.

• In March 2011, the arrest of 15 students who had written anti-government slogans on walls enraged the population of Deraa and sparked the first mass protests against the Assad regime. President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, launched a series of crackdowns on protestors across the country, sending tanks into cities and opening fire on demonstrators. The violence has only escalated. This week, the country saw the deadlist attack since the protests began — at least 90 people were killed in the town of Houla. Video of rows of dead children lying in a mosque in their bloody shorts and T-shirts shocked the world. A local activist reached by Skype told the Associated Press that pro-regime fighters known as shabiha stormed the village, raiding homes and shooting civilians. The United Nations estimates that the conflict has left more than 9,000 dead and thousands more displaced.

Finance

• The worst corruption in the world is on Wall Street.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• When it comes to the issue of “net neutrality” I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.

• But I don’t like to intervene in competitive markets unless I am sure this is the only way to help either consumers or companies. Preferably both. In particular because a badly designed remedy may be worse than the disease – producing unforeseen harmful effects long into the future. So I wanted better data before acting on net neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• La Quadrature has sent letters to three key committees of the EU Parliament urging them to work toward the rejection of the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, along with its voting recommendations.

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