● 06.03.12

● Links 3/6/2012: Linux Advocacy and More

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux is distributed using the Free Software Foundation’s copy left stipulations that mean any modified version that is redistributed must in turn be freely available. The below mentioned features gives Linux a winning edge once compared to most Operating Systems.

Desktop

• When it comes to laptops that solely ship Ubuntu as an operating system one of the most well known names is System76.

• During the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA a few weeks back I had an opportunity to chat over lunch with System76 CEO, Carl Richell about the exciting products they are working on at their Headquarters in Colorado.

• Lightweight Linux distributions have grown in popularity in recent years, but few have been as buoyant as Google’s Chrome OS. When it debuted a year ago on Samsung and Acer Chromebooks, the web-centric operating system was basically a Chrome browser and a media player linked to cloud services. The open source platform has evolved over the last year, however, and on May 29 Google unveiled a more robust version 19 on Samsung’s new Chromebook Series 5 550 laptop and Chromebox Series 3 net-top.

• Google (GOOG) will try to win more converts to a computer operating system revolving around its popular Chrome Web browser with a new wave of lightweight laptops built by Samsung Electronics.

• Userful Corp. says as Web-based applications grow, open-source virtualization will provide big cost benefits. But a Gartner analyst says the “history and legacy” of Windows is still too powerful for widespread Linux adoption

• We looked at the Laptop 15″ — which is, in fact, a 15.6in. Toshiba Satellite C660D-14C running a customised Debian-based Linux distribution and including a simplified keyboard overlay that provides one-button access to applications and a range of common functions. The idea is to appeal to people — particularly the over-50s — who have so far resisted computers and the internet. The Laptop 15″ costs £599 (inc. VAT), while its 17in. sibling costs £899 (inc. VAT).

Server

• Dell intends to create a complete ARM server ecosystem running on Ubuntu or Fedora Linux, and has already shipped its first “Copper” servers to select customers and partners; the servers are, however, not yet generally available. Dell is running its own cluster that developers and customers can access remotely. Dell is also planning to offer products such as Crowbar for ARM and Crowbar for Hadoop on ARM, to help customers set up cloud environments – Crowbar is Dell’s open source management infrastructure software.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Supreet Pal Singh has provided an in-depth overview of his X.Org EVoC project for providing a Fermi scripting engine for the Nouveau driver that will allow for safe and dynamic GPU core / video memory re-clocking on modern NVIDIA GPUs.

Applications

• A file manager is software that provides a user interface to undertake file management activities with file systems. Common operations performed on files or groups of files include create, open, rename, move, copy, delete, search/find, edit, view print, play, as well as modify file attributes, properties and file permissions. The file manager is one of those essential applications for many users which is almost impossible to function without. Linux is blessed with a good range of file managers that help to make file management a breeze.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The average paid is US$7.63 with Linux users being the most generous…

Desktop Environments

• Method – This is a very casual test (sorry no “benchmarks”), I merely booted the appropriate Live CD, opened a terminal, and reviewed the RAM use. YMMV.

• Linux Mint, the fastest-growing Linux distribution (outpacing Ubuntu in DistroWatch.com page hit rating) is launching its own hardware! The free operating system known for its stability, security, and ease of use, is teaming up with Compulab maker of fanless mini PC for the mintBox.

• David Chisnall of the FreeBSD project is working on updating their advocacy material regarding this leading *BSD operating system. As such, he asked on the mailing list Why Are You Using FreeBSD?

GNOME Desktop

• I mean, we all know GNOME 3 and its Shell have some rough edges. Given that computers users since the stone-age have been adverse to change, it’s not surprising that people complained about GNOME 3.x being different than GNOME 2.x (actually, more to the point, being different than Windows 95. How dare they?). Even though we believe in what we’re doing, we’re up against it for having shipped a desktop that imposes workflow and user experience changes on the aforementioned change-adverse hypothetical user.

• As we’ve stated two months ago, in article about the upcoming features of GNOME 3.6, the GNOME developers will implement support for Microsoft’s cloud service, SkyDrive, in the Documents application.

Distributions

New Releases

• Michael Prokop proudly announced last evening, May 29th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of the grml 2012.05 Debian-based operating system.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• My name is Charles-H. Schulz, you may know me from other Free & Open Source Software projects, and I will be assisting Mandriva and its community in defining our future and how best we will serve the interests of the community, of software freedom, and of Mandriva SA. I am humbled by this task and the trust that has been bestowed upon me. After all, my first job was at MandrakeSoft years ago, before the company became Mandriva. I look forward working with all of you and I’m open to constructive suggestions and ideas. You can contact me at cschulz AT mandriva DOT com and follow my other (personal) blog here.

Red Hat Family

• If you are tired of waiting for Red Hat to do an official port of its Enterprise Linux commercial distribution to the ARM architecture, well then Red Sleeve Linux has just what you are looking for.

• The Fedora Project, which develops one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions, serves essentially as a sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But that hasn’t stopped the Fedora team from pushing out a variety of new features in the latest release, Fedora 17, that should appeal more broadly than to Red Hat’s customer base alone. Here’s a look at the most important.

• Enterprise Linux leader Red Hat is changing its support pricing model in a way that opens the door to rival operating systems — at least in the cloud service provider market — and perhaps more broadly. One large cloud provider said the move will more than double his costs, making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) option as pricey as Windows.

Fedora

• The Fedora Project, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, released a new edition of its free, open-source operating system Tuesday, offering a range of new virtualization capabilities, performance enhancements and new development tools.

• The new release, Fedora 17, also provides new desktop features via a new release of the Gnome desktop environment and graphical user interface.

• It’s possible to optimize the Fedora 17 boot process to boot the system in less than three seconds. One developer went from a boot time of 15 seconds down to just 2.5 seconds.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A launcher thats a fusion of the Ubuntu dash, the Gnome-shell overview and the classic Gnome 2 menu which replaces the overview.

Flavours and Variants

• Introduced by Softpedia at the beginning of the year, the Ubuntu Secure Remix operating system has just reached version 12.04 and it is available for download on mirrors worldwide.

• The Bodhi development team has published the first pre-release build of Bodhi Linux 2.0, the project’s next major update. According to project lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of the new version “is not to introduce ground breaking new features”, but rather to “allow our distro to transition to the next major Ubuntu LTS as a distro base”. As such, Bodhi Linux 2.0 is built upon Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, incorporating changes and new features from that release; the 1.x branch of Bodhi is derived from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• MontaVista has announced the arrival of a new release of its Automotive Technology Platform (ATP). Version 2.0 of ATP is compliant with the new GENIVI Specification 2.0 from the GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit industry alliance founded in 2009. The GENIVI compliance standards are designed to provide an open reference platform for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.

• Last time I wrote about the BeagleBone, a simple and inexpensive ARM Cortex-A8 development board that can run (among other things) Linux. Being Linux based, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things you would when you are programming close to the “bare metal.” For example, Ethernet, serial ports, USB, and the like just work, which is really very productive.

• On the other hand, some devices aren’t part of a normal desktop Linux OS. Luckily, the Angstrom distribution I mentioned last time even has drivers for these special devices (actually, the standard gpio-sysfs drivers). For example, consider general-purpose I/O ports. The BeagleBone can support up to 66 3.3V input/output pins. The board has 4 pins (GPIO1_21 to GPIO1_24) connected to LEDs. Well, connected to transistors that turn on LEDs. If you output a high, the LED turns on.

• The incredibly inexpensive credit-card-size Raspberry Pi harks back to a simpler time, when programmers intimately built gadgets from the ground up.

Phones

• Chinese web tat flogger Alibaba finally has some good news to report after sales of smartphones based on its Aliyun OS hit the million sales milestone in the People’s Republic less than a year after its launch.

Android

• A rumored 7-inch tablet branded by Google has been outed by a RightWare benchmark test and it appears the device includes a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and runs Android 4.1, according to some deep reporting by Android Police.

• Cortex-A15 chip (a source of ours said it will be multi-core) and up to 64GB of internal storage, as well as a “Miflavor UI” — something that we’ve already previewed on the Era at MWC — to go on top of Android 4.0. Lu also hinted that there will be several color options, but we’re more than happy to nab that black kevlar edition in the above shot (and someone should tell Motorola to take a look at this). Two more pictures after the break to keep you busy for the time being.

• It appears that the smartphone race is really heating up. Different operating system (OS) such as Windows Phone 7, Linux, Blackberry OS, Symbian, iOS and Android platforms are all competing to get the consumers loyalty and to get the top spot in the mobile OS race overall. But like any competition, there could only be one winner.

• This media device that fits right into one’s palm looks like a plastic box with an antenna protruding from its body to receive wireless signals. It has measurements of 2.8″ x 2.4″ x 0.5″ and a weight of merely 1.8 oz.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• Content and data is everything right? But device usage at the enterprise level necessitates real-time integration, or that data becomes less valuable and potentially even worthless if it exists in some standalone silo.

Events

Web Browsers

• There’s been a relatively large announcement made by Hillcrest Labs tonight in that they’ve turned their own “Kylo Web Browser for TV” over to the Open Source community. This announcement sets the Mozilla-based TV browser up for open-sourced management for its many features, features such as its ability to work with Mac OS and Windows machines and its ability to work with Freespace-enabled in-air pointing controls.

Mozilla

• Mozilla uploaded earlier today, June 2nd, the final packages containing the Mozilla Firefox 13.0 web browser for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

SaaS

• Open-source source platforms for big data have exploded in popularity. And in the past few months, it seems like nearly everyone is feeling the fallout.

• You might think the hard work for Hewlett-Packard is done, after it came from behind to build its own Amazon-style cloud so quickly. But the difficult part – taking on Amazon and winning with open source – lies ahead.

CMS

• François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and kiwi content management system SilverStripe.

Education

• NetSpot is pleased to announce that they will be partnering with the University of Wollongong to provide enterprise-level hosting and services of open source e-Learning systems: Moodle and Mahara.

Business

BSD

• After a few days ago sharing a list of why you should use FreeBSD as said by FreeBSD developers and community members who use the BSD operating system, here’s a list of reasons for why not to use FreeBSD or missing functionality.

Project Releases

• Piwik is a free software/open source Web analytics software developed in much the same manner as most open source applications – global collaboration of talented coders doing what they love.

• It is an alternative to Google Analytics and from my experience, better in many respects. If you manage websites and want to have complete control over traffic monitoring, Piwik is what you want to use. The latest version, released just today June 1 2012, is Piwik 1.8, and it comes with its share of new and improved features and bug fixes.

• The Gluster open source distributed filesystem is out with version 3.3 after a long development cycle. Gluster 3.3 unifies file and object storage and provide a Hadoop HDFS compatible API for Big Data Storage.

Public Services/Government

• The European Parliament’s Directorate General for Innovation and Technological Support is to produce report on the EP’s free and open source software programmes. MEP Bart Staes (Group of the Green and European Free Alliance) on 10 May added this as a requirement for the discharge of the EP’s 2010 budget committee.

• The government of the Navarra region in Spain is making available its ‘Justice Management’, a document management system (DMS) tailored to judicial documents. The system is already used in courts in Navarra and Cantabria. Galicia and La Rioja, two more autonomous regions in Spain, are considering to use the DMS.

• The national council of Switzerland on 3 May adopted a resolution signalling that electronic governmental services must work on all kinds of computing platforms and should not depend on a single IT vendor. The parliament voted in favour of a motion for improving a software application ‘Agate’, which must be used by the country’s cattle farmers for filing livestock data.

• Patient List, a software application making it easier for doctors to hand over patients, has won the NHS Hack Day 2012 which took place in London last weekend. The application is made available as open source.

• Public administrations in Italy’s Lazio region are encouraged to replace proprietary software with open source alternatives, according to one of the articles of a law on open data adopted on 23 May. The law also says that software developed for and by the regions public organisations should be made available as open source.

• Portugal’s Agency for the Public Services Reform (AMA) is revamping the country’s main eGovernment portals for citizens and businesses. It will use the open source portal software Liferay.

• The UK government appears to be taking positive (possibly even ‘assertive’) steps towards more implementation of open source technologies at this time. The Open Government Summit today will be held on 30th May in Central Hall Westminster and speakers have just been announced.

• While the UK public sector is arguably far better at organising “congressional summits” than it is at decisive implementation and action, there will reportedly be examination and analysis into how the open source model allows public sector organisations to be more efficient, save money, meet mission-critical IT demands and improve their services.

Licensing

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) — a nonprofit project hosting the Samba and BusyBox projects — has announced a new initiative to engage in enforcement of the Gnu General Public License and related free software licenses. The move arises following a controversy earlier in the year when it seemed that a former developer of BusyBox — a command-line interface used in embedded devices — was working on ToyBox, a non-GPL-licensed clone of the project. This concerned GPL enforcement activists because BusyBox is a popular entry point to wider GPL enforcement by the SFC on embedded devices.

Openness/Sharing

• With UDL Book Builder, children can freely create, share, publish, and read digital books. They can express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings in words, pictures, and sound. They can create their own interactive digital stories. This gives children the chance to become an author, to have a voice, to make learning relevant to their experience and their personal lives. They can control the content and the message. Printed materials may still exist and be used in classrooms today, but we’re in a transitional world where print is in flux and digital learning is paramount for young children.

• The Polish Ambassador, a “beat machine from the future,” raised a number of interesting questions on Facebook about “what it would mean to be an ‘open source’ musician.” Discussion ensued. Mike Masnick pointed to this discussion on TechDirt. More discussion ensued.

Open Data

• Using open source software to build open data application is pragmatic and logical, says Pieter Colpaert, board member of the newly founded Belgian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF is assisting the government of the Belgian region of Flanders in organising a open data hackaton, in Brussels on the 15 of June.

Open Hardware

Standards/Consortia

• During a round-table meeting in Brussels, the Coordination Group of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme has endorsed four open specifications for e-Government interoperability.

Leftovers

Finance

• The folks on Wall Street are busily dry-washing the hands in glee at the thought of a massive wave of European bank collapses.

Privacy

• The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.

Copyrights

• The coalition of authors suing to stop Google Book Search scored a key victory on Thursday as the judge overseeing the case ruled that three individual authors and the Author’s Guild could represent the class of all authors whose works had been scanned by Google. Google had sought the opposite result, arguing that including all authors in a single lawsuit would make the case too complex, and that most authors actually supported the scanning project.

• Judge Denny Chin, who rejected a controversial settlement of the case last year, ruled on two distinct legal issues. The first was over whether the Author’s Guild was entitled to serve as a representative of its members. Google had argued that only individual authors could be plaintiffs because the case will require the participation of those individual plaintiffs to consider issues such as fair use.

• Mr. Dotcom, founder of the online storage site Megaupload.com, was arrested in New Zealand in January on charges including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit racketeering. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down Mr. Dotcom’s website, which it claims was used to pirate half a billion dollars worth of entertainment content.

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