● 06.28.12

● Links 28/6/2012: Over a Million Android Activations Per Day, KDE 4.9 RC1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Jon “maddog” Hall wrote a beautiful essay in honor of Alan Turing that highlights the terrible, corrosive consequences of attacking people for who they are.

• “If you are homophobic, you probably want to stop reading now.” And so begins Jon “maddog” Hall’s beautiful, brilliant essay on being homosexual, and the terrible high price paid by LGBT people even today just for being who they are.

Desktop

• Two years ago, I got into a conversation with another professional about the desktop. I opined that very shortly, the desktop would be our cell phone and there would be no need to put file servers at everyone’s desk. This was partially driven by the announcement that morning, at LinuxCon, by Qualcomm, that they were going to put dual-core 1 GHz processors in their next generation cell phones. This professional pooh-poohed the idea as completely unworkable.

Kernel Space

• It has been a while since last benchmarking the ZFS file-system under Linux, but here’s some benchmarks of the well-known Solaris file-system on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and compared to EXT4 and Btrfs when using both a hard drive and solid-state drive.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Several weeks back, a fellow Martian emailed me and asked me to take a look at the latest release of Alien Arena, a free, cross-platform first person shooter, numbered 7.53. All right, why not. I always liked the game and had it reviewed a few times. So I agreed, politely declined using the existing press material and went for my own installation and screenshots, even though they might be inferior to the official collection.

• The Real Texas is an action adventure game that plays like a mashup of Zelda: Link to the Past and Ultima VI.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Since I imported my mail into kmail 4.8.3, my old Mail folders haven’t been updated. Where the heck is my mail stored?

• There’s some interesting OpenGL-related news out of the Qt development camp.

• Shared on the Qt development list this week was notes from last week’s Qt Contributors’ Summit as it pertains to their OpenGL usage.

• As for their future plans, their first note is “Desktop OpenGL 3+ support, ES 3 support.” After Qt 5.0 it looks like they will begin using OpenGL 3.0+ functionality within the tool-kit. They’re also looking towards supporting OpenGL ES 3.0, which will be the updated GL specification for mobile/embedded devices and should be ratified by the Khronos Group and publicly released this summer.

• The KDE Community is looking for a host for Akademy 2013.

• Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE Community, one of the largest in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, KDE people gather to exchange ideas for development, plan for the future, and discuss other important issues. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation.

GNOME Desktop

• I am still running Fedora 14 on some machines, and I have been holding off on upgrading to a newer version of Fedora ever since, all because this was the last version of Fedora to have Gnome 2. I’ve deployed some PCs since, with Fedora 16 and Gnome 3 and have enabled Fallback Mode for those users to retain the familiar menu system and desktop of Gnome 2. I still find Gnome 2 to have more information on the screen and less clicking to navigate around than Gnome 3. Fallback Mode has worked up to this point, but now with Fedora 17 which includes Gnome 3.4, some themes that I had used to better simulate Gnome 2 no longer work. It appears that Gnome 3 is still rapidly being developed, and things are changing from release to release.

• Gnome exists more than a decade but it seems that all great things are happening just lately. Gnome’s future feels safer than ever and promises for a competing OS outside the Linux ecosystem are rising, relying on genuinely realistic foundations.

• We posted a week ago that Gnome 3.6 will ship with an awesome configuration tool called InitialSetup that will make setting up a desktop easier and ready to use. This proposal was in whiteboard for a while, but today we have got the latest images of how it will actually look like.

Distributions

• It has been a while since I had a look at Puppy Linux (www.puppylinux.org). so I thought I’d have another go to see how much it has improved over the past few years.

New Releases

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat announced a series of integrated cloud solutions including Red Hat Hybrid Iaas, Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle and Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise Paas solutions which will be offered at one price per guest. One of the solutions will be priced at $500 per guest with cloud management included

• This week, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 conference is going on, and Red Hat is making a number of new announcements. In addition, Red Hat’s always highly quotable CEO Jim Whitehurst–a veteran of the airline industry–is out with some notable reflections on the state of open source.

• BOSTON. There are keynotes that are little more than product pitches, then there are conference keynotes that educate and inspire. Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst delivered the latter during his keynote kickoff for the Red Hat Summit here today.

• Just over a year ago, Red Hat first announced its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. After being available for free for its entire lifespan thus far, Red Hat is now revealing its plans for making money from the platform.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced strong partner support for Red Hat Storage, the company’s scale-out, open source storage software for the management of unstructured data. Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 debuts with a strong ecosystem of industry-leading partners, including Cisco, Groupware, Intel, Mainline and Synnex.

• Big Blue has teamed up with Red Hat to deliver virtualization, optimized IT infrastructure and potentially cloud services to Casio Computer Co.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• His second technology act was Linux. Shuttleworth created the Ubuntu Linux distro based on a Debian fork, and founded Canonical. The vision was a Linux for humans, not the usual bit twiddlers favoured by the Red Hats and SuSEs of this world. He was now 31.

Devices/Embedded

• I got my Raspberry Pi just a week ago (after 3 1/2 months of waiting). Downloaded the Debian image (I also tried the Arch one) threw it on a 8GB SD Card.

• So… my impressions so far. It’s small. It’s quiet. Debian boots a little slow, Arch flies. Debian comes with LXDE pre-installed (but starts in console mode by default), the absolutely essential software (file manager, web browser etc.) and a couple of programming learning apps. Speed-wise the desktop experience is nothing horrible but it is what you would expect from an ARM device. It is powerful enough to serve its purpose i.e. provide a throw-away-cheap (but invaluable) learning tool.

Phones

• If you’re old enough to remember the heyday of Palm and how many people swore by their Palm devices, you may wax nostalgic at the news that Hewlett-Packard has released the first part of WebOS Community Edition (WOCE), which is what the Palm operating system has morphed into after all this time. The open source offering is targeted at people who own HP’s TouchPad tablet. The first release of WOCE is downloadable now.

• Hewlett-Packard has released an open source version of webOS that can be used on legacy TouchPad tablets, the Open webOS project team announced on Tuesday. The “Community Edition” enables users to learn how the TouchPad works and how to modify the device.

Android

• Welcome back to Android 201, our series of posts aimed at the Android developer that already has some experience. In other words, this is not an Android 101 column focused on teaching new developers how to make an Android app it is a column focused on teaching developers more about Android.

• Google finally unveiled Android 4.1, aka Jelly Bean during OI 2012. The company also announced the much awaited Nexus 7 tablet and a new device Nexus Q. As expected all attendees got free Nexus Q, Nexus 7 and the Galaxy Nexus phone. All these devices were running Android 4.1, except for Galaxy Nexus which was still running Android 4.0.

• Literally moments into the Google I/O Day 1 keynote, a huge milestone for the Android platform has been announced. In total, 400 million Android devices have been activated, an astonishing 300 million in the last year alone. Wow.

• The new version of Android, Jelly Bean, includes numerous new features and one of them is making Google’s Chrome its new default Web browser. Chrome is also now available for Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. UPDATED 4:30 Eastern with ICS release.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Google has finally announced the much hyped Nexus Tablet. As rumored the tablet is built by ASUS and designed by Google. This 7-inch tablet also introduced the next version of Android, which is code-named Jelly Beans. The tablet is available for pre-order on Google Play Store for only $199.

• Confirming rumors and leaks that preceded its I/O event, Google has officially unveiled the Nexus 7 tablet, a seven-inch slate manufactured by Asus and running the Jelly Bean version of Android. The Nexus 7 is priced at $200, which puts it in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and well below the price of Apple’s market-leading iPad.

• Asus are about to launch an 11.6” screen notebook loaded with Ubuntu 12.04. Part of the continuance of the popular EeePC line, the 1225C uses the latest generation dual core Intel Cedar Trail mobile processor and will be available with either a 1.6 Ghz N2600 or a 1.86 Ghz N2800 cpu, 2Gb RAM and 320 Gb or 500 Gb hard drives. There will be Ethernet, Bluetooth, VGA and HDMI connectors and starting prices will be around Euro 300.

• Google I/O is nearly upon us, and all signs point to Google revealing a tablet later today. The device leaked and then over the last few hours several high-level sources confirmed the device’s existence. It’s likely a low-end, 7-inch tablet powered by Google’s latest mobile operating system, Jelly Bean.

• Say hello to the nemesis of the Kindle Fire, the Google Nexus 7. Shipping in mid-July, this quad-core tablet can handle graphics-heavy gaming and has a front-facing camera. The 8GB model starts at $200.

• Amazon could fight back in late July with a Kindle Fire 2. It’s expected to have improved specs and a camera, too.

Free Software/Open Source

• CIO – You may be aware that a little event is about to be unleashed on the world from London-the 2012 Olympics. My chance encounter was with Russ Ede, who is responsible for the London 2012 Olympics website. He shared some amazing information about what it takes to create a website that can stand up to the most widely watched sports event in the world.

• Very few companies know how to scale and deploy cloud applications like Netflix, the ginormous movie streaming site. And now it’s making some of that cloud management expertise available to the masses via Github.

• When I first got into IT back in the late 90′s as a teen, I was always baffled by the landscape in regards to infrastructure and software. And coming from a Linux background, who could blame me? When I went off to get my secondary education, I chose the vocational route and I chose to certify in Novell and Microsoft because they were the two major players at the time. And in my opinion, Novell was actually doing it right with the NDS operating system which seemed way ahead of windows NT at the time.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Google Chrome team has released latest stable versions of their browser. The Google Chrome version 20.0.1132.43 for Windows, Mac and Linux comes with a loads of bug fixes and also the Pepper plugin that will allow Linux users to watch web videos and use flash without installing the Flash plugin.

SaaS

• We’ve all heard plenty about open source changing the dynamics of the tech industry and upsetting the old order. Open source, we’re told, is manifest destiny. Companies that ignore it will be consigned to history and CIOs who assert there’s no freebie code behind their firewalls are out of touch with devs happily humming to Tomcat, Apache, Linux and PHP. At least that’s how the story goes.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Open government scored another victory when the City of Raleigh announced the Open Raleigh initiative—an online repository with open data, web and mobile applications, and links to participatory tools and organizations. It’s all part of Raleigh’s open source strategy focusing on transparency, collaboration, and improved access to information. It’s proof of the ongoing work of the public-facing, open source resolution Raleigh unanimously passed earlier this year.

• As part of the Open Raleigh announcement, the city included an online feedback system: My Raleigh Ideas! It’s a new service the city will use to collaborate with the public to solicit ideas on future projects and topics. Currently, the city is using it to prioritize the data citizens might want in the open data portal and to solicit input for the open data policy.

Open Access/Content

Programming

• As is the tradition for the end of June, the Eclipse community celebrates the release of the annual Eclipse release train, this year code-named Juno. This is the ninth year the community has shipped a release train, and each year the release gets bigger. Juno represents the work of 72 project teams by 445 open source committers on 55 million lines of code, and the participation of 40+ Eclipse member companies.

Standards/Consortia

• There’s more surprise for Linux users from closed source software vendors. After Microsoft unexpectedly updated Skype recently, Adobe has announced details of its source code editor for web developers. Unlike other Adobe products, this will be open-source distributed under MIT license.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The lead plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the National Federation for Independent Business (NFIB), is a highly partisan front group masquerading as the “nation’s leading small business association,” critics say. The nation’s highest court is expected to rule on the federal health care law Thursday.

Security

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

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