● 07.21.12

● Links 21/7/2012: Web Apps, Ubuntu and Dell

Posted in News Roundup at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• While i still stand firm that the day of Desktop Linux has passed, there is no doubt that from its humble beginnings this open operating system not only changed the direction of IT, but have changed the world we live in. It’s more popular and used today than it has ever been, just not in the guises and up front ways that something like Windows or OSX is.

• How have the guys with the beards and sandals changed the world we live in?

• For many of us working in an enterprise space, the need for a solid personal information manager (PIM) is a must. Unfortunately, unless you’re running your own company, chances are you can’t simply use just any PIM. Usually, there are certain levels of functionality or specifications, that need to be considered.

• In most instances, it’s locked in, with Microsoft Exchange doing the data handling for desktops and mobile users alike. Thankfully, however, some companies are looking at alternatives, including Google Apps and other self-hosted solutions, running on Linux servers.

Desktop

• Canonical and giant PC maker Dell Computer have already found new horizons for Ubuntu in China in India. The two companies have steadily expanded efforts to deliver Ubuntu-based Dell computers in both countries, which, of course, have giant populations. Now, through an internal innovation challenge at Dell called Project Sputnik, Dell has announced that it will deliver a new, developer-focused laptop based on the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04LTS preloaded, available in select geographies. It’s a sign of more commitment to Ubuntu from Dell.

• Who Will Buy an Ubuntu Ultrabook?Dell has announced that it’s planning to bring Ubuntu to the masses. In the fall of 2012, Dell’s XPS 13 will be available with an install of Ubuntu direct from the company. But who’s going to buy one?

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• When you think of Open Source software and Linux, you probably think of legions of independent developers and scruffy enthusiasts scattered across the globe – pounding out code and annihilating bugs with the words “Linux Forever” and a Penguin tattooed on their forearms.

• Sure, those people exist, but they’re being crowded out by serious IT professionals dressed in business casual.

• According to a recent report released by the Linux Foundation, large, multinational, for-profit organizations are contributing significant financial and human resources to the cause. Participants include household names like IBM, Samsung, Texas Instruments and, for the first time, Microsoft.

• Yes, but it is not exactly being planned that way. It is bubbling up like most open source projects do. But in many respects the move to open source is also by design. Dell does not want to be a box maker anymore. That makes open source a desirable option. With open source, Dell can leverage an ecosystem of partners and developers.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• Despite the project being less than 3 months old all 50 pages in the user-contributed publication have been completed, creating a compelling list of contents aimed at casual and pro Gimp users alike.

• Office documents like texts, presentations, and spreadsheets can have watermarks, that is, images or (much more often) semi-transparent text as the background of all their pages.

• Normally, the purpose of a watermark is to declare, in a way that it is impossible to miss, the current status of a document, or who published it. “Draft”, “Pending Approval”, “Strictly Confidential” or the logo of a company are all common watermarks.

Games

• Croteam, the Croatian-based game development studio behind the Serious Sam series, proudly posted a couple of days ago, July 18th, on their Facebook page, a screenshot of Serious Sam 3 running on Ubuntu Linux distribution.

• There are no other details, besides the screenshot (click it above to enlarge) posted on Facebook by Croteam. Apparently the game was ported to the Linux platform and tested on the Ubuntu operating system.

• As the latest Valve Linux news for today, Valve Software actually cares about open-source Linux graphics drivers. Last week they had the Intel OTC Linux graphics team out to Bellevue to jointly work on the OpenGL renderer for the Source Engine and the Intel Mesa driver.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE 4.9 will be released in August and overall it feels more responsive and faster during desktop use than its predecessors.

• Aside from Qt Quick support in KDE Plasma Workspaces, improvements to the Dolphin file manager, and other changes, performance was also a focus for this six-month update to the KDE desktop. There’s many performance improvements and bug-fixes to improve the user experience.

• I’ve heard good comments about speed improvements of the Plasma desktop within KDE SC 4.9, so I tried it out for the past few days — comparing Ubuntu 12.04 with KDE 4.8 to the latest KDE 4.8.90 packages. Yes, indeed, KDE 4.9 feels much nicer!

GNOME Desktop

• Getting a versus between Gnome Shell and Unity would be sooo.. typical. Instead we did exactly the opposite, we tried how they work together. But this isn’t meant to be a review, because everything you’ll see is pretty much unstable versions.

• Gnome developers are working on a mail client that will be much more attractive and lighter than the present Evolution suite. Of course, it wont be as robust and enterprise standard as Evolution, but the below screenshots make it look promising.

• It is only natural that there are still a lot of people out there who can’t get used to GNOME 3 and prefer GNOME 2 that they are used to. The problem with this is that not many distributions support GNOME 2 anymore, and most of them use obsolete versions of applications.

Distributions

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• After what may have been the most tumultuous months in the company’s often tumultuous history, Mandriva is planning a comeback with a new community oriented strategy. Richard Hillesley looks back at that history and talks to the people charting Mandriva’s future.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• If the loudest voices in the open-source community were to be believed you’d get the impression that Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is universally loathed.

• Kororaa 17 appeared on project mirrors several days ago, but Chris Smart has yet to announce it. He’d been having some developmental issues and last blogged that version 17 would be delayed. The Kororaa 17 available now may or may not actually end up being the final version, but let’s take a look anyway.

• Smart may be waiting until he receives sufficient feedback before announcing version 17. Limited or quiet releases are not uncommon with smaller projects (and not unheard of with larger). In fact, they are another tool available to project leaders. Users have noticed the updates and new ISO and are reporting issues and seeking help on the forums for this release. Smart himself is answering questions.

• The Fedora Advisory Board is still deciding what to do about future codenames for Fedora Linux.

• The GNOME:Ayatana project on the openSUSE Build Service now includes a repository of RPM packages that allow the Unity desktop – which was mainly developed by Canonical for its Ubuntu Linux distribution – to be installed in Fedora 17. The Ayatana page currently only provides a handful of details on the development state of the project. The project is also working on Unity repositories for Mandriva 2011, and for version 12.1 and the Factory (development) builds of openSUSE. Xiao-Long Chen, one of the project’s four developers, replied to a query from The H’s associates at heise Open by saying that the repository is “ready to be tested by developers”; however, Chen added that he is still working on several core package issues and that this may result in problems once an update is installed.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is adding a new feature to its Ubuntu operating system that will allow desktop users to access popular Internet services without opening a browser window. Instead, a Web page can be accessed as a desktop application.

• Portland, OR: At OSCon, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company announced that it’s adding a new feature to its Ubuntu desktop: the ability to use popular Internet services and Websites, such as Google’s GMail and Facebook as desktop applications, Ubuntu WebApps.

• This feature will formally appear in the next release of Ubuntu 12.10, Quantal Quetzal, in October. But, users won’t have to wait until then for it. According to Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s community manager, the Ubuntu team has been working on this for some time and the feature will be available for Ubuntu 12.04 users in the next full days.

• At Oscon 2012, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth defends the project’s decision to create the Unity interface for multiple form factors and said Dell’s decision to pre-install its latest Linux desktop on high end PCs in North America shows perception about Linux on the desktop is improving.

• This is the second of a handful of long-term reviews I will be doing this summer. The initial subject of this was the 64-bit edition of #! 11 “Waldorf”, so follow the jump to see how that turned out.

• Mark Shuttleworth has spoken about the design and thought process behind the creation of Unity, and how it’s impacted on Ubuntu multi-device strategy.

• If you have a Sony VAIO laptop (it could be E series or S series), there is a strong chance that your laptop’s MOBO uses Insyde H2O EFI bios. Getting Ubuntu dual booting with Windows 7 is not as straight forward as it usually is for most systems. I won’t go in to the details of partitioning and installation of Ubuntu alongside Windows 7. The procedure is straightforward, except that you should be careful to install Grub bootloader in /dev/sda3

• Back in 2008, I was at OSCON when Mark Shuttleworth set out the audacious goal to make the Linux desktop more beautiful than Apple.

• Today, four years later, Shuttleworth returned to the OSCON stage to claim victory.

• In his view Ubuntu’s desktop is now better than Apple. In his view it’s also easy for existing Apple users to move to Ubuntu as well.

• That said he noted that Ubuntu’s Unity desktop effort was a deeply unpopular process, but it is one that has delivered results.

• With today’s updates, Canonical made some changes to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, regarding the GNOME packages, especially Nautilus.

• Earlier today, we’ve had the pleasure of recording a live video stream from the O’Reilly OSCON 2012 event with Ubuntu’s father and Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth.

• Called “Making Magic From Cloud To Client,” Mark’s speech lasted for 25 minutes, and it consisted of two parts.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi Linux made quite a splash last year earning raving reviews from users and respected writers. Fast forward to yesterday when Jeff Hoogland announced Bodhi Linux 2.0 Release Candidate.

• Bodhi Linux had climbed to the top 20 in Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking last year. Although it’s fallen a bit lately, the next release is bound to give it another bump. Developmental images have been made available for the upcoming release and Hoogland says of the latest, “I am stamping this build as our “release candidate” meaning that is is a stable working environment and something extremely close to this release will become our “stable”/final 2.0.0 release by the end of this month.”

• The final release of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce hasn’t even been officially announced yet, but despite that, I’m reviewing it now (and it is indeed the final release and not an RC). How is that possible? To be honest, I was quite anxious to get my hands on it, and earlier today I found that some mirror sites of Linux Mint had uploaded (though not others, which was weird, although as I write this, more mirrors have uploaded it). Well, in any case, now I’m trying it out.

• The main editions of Linux Mint now feature the MATE and GNOME 3/Cinnamon desktop. I’ve checked out Cinnamon from time to time and have found it to be too unstable for my use, at least in a live USB session; plus, some extensions like the Auto-Move-Windows extension don’t work as they should. That leaves MATE, which I tried over a month ago. I wasn’t especially happy with it because of the issues with Compiz trying to work with MATE, and this surprised me considering that MATE should have replicated the GNOME 2 experience. That left me waiting for the KDE edition. Then I found out that Xfce would make an official return to Ubuntu-based Linux Mint, which was surprising given past statements by the developers that the Xfce edition would be exclusively offered with the Debian base. Now that this has happened, I want to see if Ubuntu-based Linux Mint with Xfce can effectively replicate and replace my current and ideal GNOME 2 setup on Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora”.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a very cheap PC, it’s also tiny and uses very little power. So it isn’t too surprising to see one hooked up to a battery and display in a makeshift portable workstation.

• SK Pang Electronics sell a wide range of gadgets and components, so when the Raspberry Pi got delivered they didn’t hang about experimenting with it. What they have done is combine a mini wireless keyboard typically used with a smartphone, a USB power pack, and an small LCD monitor usually found in the backseat of a car.

• Raspberry Pi is a tiny-sized single-board computer that costs only 30 Euros. Due to its high demand, the Rasberry Pi Foundation had to restrict purchases of the Raspberry Pi to one per customer. However, things seems to have changed since yesterday, both of their manufacturing partners have been working at building capacity and from now on 4000 Raspberry Pis are being made every day.

• Developer Liam McLoughlin is still working on porting the Chromium OS operating system to run on the Raspberry Pi $35 mini-computer. But today he’s released the next best thing – a beta version of the Chromium web browser designed to run on the Raspbian Linux operating system.

• The Raspberry Pi is often described as an inexpensive, low-power computer. But really, at this point it’s pretty much a low power motherboard, memory, and processor.

• The Gooseberry Board was announced in a limited production run of 500 units and comes with a 1 GHz overclockable A10 processor, a 400 MHz Mali processor, 4 GB of on-board storage as well as Android 4.03 ICS.

Phones

• “Finland and the people let go by Nokia could do a lot worse than using MeeGo to avoid the roadblock of M$ in smartphones,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “It’s good to have diversity in smartphones. iThingies and Android/Linux thingies are decent, but a little more competition is good for all of us.”

• The developers at HP’s Enyo project have announced that version 2.0 of their open source application framework is now available. The new release introduces new Onyx widgets such as Menu, Picker, Tooltip, Tree and Drawer, while also adding an Enyo 2 Sampler app that provides examples of the functionality available for those new to the framework. The team says that the major milestone means that Enyo 2 is now considered to be “production-ready, from both a functionality and quality point of view”.

Android

• Google has released the full SDK (Software Development Kit) for developing applications for the latest version of its mobile operating system, Android 4.1 code-named “Jelly Bean”. Google presented the operating system itself at the Google I/O developer conference last month and released the corresponding source code earlier this month. The company has also made Revision 20.0.1 of the SDK Tools and Revision 8b of the NDK (Native Development Kit) available; both of these releases include only bug fixes.

• Since Google announced Android 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) on June 27, the update has appeared on Galaxy Nexus phones, and this week showed up on Google’s Nexus 7 tablet. Last week, Google released Android 4.1 source code along with developer background, and this week followed up with a changelog offering further details. A number of in-depth reviews have also appeared in recent days.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• A worker loads boxes labelled “One Tablet Per Child” on to a truck at the Education Ministry in Bangkok. The ministry sent off trucks on Wednesday to deliver the first batch of 55,000 tablet computers to primary schools in eight provinces. The government plans to distribute 800,000 PC tablets to Prathom 1 (Grade 1) schoolchildren nationwide. The devices are made in China.

• For years, Nicholas Negroponte and the folks behind One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) sought to deliver the $100 computer that could make it into the hands of poor children all over the globe. That didn’t happen exactly, and one of the reasons was that the OLPC team never really cracked the $100 price point for a functional computer.

• The Asus Transformer Pad, Transformer Pad Prime, and Transformer Pad Infinity will get an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean upgrade.

• Introduced 3 weeks ago at Google I/O 2012, the Nexus 7 with Android JellyBean has proven to be a runaway hit. It has already sold out at brick-and-mortar stores such as Costco, GameStop, Sam’s Club, Office Depot, and Staples, and is unavailable at online stores such as B&H. The 16GB model is especially hard to find. Here’s a run-down:

• One of the reasons I am a huge fan of Nexus devices is that Google takes care of the updates and I don’t have to deal with crappy skins OEMs slap on top of the already polished interface. My Galaxy Nexus is already running Jelly Bean and just a few hours ago Google announced the rollout of Android 4.1 for Nexus S. So, my wife will also get Jelly Bean on her phone.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of my personal open source community highlights this year was joining the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board. I first discovered OSI in 2003 when I was asked to weigh in on proposed legislation in Oregon that was designed to mandate the use of open source by all state agencies. Yep, I actually wrote the official executive branch position–but that’s another story.

• Open-source software is a key driver for small business in the U.S. and contributes an enormous amount to the economy, perhaps to the tune of $1 trillion in economic output.

• The news that Microsoft is to kill off Windows Home Server in favour of a cut-down version of Windows Server 2012 hasn’t been met with universal approval. The low-cost, low-power Windows Home Server has proved popular since its introduction, and its absence is going to leave a hole in the market – a hole that the OEM-only Windows Server 2012 Foundation and $425 Windows Server 2012 Essentials is unlikely to fill.

• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is now accepting individual members as the organization moves to enhance its impact in the open source world.

Events

• Taking place Tuesday, August 28, 2012, the Workshop gives anyone attending LinuxCon and CloudOpen an opportunity to arrive just a day early to get a huge return on that invested time (though you don’t have to be an event attendee to join the Chef 101 Workshop).

• This week’s open source cloud headlines include several OpenStack-related announcements, denials from VMware that it might spin off its own open source Cloud Foundry and a new global-scale CloudStack deployment.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As an idealistic thought experiment, the truly open Firefox OS (formerly Boot 2 Gecko) is captivating — but in reality, as it prepares to enter one of the world’s most fiercely competitive markets, its chance of success is close to nil.

• When do you know a company has its thumbs up their arses? When they make bold executive decisions that are contrary to their previous bold executive decisions. Indeed, enter Firefox 14, a bold version of Mozilla’s browser that defies the prime directive set by its own upper management. Let me elaborate.

• As part of Mozilla’s Webmaker Project, Mozilla is holding a MozParty in Newcastle to help teach people how to make the web

SaaS

• OpenStack has the potential to become to the cloud what the LAMP stack is to servers, Rackspace’s chief has said, while blasting VMware and Amazon for not participating in the scheme

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The administration of the city of Las Palmas on the Canary Island will start using LibreOffice on all of its 1200 desktop PCs. This free and open source office suite is already used on nearly 120 of the city’s desktop PCs. In a press release published on 27 June, the city explains that is why it can calculate that the migration will save about 400,000 euros.

• On a recently published web page, Oracle addresses CentOS users in an attempt to persuade them to switch to Oracle Linux. On the page, the company even offers a scriptDirect download that makes various changes to CentOS or Scientific Linux (SL) installations and causes them to receive future package updates and operating system packages from the Oracle Linux repositories. Ultimately, this will turn CentOS and SL installations into Oracle Linux systems.

BSD

• PC-BSD 9.1 beta 1, the latest pre-stable version of what will become PC-BSD 9.1, has been released. PC-BSD is a desktop-centric distribution based on FreeBSD. It used to be primarily a KDE-using distribution, but the installer now has options to install a system using other major desktop environments.

• Aside from KDE, users can opt to install a PC-BSD desktop system powered by Xfce, LXDE or the GNOME desktop environment. The installer also makes it easy to install a FreeBSD server, as well as a server installation called TrueOS. Below are select screen shots from test installations of all four supported desktop environments.

Project Releases

• My reasons for going GPL are varied from folks worried about security issues regarding what SelekTOR does with their underlying system proxies to ensuring the longevity of the code as once its out there it can’t be taken back. Well not only do you have access to the debug facility here is the code as well. It also brings it in line with my other offerings which have been open source for quite some time.

Openness/Sharing

• Since unveiling its Open Compute Project and data center designs in 2011, Facebook’s Open Compute project has been rallying OEMs to support and build open, interchangeable components. At Oscon 2012 today, the project’s chief urged developers to accelerate the trend of open source hardware by refusing to buy “gratuitously differentiated” systems

Programming

• ActiveState has released version 7.1 of its integrated development environment (IDE) Komodo. The latest release of the IDE for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl and web development includes several improvements to the editor as well as new features for cloud deployment and easier integration with version control systems. Komodo 7.1 also updates the IDE’s support for several languages and frameworks and lets users add language support themselves.

Leftovers

• Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas casino magnate and GOP mega-donor, is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department under suspicions he violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) while dealing with the Chinese government and his Macau casino ventures. The FCPA, introduced in 1977 by U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), prohibits American companies from bribing foreign government officials.

• We recently wrote about some concerns by Vint Cerf and others that the FCC was considering a proposal to move some of their network diagnostics efforts — which are a really good thing — from the open M-Labs solution to proprietary servers run by the telcos. As we noted, the telcos denied that this was happening — and Henning Schulzrinne, the CTO of the FCC, showed up in our comments to strongly deny that such a proposal existed.

Security

Finance

• Last year, Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found that as of 2007, the Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — had a net worth equal to that of the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And due to the effects of the Great Recession that ratio has gotten substantially worse.

• New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined…

• Since 2009, exports from the US have grown at a faster rate than GDP. This is reflected in the weak, national recovery in jobs while export-oriented regions and export-sector jobs have fared much better. As US exports are nearing 15% of GDP, one wonders that a nation long accustomed to protecting consumption may finally have to think about protection, and enhancement, of production. | see: US Exports as a Percentage of GDP 2007 – 2012.

• Allegations of interest-rate rigging by global banks are hurting the financial system by undermining trust, said Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

• Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Donald Mullen, one of the architects of the subprime mortgage trade, is trying to raise at least $500 million for a fund that will buy foreclosed homes with an eye toward renting them out.

Civil Rights

• A student rendering of Bucky Badger puts the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s furry mascot in a lock-up formed by the Adidas three-bar logo.

• But in a historic test, it is the midwestern university that is now putting Adidas on trial.

• The university filed a complaint against the global sportswear giant in Dane County Circuit Court on July 13 calling on a judge to determine whether the university’s code of conduct required Adidas to pay severance and other benefits to nearly 3,000 Indonesian workers. The workers were left jobless and impoverished by a Korean contractor’s abrupt exit from Indonesia in January 2011. The lawsuit marks the first time that one of the more than 100 U.S. universities in a national anti-sweatshop consortium has sought to enforce its code in the courts.

• As the governments are becoming more and more powerful and using all means to crush protest, it is becoming harder for activists to stand against suppressive governments.

• YouTube has become a very powerful means for citizens to provide video coverage/footage of events. But now governments are using these footage to identify protesters and take action against them. There is no way a protester can hide this identity and escape the wrath of government.

• A new bill on Capitol Hill could have far reaching implications for government use and development of open source platforms – potentially requiring all open source projects to “prove adequate industry support and diversification.”

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