● 07.25.12

● Links 25/7/2012: Dell Has Red Hat Enterprise Linux Loaded

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Claiming that Linux users are different reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that “the rich are different from you and I” and Ernest Hemingway’s alleged reply, “Yes, they have more money.”

• After all, computer users are computer users. A few geeks may argue over the differences in operating systems, but aren’t average users more interested in simply getting work done?

• Superficially, yes. But operating systems and applications are far from neutral. Behind the code and the interfaces are assumptions about how users should use an application and what they want and expect from an application – even about the relationship between users and an application and its builders.

• Use an operating system long enough, and the assumptions behind it start to shape your expectations — so much so that another operating system may seem hostile and bizarre.

• You can hear the differences any time Linux users mingle with Windows and Mac users. The three groups have very different ideas about their relationship to their software, and communication is regularly confounded by differences in expectations.

• So what do Linux users expect from their operating system of choice? I can think of at least seven replies:

Desktop

• The company announced two models, the Precision M4700, which has a 15.6-inch screen, and the Precision M6700, which has a 17.3-inch screen. Dell will offer Windows 7, but is also offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for specific regions. Dell did not provide information on the countries in which RHEL would be available.

• As the market for Linux PCs expands, hardware manufactures are gearing up to release Laptops preloaded with Linux. Dell’s Project Sputnik was a big success, and the company has promised to release laptops with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in India and China. Now Dell is offering Laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Laptops 6 Preinstalled.

Server

• HP is the world’s leading server vendor, delivering solutions on both x86 and Itanium architectures and on Unix as well as Linux and Windows operating systems.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The open-source OpenCL acceleration within Mesa/Gallium3D isn’t even in a good enough state to be accepted in the usually bleeding-edge Fedora Linux distribution.

Applications

• Gnome Boxes is an upcoming app that will allow you to connect with remote, local and virtual machines and system images and use them right from your desktop. The application will also have the ability to view, access and use virtual machines from removable media and shared connection or shared machines and also allow you to upload and publish virtual machines.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Described as an “Epic Action Role-Playing Game for core gamers”. Legends of Aethureus is now a fully-funded, soon-to-be masterpiece and will be available for Linux.

• I am writing this article under considerable strain, as by tonight Linux shall be no more the same. I can bear the torture no longer; by the time you have read this hastily scrawled web page you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must forget or vanish.

• I come from the old Unix families of the dark shell, near the depraved mountains, hidden beneath the shadow of the alpha moon. Some say, we are evil spirits and black-hearted inhabitants, full of anger and pain. Though I was always remembered as the lonely one, a harmless boy, until today. You may keep reading this article, but I need to warn you, every syllable you let your eyes wander over gets you into more and more trouble. You are in mortal peril my friend, on the verge of unleashing terror, no sane man would be able to withstand. You’ll go indifferent because you wouldn’t do one simple thing, and that is stop reading this article. STOP NOW !

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. It is an easy way to get the latest code without having to build the entire KDE-SVN tree and maintain the checkout. Project Neon is unstable, but it installs alongside stable packages. It is suitable for contributors such as new developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. With Project Neon, people can experiment freely without risk to a working KDE environment.

• Project Neon is especially useful for reporting bugs. With its daily builds, bugs can be reported in the most timely manner. The more time that elapses between when a bug is introduced and when it is reported, the more difficult it gets to find it and fix it. With Project Neon, a bug can be reported on the same day that it is introduced.

GNOME Desktop

• The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.

• This is the second post from the “Making GTK3 themes”series. The first post can be found here.

• We will name our theme as “Dream”. So create a directory named “Dream” under “~/.themes” and then create another directory named “gtk-3.0″ under “~/.themes/Dream/gtk-3.0″. All the files we create will be inside this directory.

Distributions

• For those that haven’t heard yet, the Arch Linux 2012.07.15 install media is available as a major installer update for this popular rolling-release Linux distribution.

• Peppermint is a distro based on Linux Mint and Lubuntu. But unlike other distros that use offline desktop apps, Peppermint focuses on cloud services for applications. Peppermint three is based on Lubuntu 12.04, an LTS release which will be supported with security updates for a period of five years.

New Releases

• It’s been a while since we had a release. This release is a roll-up of a lot of features and fixes we have been working on since the last release. It’s been over 6 months since 2.0 was released so there are a lot of new features and fixes in this version. This release includes Logitech Media Server 7.7.2. Backups now support more than 2.2TB drives. This is great for 3TB+ VortexBoxes. We have the latest Fedora kernel with upgraded audio drives. The new ALSA drives now have better support for USB audio devices. We are now using ALBUMARTIST instead of BAND tag in the FLAC to mp3 mirroring.

• After months of development, Slackware 14.0 reaches Beta status on July 22nd, as announced by its developer, Patrick Volkerding.

• Among lots of interesting features, the Slackware 14.0 Beta operating system comes with the ultimate Xfce 4.10 desktop environment.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• In a post dated July 22, Smart explained that he had been waiting for mirror to sync, or all to have a complete copy, before announcing. This is necessary because “it is taking a very long time to sync to SourceForge mirrors. In addition, some bots picked up the new files and posted a release announcement (although I had not yet done one) which caused the few mirrors that had been sync’d to get hammered and as a result they dropped the files.” He was kind enough not to mention my post that had linked to SourceForge.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical announced a few hours ago, July 23rd, in a security notice, that a new Linux kernel update for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now available, fixing one security vulnerability discovered in the Linux kernel packages.

• In my previous writings I have talked a lot about how to build strong foundations in our communities. Namely, that we should strive to build belonging, and that a sense of belonging is what transitions drive-by contributors that are expensive and time-consuming to spin up, into regular community contributors who provide significant and sustained contributions.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Gooseberry is another alternative to Raspberry Pi, and according to the manufacturers it is three times faster than its rival. This new berry comes with a new ARM A10 processor running at 1GHz stock frequency, while there is enough headroom for overclocking up to 1.5 GHz. Also, it has twice the RAM of Raspberry Pi, meaning 512MB for this board. As for its power consumption, Gooseberry board consumes on average 4 watts of power when in use. When idle consumes 3.5 watts of power and when on standby consumes 2.3 watts of power.

• Four young programmers, Ben, Luke, Ryan and Edward, aged between twelve and sixteen coded 48 hours in Python. The result was a game and more than 500 pounds raised for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Phones

• According to an old saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That, however, does not seem to apply in the proprietary software business, because as we have seen over the years, whenever a proprietary software vendor falls on tough financial times, it closes shop and releases its products under an open source license.

• HP did it with webOS, which is now called Open webOS. OpenOffice.org is not a very good example, but it went from one open source license to another after the sponsoring proprietary software vendor pissed off core developers. OpenOffice.org is now known as Apache OpenOffice. I am sure you know how that story unfolded. And, then, there is the most recent case of Mandriva SA

Android

• I wanted to like Google TV. Who wouldn’t want to be able to watch Internet video, normal television, and use their HDTV as the world’s biggest Web browser. There was just one problem. The various Google TV implementations, such as the Logitech Revue, never worked well. It looks to me though like the soon to be released Vizio Co-Star may finally fulfill at least some of Google TV’s promise.

• A Motorola device with model number XT926 attached to it, cruised through the FCC today. As we know thanks to a variety of Moto employees who posted both pictures and benchmarks from the device to public sites over the last few months, this should be the DROID RAZR HD. According to this FCC filing, it was tested for Verizon’s 3G (CDMA 800/1900) and LTE networks. It also packs GSM and WCDMA radios, so there is a good chance that this phone will end up with global roaming capabilities. As you can see from the picture above, an NFC chip is included as well.

• Apple’s strength in the enterprise was attributed to several factors, including the success of the company’s best-selling iPad tablet.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Linus Torvalds, Linux’s inventor, software developer extraordinary, and, now, tablet reviewer! On Google+, Torvalds reviewed his Nexus 7 tablet and like ZDNet reviewers such as James Kendrick, he loved it.

Free Software/Open Source

• There are differences in how you evaluate open source applications, and it behooves security organizations to think through those differences and plan accordingly. Why does it matter? Because those differences can sometimes gate or slow down the adoption of a perfectly serviceable tool — like if you have inflexible corporate software acquisition policies that mandate non-applicable steps.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Many dedicated users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser have been wrestling with the new silent updates, which upgrade and modify the browser automatically, rather than at users’ discretion. The silent updates have been quite controversial. They are in place and going strong with Firefox 14, and there are signs that they are helping with adoption of that version of the browser. At the same time, some users find them very intrusive.

• For a long time, Firefox had no silent updates. The Mozilla team reported earlier this year that the browser would begin to have them, and it was clear that doing so was an effort to compete more closely with Google Chrome, which has offered silent updates for years.

SaaS

• But the project has seen more community contributions in the last 90 days than it did in the last two years it’s been open source, he said. CloudStack has also seen a nice uptick in adoption from a wide range of companies that includes cloud hosting providers, social gaming companies and research labs, among others.

CMS

• I have been using WordPress for years and it works but by now I would expect a mature product. Instead we still have “features” like displaying newest comments at the tops of pages unavailable. Really. I thought this was a bug because there is an option in the Dashboard/Settings/Discussion settings for newest first but it does not work. When I reported this to WordPress.com I was informed to get help from WordPress.org where I see this has been a problem for years and no solution exists except to install plugins that may or may not work depending on “theme” and editing PHP. Apparently, WP is not amenable to fixing. I tried two different plugins and could not get it straightened out. My son may look at the PHP to figure out what’s wrong. I even turned off caching to no avail.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Here are benchmarks of all major GNU Compiler Collection releases from GCC 4.2.4 through the latest GCC 4.8 development build. Benchmarking was of the seven GCC compiler releases from an Intel Core i7 “Clarksfield” system and an AMD Opteron “Shanghai” workstation.

Project Releases

• Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal expands the capabilities of Phoronix Media’s leading open-source, multi-platform testing software to advance the areas of standardized automated benchmarking, per-commit regression testing, and performance efficiency monitoring.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• Developers who take a first peek at the M language may get a quick impression that it is strange and alien. Here is the good news: If you have used R, or have friends who know R, then you are in good company and can learn M in a much shorter time. Moreover, you can combine M with R to get a powerful with an excellent statistical package.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• I had come to the artisanally fed vale of Facebook and Tesla to sample the first fruits of Lyfe Kitchen, a soon-to-be-chain of restaurants that might just shift the calculus of American cuisine. At Lyfe Kitchen (the name is an acronym for Love Your Food Everyday), all the cookies shall be dairy-free, all the beef from grass-fed, humanely raised cows. At Lyfe Kitchen there shall be no butter, no cream, no white sugar, no white flour, no high-fructose corn syrup, no GMOs, no trans fats, no additives, and no need for alarm: There will still be plenty of burgers, not to mention manifold kegs of organic beer and carafes of biodynamic wine. None of this would seem surprising if we were talking about one or 10 or even 20 outposts nationwide. But Lyfe’s ambition is to open hundreds of restaurants around the country, in the span of just five years.

Finance

• At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.

• Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

Civil Rights

• This week the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and two top special operations forces commanders for “violating the Constitution and international law” in the drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman (though no one claims he had anything whatsoever to do with terror campaigns). The suit is based on the Constitution’s promise of “due process” (“[N]or shall any person… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), which to the untutored eye of this non-lawyer clearly seems to involve “law.” Attorney General Eric Holder evidently thinks otherwise and has explained his reasoning when it comes to the right of the Obama administration to order such deaths: “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” If you’re not inside the National Security Complex, it may be just a tad hard to grasp how “due process” could mean a secret process of review in the White House presided over by a president with a “kill list” (whose legal justification, laid out by the Justice Department, cannot be made public). And yet that is, as far as we can tell, indeed the claim.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• La Quadrature du Net publishes its non-answer to the EU body of telecoms regulators’ (BEREC) consultation on Net Neutrality. It is not time for yet-another consultation on the EU Commission’s failed “wait-and-see” policy aimed at letting telecom operators take control of the Internet by discriminating communications. The only way to protect a free Internet as well as freedoms and innovation online is to clearly enact and protect Net Neutrality in EU law.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A confidential internal report of the music industry outfit IFPI has been inadvertently made available online by the group itself. Penned by their Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, the report details the global strategy for the major recording labels of IFPI. Issues covered include everything from torrent sites to cyberlockers, what behavior IFPI expects of Internet service providers, the effectiveness of site blocking, and how pirates are accessing unreleased music from industry sources.

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