● 07.27.12

● Links 27/7/2012: Linux 3.6 Plans, Bodhi 2.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Something dawned on me just yesterday. When using a slim and clean-lined theme or skin on GUI based software, the user can be easily convinced that the system is actually running faster and much lighter on resources. Or at least that’s how I see it. It is a psychological case, whether this affects only a small percentage of users or is within our nature to believe so, I am unsure. Read on and let me explain.

• The thought came about yesterday when I updated VLC Media Player on my Linux system. I was not only starting to get bored with the default GTK interface used by VLC, but it also doesn’t fit into my IceWM theme. It sort of looks out of place, considering VLC is an application that is open almost all of the time. So I checked out some VLC skins. I decided to install the hx_milky skin.

• I have believed, with good reason, that GNU/Linux has “arrived” just about everywhere in IT except in some business desktops and gaming for some time. Certainly, no one needs that other OS to do everything.

• I have been dismissive of gaming as a barrier to GNU/Linux but spotted it as one of three evidences that GNU/Linux has arrived:“Valve has decided to support GNU/Linux with its Steam platform to hedge its bets in case Windows 8 fails”. It used to be that some would do nothing by taking a risk on anything else but now some see that other OS as a risk to the business.

• There’s the word of Linux too, with Linux.com showcasing the “The 2012 top 7 best Linux distributions for you”, where the desktop Linux winner isn’t Ubuntu, but Linux Mint 13, just released in two versions, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” on last Saturday on the 21st of July, and the “KDE” version released on Monday the 23rd.

• There’s also the aforementioned Ubuntu Linux distribution, www.ubuntu.com with the 12.04 LTS (long term support) release having arrived on April 26 2012, and the 12.10 release due on the 18th of October 2012, 8 days before Microsoft releases Windows 8 to GA or “general availability” on retail computers, for online download and through retail boxed purchase.

Server

• Strictly speaking it is not a single hole, but fourteen holes in the parsing of certain types of tile. The affected file formats are .VSD, .WSD, .JP2, .DOC, .SXD, .LWP, .PCX, .SXI, .DPT, .PDF, .SAM, .ODG and .CDR. A program that opens a specially crafted file with the Oracle libraries is fundamentally compromised. A range of server services are affected, including anti-virus scanners like McAfee GroupShield, but also specific desktop applications that need to handle different file types, such as the Guidance EnCase Forensic toolkit.

Kernel Space

• While the NFL season prepares to get underway there is an ongoing, intensive draft for Linux talent taking place right now.

• We hear this from companies large and small, universities from all over the world and from the Linux kernel community, but we also know demand is high for Linux professionals based on our Linux Jobs Report issued this year (produced in partnership with Dice.com). Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. Sixty-three percent are seeking more Linux professionals relative to other hires. But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult.

• In the latest of our LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynote Q&A series we talk to SUSE’s Vice President of Global Alliances Michael Miller. Miller will be talking in his keynote at the events about how service-oriented clouds are bridging the divide between IT and lines of businesses. He also hinted twice during our conversatoin about a big announcement coming.

• Earlier this year VIA launched a $49 Android PC and now finally they are releasing the source-code to its boot-loader and kernel.

• VIA still isn’t engaging in anything in terms of open-source graphics following their failed strategy, but at least when it comes to VIA’s APC Android PC, they have now opened up a bit more.

• The Btrfs file-system update for the Linux 3.6 kernel is “a large btrfs update” with new features introduced to this next-generation file-system.

Applications

• Keeping an eye on your disk is always very important, especially today when dealing with huge quantity of data. Take a look at your personal files and programs, and you will be surprised by how much disk space you consume. Baobab is a Graphical User Interface software to analyze a disk usage. Hopefully, Baobab can help you manage that, straight out of the box, and with very little installation required.

• London-based Petr Nejedly has released the first stable version of his DLNA media server app for Windows, Mac and Linux. Serviio 1.0 exits beta by introducing both free and Pro versions, with all functionality present during the beta testing kept free as promised by the author.

• Serviio 1.0, which can be installed on Linux-based NAS drives as well as PC and Mac, allows users to stream video, music and photos from the host device to any other DLNA-ready device, including Smart TVs, mobile devices and other computers.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Rich Geldreich of Valve Software will be presenting on “Left 4 Dead 2 Linux: From 6 to 300 FPS in OpenGL.” As far as a talk description, “The talk will primarily focus on the many lessons learned and the custom profiling and visualization tools created while optimizing Left 4 Dead 2 to run well under Linux using OpenGL.”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Amarok has the ability to connect with Last.FM and submit your tracks listened, recommend you music, show your top artists and more. Soon Amarok will be able to sync your stats and ratings as well. Say you listen music from a number of devices, your iPod, phone, PC etc. Now all of them are connected with Last.FM. As the music gets scrobbled, Amarok will submit your ratings (stars), the last played time, track added time etc to Last.FM. So next time you listen music from any other device which supports StatsSyncing, you will be able to get data submitted via Amarok (eg stars, labels, last played date etc) on that device as well!

• KDE is becoming more social and developers are working to include Internet and social network sites right into the KDE desktop. A student developer, Marty, has created an KDE plasma widget as his GSoc project, which allows you to interact with Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca from your KDE desktop.

GNOME Desktop

• Flickr is maybe the most popular image hosting website in the world, helping millions of users to manage their photos online, and to easily share them on any of the widely used social networks.

• Frogr is a smart and very useful little application that allows you the easier pre-set and upload of your photographs on Flickr straight from your 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.

Distributions

• We have been using Zorin OS since version 3.0 in our business and on our personal computers. I purchased several copies of Ultimate to support Zorin and because of the value added software on the Ultimate DVD. The look changer and splash screen themer are what I call value added. Also, the fact that we can configure our wireless without a wired connection has changed the way we use Linux.

• If the Zorin Team can think of “value added” programs to add to the Zorin DVD, I am convinced they will sell more DVD’s and that would help fund Zorin OS.

New Releases

• Bodhi Linux is proud to present it’s second major release! Bodhi Linux 2.0 is now available for download!

• Jeff Hoogland has announced the release of Bodhi Linux version 2.00. This stable release comes after two months of hard work and bug fixing, followed by a Bodhi Linux 2.00 Release Candidate.

• Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva will be present at 13th FISL (International Free Software Forum – Brazil), taking place July 25th-28th in Events Center of PUCRS, Porto Alegre. FISL is the most important meeting of the Free Software Communities of Latin America and their 13 years of history have seen many creative and innovative people who encouraged, and believe in the strenght of free software, inside and outside Brazil.

Gentoo Family

• Gentoo Hardened is thriving and going forward. For those that don’t exactly know what Gentoo Hardened is – it is a Gentoo project dedicated to bring Gentoo in a shape ready for highly secure, high stability production server environments. This is what we live by, and why we do what we do. To accomplish this goal, we use a great community of developers & users that work on several subprojects: the implementation of kernel hardening features such as grSecurity, memory-based protection schemes such as PaX, toolchain updates to harden against buffer overflows and memory attacks, mandatory access control schemes such as SELinux and RSBAC.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) is a growth stock that provides a variant of the Linux operating system family, which is formally known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (If you haven’t heard of Linux, take your IT guy or IT gal out for a cup of coffee.) Unfortunately, Red Hat trades at very high valuation multiples. When compared to its peers, it is readily apparent that investors should stay away from RHT shares at current price levels, even after considering growth projections. RHT high price multiples should dissuade investors from buying at current prices until its valuations descend closer to those of its peers.

Fedora

• Fedora is one of the most successful community driven open-source project. Its community is most active, helpful, skilled and diverse. You will find people helping in forums, writing documentation in wiki, maintaining the website, doing artwork, packaging software, coding and more.

• Get a Raspberry Pi for contributing to Fedora this Summer, along with other open hardware in the Summer of Hardware and Fun

Debian Family

• I want preface this blog post by stating I am a Debian Linux fan. I think when set up properly, Debian can be almost unbreakable. It can run light and fast and cool, but first you have to get it installed.

• I’ve installed numerous Debian forks and had few if any issues with them, distributions like SolusOS, Linux Mint debian, SalineOS, and Mepis. All were very solid Linux distributions and relatively easy to install. Not so with vanilla Debian.

• My goal was to install Debian to a 16 gig usb stick, essentially installing Debian to an external hard drive. To start with, Debian is not as easy to find and download as say, Ubuntu. You don’t go to the home page and click on the “install” button, you have to search through directories to find what you need. I began with what should have been the easiest way, the Debian Live page and Stable release. I downloaded the KDE image and burned it to a usb stick with Unetbootin and booted up the operating system. So far so good, I had a wired Internet connection that was working and the KDE desktop looked good. So I click on “install”.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I was delighted to read the news of Unity entering Fedora. Although many associate Unity with Ubuntu, we would like to encourage the wider adoption of Unity in other Linux distributions and projects. Unity is a desktop that is designed to provide a unified experience not only on your desktop for GNOME, KDE and other apps, but also across different devices and screens.

• With Unity getting more eyeballs from Fedora and other distributions, we would like to welcome you folks into the upstream community. If you would like to participate in programming, design, testing, support or other ways of contributing, you are more than welcome! You can find out more here and feel free to post questions of how to participate to the Unity development mailing list or the Unity design mailing list. You can also join our IRC channel at #ubuntu-unity on freenode.

• The third alpha release in the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle has been made available for download.

• The Ubuntu developers have released the third alpha of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the final release of which is scheduled for 18 October. This development release includes several changes over Alpha 2, which was released a month ago. These changes include a reworked session menu, improvements to the update manager and removal of the third party driver installation tool. Upstream changes to the Nautilus file manager have caused theming issues with the default Ubuntu theme, but the developers expect to have these fixed by the time the first beta release of 12.10 arrives at the beginning of September.

Devices/Embedded

• Smartenit, a home and building automation solutions provider, has added the popular Raspberry Pi board to their repertoire of Linux platforms that run its XML-socket based ZigBee and INSTEON automation package.

Phones

Android

• Sony is in the midst of sending out invitations for a press gathering on the eve of the annual IFA conference which takes place in Berlin this August. As to what they will be announcing is not official, however there’s plenty of speculation. Rumored smartphones include such models as the LT29i Hayabusa, the Xperia J, and the Xperia SL. Also potentially on the agenda – the LT30p Mint.

• Facebook Inc. (FB), owner of the largest social network, is working with HTC Corp. to build its own smartphone for release as soon as mid-2013, people with knowledge of the matter said.

• Intel has confirmed that it will be working with Google on porting the Android 4.1 operating system, known as Jelly Bean, to work on smartphones and tablets using low-power Atom processors.

• The company did not provide a time frame about when the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean port would be realised, though it is expected to be complete in the next few months.

Free Software/Open Source

• In January I attended the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo. In addition to speaking and running the Ubuntu booth, I had an opportunity to talk to other sysadmins about everything from selection of distribution to the latest in configuration management tools and virtualization technology.

• I ended up in a conversation with a fellow sysadmin who was using a proprietary virtualization technology on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not only did he have surprising misconceptions about the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) virtualization tools available, he assumed that some of the features he was paying extra for (or not, as the case may be) wouldn’t be in the FOSS versions of the software available.

• It took Instagram a good amount of time to build a mobile photo-sharing app that could scale to 50 million users — and its efforts were obviously recognized by others when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion earlier this year. But Parse, the startup that launched out of Y Combinator last summer and provides backend-as-a-service tools for mobile app developers, says that making such services should not take so much time and money anymore, because Parse’s tools make it much easier and faster to build really scalable mobile apps.

• We are happy to announce Version 2.0 of Apache OpenMeetings Incubating!

• Open source doesn’t have to mean free of cost, but thanks to the generosity of open source developers many thousands of great applications are free. Why spend money when you don’t have to? Though if you like and depend on an app, nothing says thanks like clicking the “Donate” button.

• Two weeks ago, Amy Clark wrote that an open-source model can — and should — be applied to scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry. Using insights from Ashoka Fellow Stephen Friend, she showed that open-source science would eliminate redundant efforts and fast-track lifesaving drugs.

Events

• During LinuxCon this year one of the lead Linux kernel developers, Alan Cox, pointed at the challenge the community is facing in terms of gender gap. Unlike other areas where women are in leadership positions open source is an exception. So, we are starting an interview series on Muktware ‘Woman Force In Open Source’ where we will feature one female developer/executive every week. We are starting this series with Elizabeth Krumbach, the winner of the O’Reilly Open Source Award.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. We’ve previously covered the company’s Boot to Gecko platform — an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine — which is part of the effort. And since February, Mozilla’s mobile operating system has moved ahead rapidly. Now, there are new pictures emerging of what some are calling “Firefox OS.”

SaaS

• This week’s top open source cloud news features VMware’s acquisition of Nicira; a Q&A with Citrix’s Mark Hinkle; the pros and cons of open source cloud platforms for IT managers; and insider news that Nebula has enticed some Rackspace developers away.

Databases

• Microsoft SQL users will now be able to migrate data from proprietary MS SQL databases to free MySQL databases, thanks to the new migration tool unveiled by Oracle. By switching to a free and open-source RDBMS, companies and individuals will be able to easily save ownership costs by 90%.

Funding

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• A Massachusetts college student with diabetes is facing a tough situation: Either she stops going to college full-time to qualify for the insurance she’s currently using, or she opts for help from the state that isn’t going to give her the quality of life she’s used to. So what’s a student trying to get ahead in life to do — try to get an education on a part-time basis or get along without the insulin pump that helps her treat her diabetes?

• Katie’s had diabetes since she was 9, reports CBS Boston, and her mom has been grateful to qualify for MassHealth. That coverage has allowed Katie to use an insulin pump to regulate her blood sugar, something that at $1,000 a month, her single mother couldn’t afford otherwise.

Finance

• Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials. He soon discovered that the department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.

• “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

• To be sure, Mr. Barofsky and his team were up against a powerful status quo. And that meant that they ran into plenty of brick walls.

• “Bailout” covers a lot of ground, running through attempts of the inspector general’s office to ensure that additional rescue programs suggested by the Treasury had safeguards in place to avoid conflicts of interest, collusion and fraud. One battle involved the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to get troubled mortgages off banks’ balance sheets by encouraging private investors to buy them using mostly taxpayer dollars. When the inspector general’s office recommended ways to protect against fraud and to fix other flaws in the program, Mr. Barofsky writes, the Treasury rejected the suggestions, maintaining that they would gut the programs and reduce participation.

• n a stunning reversal, a former big bank CEO who crusaded for policies that helped create the so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks now says we need to break up the banks.

Privacy

• It stands to reason that Microsoft would be extremely interested in SMB opinions about cloud privacy, given its big push into the cloud with Office 365 and its associated services, like Lync Onine.

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