● 09.22.12

● Links 22/9/2012: September Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When Acer was ready to announce a new smartphone running Alibaba’s Aliyun operating system, Google responded with force. If it were to be released, Google would end its partnership with Acer, which uses Android for 90 percent of its smartphones.

• Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.

Desktop

• For years now, there has been a lot of talk about the “fractured” Linux Desktop environment. It’s an easy argument to make, given the number of distros, desktop choices the user has and the number of apps that may perform the same function.

• [...]

• Previously I preferred a “clean” install of Gnome, uncluttered with KDE dependencies and apps but recently, I’ve had a change of heart

• In 2007, thanks to netbooks and Vista, Linux briefly exploded onto the desktop. Microsoft soon realized they were losing the low-end laptop market and they brought XP back from the dead and practically gave it away to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s. It worked. Linux’s popularity receded. In 2012, Microsoft is once more bringing out a dog of a desktop operating system, Windows 8, so desktop Linux will once more get a chance to shine… if it can.

• And here is where Torvalds disagrees. Torvalds wrote, “One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. That rule has been there since day one, although it’s gotten much more explicit only in the last few years. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring.”

• The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!

• For those reading about ROSA Desktop for the first time, it is a desktop Linux distribution published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. ROSA Desktop is actually the end-user version of ROSA Marathon Enterprise, the desktop edition for businesses.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds has poured scorn on claims made by the co-founder of the GNOME Desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, that he (Torvalds) was in any way to blame for the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives.

• De Icaza made the claim in his personal blog on August 29 when he wrote: “Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.”

• Torvalds said that Gnomes were in total denial about what their problem really is and were blaming everybody except themselves.

• De Icaza puffed that his involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago, so it is unfair to the Gnome guys to attach my position to their project.

• But he claimed that the fact that kernel guys ruled Linux did stuff up everything for the rest.

• He said that Torvalds had a strong personality, and so do a lot of the people that surround him and like it or not, that influenced the attitudes of people.

• “My take is that you are brilliant, clever and funny, and you can also be mean and harsh. Many people tried to imitate you, but they were neither brilliant, clever or funny. They just turn out to be mean and harsh and this attitude spread on the mailing lists,” he wrote.

• He agreed that when it came to CORBA, both the KDE guys and GNOME had it wrong and the same applied to .NET.

Server

• At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

• Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• When the “news” came out that Intel wouldn’t be supporting Linux on its new Atom CPU, Clover Trail, I didn’t buy it. This next-generation Intel Atom processor was always meant primarily for Windows 8; but with Intel’s x86 instruction set, it would also always support Android and Linux.

• Linus Torvalds rarely appears in public these days, and has little to say when he does.

• “There’s nothing interesting about me,” Torvalds asked, when asked along with his fellow panelists to name something interesting about himself that no one knows. “I’m in a bathrobe reading email. I read email and answers and merge code written by others.”

• His appearance at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego yesterday was no different, but he did reveal a few interesting factoids after being questioned by the audience.

• The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers and acts as final arbiter for what does or does not get included.

• It’s been a year since Kernel.org was hacked by intruders. Still no report publicly explaining what happened.

• I have been pondering the systemd situation for a while. My biggest concern has been that Debian and Ubuntu have not made decisions to adopt it as default, especially when Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and others have. Maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 will include it as well. So it seems like on the init system level, two fragmented groups are emerging: those who use systemd and those who don’t. My second concern is the ability for a casual/intermediate user to transition from a systemd-using system to one that doesn’t use it.

• Not all Open Source foundations are created equal. Over the last 15 years that I’ve been actively engaged in open source activities I’ve seen more than my fair share of open source foundations go bust. I’ve also seen a few do really well.

• Remember the OSDL?

• The OSDL was the pre-cursor to the Linux Foundation. It was an organization that I personally never really liked and neither did Oracle. Back in 2006, Wim Coekaerts (then the Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle) told methat OSDL was all about business and Oracle knew how to deal with the Linux community on its own.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has released a new Linux graphics driver in the 304.xx series, which means the GeForce 6/7 series support is still there, while adding in some new improvements.

• The xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.2 driver was released today to take advantage of the new capabilities of X.Org Server 1.13.

• Namely, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.2 hooks into the platform bus support, support for shared pixmaps with its EXA acceleration back-end, pixmap tracking/updating support, DRI2 offloading support, and the RandR provider/capabilities support. These features are what’s being done to work towards Linux support for GPU hot-plugging and NVIDIA Optimus.

Applications

• If you’re learning a foreign language, there is always the need to go beyond the standard textbooks and listening materials. Resources like CDs,DVDs, and even movies in that particular language help you become a good listener and communicator. Also, these days, there are plenty of software available that help you learn better and faster. On Linux too, there are many such applications that can push you further in your linguistic endeavors without you having to pay a single penny. Here is a list of the best ones.

• I must admit I’m wading uncharted waters here. The fact I have some street credit with 3D design and rendering does not make me an expert on computer-aided design. Still, I probably have a decent sense of understanding how 2D/3D plans and draft should work.

• At a time when many developers are focused on cloud applications, Yorba’s sights remain fixed firmly on the desktop.

• Windows being the most popular operating system on the planet, some of its apps stand out in the popularity chart and Nero is one among them. And like many popular Windows programs, Nero is also not available for other platforms.

• In this post we would be talking about free Nero alternatives to Nero for Ubuntu. We would cover all the good and free Ubuntu apps which lets you burn CDs / DVDs. The world of Ubuntu apps is huge and finding a good option for any of your needs may turn out to be a big task.

Proprietary

• Movie streaming company Netflix have once again reiterated that have no plans to support Linux anytime soon.

Instructionals/Technical

• One of my first experiences with network security was building firewalls for small offices and Internet cafés. Our boss at the time was adamant that we use open source, and directed us to OpenBSD and “pf”, their packet filtering firewall. It was a good call. OpenBSD proved to be rock solid, and pf was easy to configure and easy to maintain. Fast-forward a little over a decade and I’ve just finished installing a new pf-based firewall, this time as an entire FreeBSD distribution called pfSense.

Games

• Aside from having an obscure name, making Escape From Booty Bay an interesting open-source game is that it’s built atop EFL, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

• Escape From Booty Bay is built using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and is described as ” a physics puzzle game in which players operate a cannon to stop pirates escaping from the prison. As players advance through the game levels, difficulty increases and new challenges are placed, like firing against moving targets.”

• There’s been a discussion that organically started within the forums concerning whether Linux is a “very weak system for gaming”, with a variety of reasons being expressed by a number of different Linux users. There’s now more than 100 comments on the topic, but do you think Linux can succeed as a first-rate gaming platform?

• In terms of stability and flexibility, Linux blew away its proprietary counterparts a long time ago. What it sorely lacks is developer interest, especially in the gaming department. But there are signs of a major revival. To the delight of Linux gaming enthusiasts, EA started publishing games in Ubuntu Software Center in May 2012. Valve on the other hand is taking things to the next level by actively developing a Linux port of their popular game Left 4 Dead 2. To celebrate the occasion, we have put together a collection of 20 most exciting games for Linux (not essentially released in 2012 itself and in no particular order). Hope you like it.

• Valve is expected to have the initial Steam Linux client available in the near future along with the Left 4 Dead 2 game in some form of beta, but a full-blown Linux push by Valve Software might not happen until around February.

• Gabe Newell has publicly said yes to having Steam on Linux this year and that the Linux beta will be soon, but I am hearing now that their official Linux push might not be until February of 2013.

• Steam Greenlight is a new system that uses community votes in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam.

• Developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game as early in the development process as they like.

• Valve is beginning to roll out the “Big Picture” mode today for their Steam game distribution client.

• Big Picture is the new user-interface Valve’s targeting as a full-screen mode for running Steam on your television set and other devices with very large displays. This is also leading to their eventual foray as a Linux-based gaming hardware console.

• Isn’t it funny how the whole tech blog universe must light up with this perpetual cycle of unmitigated hype, hostility to lash out at anybody like me who calls “B.S.”, and then a month later: It never happened?

• GarageGames will make its flagship engine, Torque 3D, available for free with an open source license in a few weeks, as part of the company’s efforts to realign its goals.

• The engine will be released to Github under the MIT free software license, offering Torque 3D 1.2′s complete source code and four starting templates. GarageGames’ Dave Wyand will lead open source development and oversee future updates.

• Linux gaming has acquired bigger dimensions lately, after the active involvement of well known commercial games developing studios and other independent efforts, but we should not forget to support the great selection of open source games that Gnome users can enjoy!

Desktop Environments

• It’s benchmark season again and as I have raised some concerns about the results of the published benchmark, I was asked to properly explain my concerns without making it look like a rant. So this is what I try with this blog post.

• Given the results of the published benchmark, I could go “Wooohooo, KWin’s the fastest!”, but instead I raise concerns. I don’t see that in the data and I hope nobody else sees that in the published data.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.

• Indeed, in spite of the disbelief, people do realize that it is up to them to make things happen, that it is unrealistic to wait for it to magically occur at the hands of others and so they dig in and get it done, thankfully often with great joy. (Most of us working on Free software love what we do.)

• The Randa meetings have hosted discussions on KDE’s libraries, Plasma, multimedia, messaging and more. These discussions resulted in significant decisions being made that were unlikely to be achieved with the quality and quickness experienced at such a meeting. Those decisions translated into improvements in our software … a lot of improvements. This time around the topics in focus are education, accessibility, multimedia and the Plasma Workspaces. Each of these four topics has a group of committed developers and contributors coming to Randa to work on them. Yes, it’s four developer sprints in one!

• 21 year old twins from Greece are two of the dedicated people headed for Randa, Switzerland to work on KDE software. Giorgos and Antonis Tsiapaliokas are working on Plasmate, the KDE Software Development Kit for Plasma Workspaces. Giorgos wrote about his KDE background and what is motivating him to be part of the intensive coding in Randa.

• The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.

• Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

• These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier versions. The release only contains bugfixes and translation updates so it is a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

• Truth to be told, I’m writing this article something like three, three and a half months after my original Kubuntu Pangolin rather lukewarm review, but to be in line with the same take on SUSE, which took place 60 days after the initial piece, the title here was chosen as it is, just slightly misleading. Anyhow, it’s been a while since I first installed the latest Long Term Release version of Ubuntu, the one adorned with the KDE desktop. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by the spring edition, as it showed a definite neglect when compared to its sweet big brother. In a way, it got the attention you reserve for bastard children, in a medieval setting, of course. Today, everyone loves their children equally, right.

GNOME Desktop

• With Gnome 3.6 still being on beta (3.5.90), the discussions about the features of the upcoming 3.8 have already begun. It is not surprising that the first feature that is under examination is Fallback Mode.

• Yeap it is official by FSF Free Software Definition. Fedora isn’t free software. Linux (kernel) isn’t free software. Firefox isn’t Free Software. Pretty much there isn’t Free Software (FS), but we can baptize things by occasion as FS.

• Trisquel according to FSF is one of the nine distributions that they meet the FSF’s strict guidelines by completely eschewing proprietary components.

• Few days ago I installed Gnome Shell 3.5.91 in my Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta setup. and I’ve a mixed feeling about the new version of Gnome Shell, which is going to be called as Gnome Shell 3.6.

• This new version introduces many changes and improvements and is definitely worth an upgrade. So I’m sharing my feelings about this version of Gnome Shell on Ubuntu. Note that Ubuntu 12.10 is still in beta and so is Gnome Shell. Though there shouldn’t be any visible changes since feature freeze and UI freeze is already over.

• Gnome 3.6 beta has been out for a while, but not available for testing without compiling the software, so I was pleased to see that a live image is available- basically running on an alpha release of Fedora 18.

• I was familiar with what was coming from a post at As far as I know. There are descriptions of changes with screenshots there, so I’ll just add a few personal comments.

• Even if GNOME 3.6 has not yet been released, the GNOME developers published some of the features that will be implemented in the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 3.8.

• According to the GNOME developers, it looks like GNOME 3.8 will fix or even drop the Fallback Mode, because it has become less and less useful and because it does not work as it should. More details can be found here.

Distributions

• Here’s a quick interview with Constantine Apostolou who is the creator and maintainer of the Cinux Linux distribution. Creating an operating system from scratch has its difficulties, but also its good parts. Constantine explains this process and gives us more details about his own baby – Cinux!

• The start of the month has seen the latest release, 7.2, of Linux From Scratch (LFS). The new edition of the guide that shows users how to create their own Linux system from the source code is now based on a toolchain that uses glibc (GNU C Library) 2.16.0 and GCC (GNU compiler collection) 4.7.1. There are, in all, 26 other components that have had their instructions in the DIY Linux guide updated, including Linux 3.5.2, Kmod 9, Perl 5.16.1 and, Udev 188 (extracted from systemd).

• Just a few days ago I wrote about Edubuntu, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted to the “market” of teachers, students, pupils and everyone in the industry of education.

• You can install this operating system on a Linux Desktop or Laptop, which you bought for your child or yourself.

• A huge factor in this project’s early success is its ability to maintain state-of-the-art Linux components without compromising on the Gnome 2 user experience. SolusOS’s development team has molded a classic Gnome 2 menu using Gnome version 3.4.2 with no new user interface.

• Once again I’ve compiled some charts to show what the major, full desktop distributions look like while running on limited hardware.

New Releases

• Pat called another round of testing due to changes and more bug fixes towards a stable Slackware 14.0 release by announcing RC4. While some may be disappointed due to delay to the release, but they must understand that Patrick has it’s own standard when talking about stability and security in Slackware. He never prefer to have early release when he thinks it’s not ready yet. So, please test this release and make sure all the major bugs has been resolved.

• Slackware is bound to be about ready, Patrick’s on his fifth release candidate for Pete’s sake. Fortunately, his steganographical message in the latest changelog said, “Really, this time it is not a drill! Everything is in place and ready to release at this point.”

• A shiny new GeeXboX release has arrived! GeeXboX 3.0 is a major upgrade that integrates XBMC 11 “Eden” and adds the long-requested PVR functionality. This means you can finally use GeeXboX to watch and record live TV too! In addition to our usual x86 ISOs, this release is also available for several embedded platforms, with working full HD video and graphics acceleration for most of them.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Katherine Noyes wrote her opinion about the new release of PCLinuxOS here. When I read it, I did not pay a lot of attention mainly because of one reason: I had installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6 in both my desktop and experimental laptop and I was very satisfied with its performance. Therefore, I thought, is it really necessary to bother downloading the PCLOS 2012.08 .iso, burning it to a DVD, and installing it if my computers are doing OK? After all, as a PCLOS newbie, I did not want to break a system that was working as expected.

• Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.

• Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2, it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.

• It’s no mystery that Mageia depends on the conjunction of many contributors and many donors. Totally. Some provide the financial and technical means for the project – some provide their skills and time to make it go ahead.

• So here’s a quick, mid-year, report of how we have used the money we received. Mostly – for building our technical infrastructure.

• For 2012 alone, to this date with a budget of about 10k€:

• *

• about 80% has been invested in our infrastructure; this means: domain names, certificates, hosting and most importantly, server hardware: in July and August, we purchased and installed 2 new, rather expensive servers in Marseille Lost-Oasis datacenter, to improve the distribution’s building and packaging; *

• about 10% has been used for transportation, people to events or to go to the datacenter for maintenance operations; *

• about 7% percent has been used for marketing materials.

• ROSA, previously known for ROSA Marathon 2012, a Mandriva fork with five-year support, has now released a test version of an enterprise Linux server distribution. According to the release announcement, the beta version of ROSA Enterprise Linux Server (RELS) “Helium” is based on Red Hat and Mandriva server solutions.

• Since its inception, Mandriva has been known for delivering solutions that are easy to use. Since the beginning of 2012, many things have happened ; and very soon you will see the release of new products that help businesses with the tools they need for their infrastructure and their IT.

• Breaking news! Mandriva is not dead. Or maybe it was and came back to life, not as a zombie (Bernie Lomax) this time, but as a modest, yet persistent dog that simply refuses to give up the race.

Red Hat Family

• In 2002, Linux was on its way to becoming a major business operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Then, Red Hat dedicated itself to make Linux an enterprise operating system. Ten years later Red Hat was the first billion dollar pure play open-source company. Today, Red Hat announced a similar plan for the OpenStack cloud.

• Just as with Linux, Red Hat knows there’s no way it can make OpenStack the de facto cloud software of choice for the enterprise by itself. In a blog posting, Red Hat’s OpenStack team wrote, “A huge community is contributing to OpenStack. More than 180 participating companies and 400 contributing developers have produced six software releases in just a little over two years. Some organizations will choose to leverage all that innovation directly by implementing, testing, patching and supporting community releases on their own.”

• Red Hat, Inc. is expanding its engineering headquarters at 413 Littleton Road from 75,000 square-feet to 175,000-square feet. The shell of the addition is expected to be completed by the end of December, according to project manager David Ferreira of the Gutierrez Company of Burlington. Gutierrez is overseeing the ongoing project.

• The current practice of public procurement of IT solutions is a barrier to the development of a healthy industry of open source service providers, says Jim Whitehurst, the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. He also says that public administrations and open source software are a natural fit, since this type of software allows them to share and reuse software solutions.

Fedora

• The last time I tried to install and run the Cinnamon desktop on top of Fedora, I hit a snag and the review ended with a rather uninspiring screenshot of a failed loading of the desktop. This happened after using an external repository source for the Cinnamon installation.

• Since, I’ve been mailed by lots of people, including the Fedora Community Chief Simian, as his very signature proclaims, and they all told me that Cinnamon is now available in the official repositories and that I should retest with this new source. Which is exactly what I did. I will not keep you in eternal suspense, so I’m going to tell you upfront. It worked this time. But what about my overall satisfaction? Ah, well, you will have to scroll down a bit for that. Fedora + Cinnamon, take two. Action.

• The Konqueror web browser has been replaced by Firefox, for example, and VLC has replaced other video players. This reduces the amount of time a new user needs to spend hunting down software packages and makes the environment feel more friendly. In addition, Kororaa comes with several third-party repositories enabled, allowing users to simply open their package manager and find the software they need, rather than manually searching the web for repositories, enabling them and then searching for the package. Kororaa’s approach takes the headache out of finding software, or at least most of it. The graphical front-ends for YUM are still quite slow, but at least having YumEx available in the default installation makes up for the waiting by having an attractive and flexible interface.

• Packages and management of the same aside, Kororaa does a nice job of being a friendly desktop-oriented operating system. It’s cutting-edge, it is responsive and it comes with some great administrative utilities. The KDE edition provides a powerful, flexible desktop with a traditional layout and the distribution is easy to install. Despite some early problems I faced with updates and the boot loader, things got straightened out and Kororaa was, after that first day, a pleasant distribution to run. It’s modern, it comes with good software, a manual with a few helpful tips and the interface generally stays out of the way. If you’re a fan of Fedora and want to stay on the cutting edge without the hassles that upgrades and fresh installs bring, then Kororaa is a nice, friendly way to achieve that. It is essentially a ready-out-of-the-box desktop edition of Fedora and a welcome member of the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem.

• It’s rather old news, but today it has been finally set as default—yes the wallpaper for Fedora 18 Spherical Cow release. It took so much time because I didn’t manage to update the package that sets the defaults in time before Alpha freeze.

• The Fedora project has postponed the release of the Fedora 18 alpha by a further week. The delay was caused by various problems with the Anaconda installer, which is being given a face lift that required major restructuring work in this version of the Linux distribution. A proposal to continue using the version of Anaconda that was used in version 17 of Fedora was recently dismissed by the Engineering Steering Committee.

• I think most people are aware of the Humble Bundle which have been releasing a range of cool and great games on Linux since they started up. The games though has usually tended to be distributed as a tarball and doesn’t automatically integrate itself into your Fedora system like you would like. Well thanks to the cool effort called Mumble RPMS you can now turn all those tarballs from the Humble Bundle into nice RPMS for Fedora. So a big thanks to the author of Muble RPMS for doing this work!

• When Sperical Cow hits the digital shelves sometime in late October or early November, users will have to get used to a new firewall management application. Sperical Cow is, of course the code-name for Fedora 18, the next stable release of Fedora.

• On current versions of Fedora, the firewall management application is system-config-firewall, a static firewall application that requires a refresh of the firewall with any rule change. The new application will provide a dynamic system that will not require a refresh or reload of the firewall, even after a rule change.

Debian Family

• Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Running an alpha version of an operating system, Linux or otherwise, is quite a different experience. It means, for instance, that you are not allowed to complain when minor things have bugs or simply don’t work – it is all par for the course, after all this is alpha software. That doesn’t mean however that when you do run into problems that it doesn’t still suck.

• Ubuntu and Canonical have come a long way since their 7.04 Feisty Fawn release, which followed Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Back then, Canonical failed to capitalise on Vista’s universal rejection by its users. But it’s now 2012, and things are different. Does Ubuntu 12.04 have what it takes to position itself as a more usable alternative to Windows 8? We put both operating systems in front of 18 testers to find out…

• Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

• Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around. The next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just reached beta phase. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu’s best features so far.

• The Ubuntu sponsor last week released an upgrade of its Landscape systems management platform that offers a bevy of new features including enhanced reporting capabilities for compliance management, roles-based access control, a robust API, bare metal provisioning capabilties and better integration with the Ubuntu 12.04 platform.

• At LinuxCon 2012, and CloudOpen, Canonical touted its pioneering work with OpenStack and said it intends to position its next platform – Ubuntu 12.10 in October — with Juju and Charm technologies as the Cloud for human beings, much the way it positions its current OS as Linux for human beings. Its five-month-old Ubuntu 12.04 was the first commercial distribution to incorporate OpenStack.

• Stephen Fry is more than just a a revered actor, writer and comedian: he’s also an Ubuntu user.

• The alternate installer, required when users want to configure cryptsetup, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or software-based RAID arrays during installation, may disappear from Ubuntu as early as version 12.10. The idea is mooted in a proposal put forward by Steve Langasek, Engineering Manager at Canonical’s Ubuntu Foundation.

• Amazingly while Ubuntu is moving more and more towards Unity and Gnome 3, there are quite a few distro hugging the limelight with their remixed Gnome 2 offerings. Kiwi Linux is one such distro – it takes you back to the classic Gnome 2 days. I guess users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will love Kiwi, 12.04 has changed a lot for many of them!

• Forget colourful foliage and dropping temperatures, nothing says autumn for Linux nerds like the arrival of an Ubuntu beta. This season includes twice the fun, with Canonical plotting not one, but two betas for the coming Quantal Quetzal, or Ubuntu 12.10. The first arrived on Thursday.

• Quantal Quetzal comes hot on the heels of the 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release earlier this year and – at least for more conservative users – is unlikely to be a high priority upgrade. LTS editions of Ubuntu are delivered every two years and have extended support from Canonical.

• Olli Ries, Director of Technology at Canonical shared information about some new features in Ubuntu 12.10 that will help in generating affiliate revenue for Ubuntu project.

• Music and Video Lenses, will have a “more suggestions” category that is added to search results obtained from the home dash. This will help users to find content available online in addition to what already resides on their device. All these results can be previewed from dash itself through new ‘Unity Previews’ feature available in Ubuntu 12.10.

Flavours and Variants

• Where do you live? I don’t know the rules of your residence country, but Russia, where I was born and spent most of my life, has a rule: the 1st of September is the start of the school year. Even if this day falls on a weekend, like we have it in 2012, schoolchildren must have their great event, especially those who go to school for the first time in their lives.

• Today we review a fresh Linux distribution from France called Emmabuntüs. Their first major release of Emmabuntüs 2 1.01 is based on Xubuntu12.04. This distro was designed to facilitate the refurbishing of computers given to human help associations, especially Emmaüs communities (where the name comes from) and promote the discovering of Linux and GNU by beginners. The goal of this thousandth Linux distro is intended to be sleek, accessible, equitable.

• If your like me, no Linux distribution or desktop environment suites you just right. I always seem to have to work around something or with something that just doesn’t suit me.

• Cinnamon 1.6 (along with Muffin 1.1.0 and Nemo 1.0.1) was released yesterday. You can read the release announcement and an overview of the new features at: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=207

Devices/Embedded

• A major deal will see a Sony factory in Wales crank out thousands of the Linux mini-computers, proving that not all low-cost electronics need be made in China.

• The Raspberry Pi finally saw a release on February 29 this year and is thought to have sold 200,000 units, with a million expected to ship before the year is over. That’s a lot of tiny PCs, but it’s also been an opportunity for owners to feedback any problems or tweaks they’d like made to the board.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the feedback on board and today announced a revised design is being put into production. The new Raspberry Pi, known as revision 2.0 PCB, is expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. The only way you’ll be able to tell which version you have is when you receive it, hook it up, and type “cat/proc/cpuino” in a terminal. if the code that appears is 4, 5, or 6 then you have the new board, otherwise a 2 or 3 signifies the original board.

Phones

Android

• After the Raspberry Pi, the APC and Hackberry A10 are the latest entrants in the hugely popular line of ultra small motherboards designed to run any thing from the Android OS to trimmed down Linux distributions. But keep in mind that these are development boards, not mobos that you can buy and build a standard desktop computer from.

• No wonder they are popular with tinkerers, developers and wannabe DIYers. No doubt that they will eventually go mainstream, but for now, these boards are a hacker’s delight. This article presents a casual comparison of the Android Personal Computer (APC) and the Hackberry A10.

• NASA is aiming to launch a line of small satellites called “PhoneSats” that are cheaper to make and easier to build than those it has produced in the past. To achieve this, engineers are using unmodified Android smartphones — in one prototype, HTC’s Nexus One, and in another, Samsung’s Nexus S — to perform many of a satellite’s key functions.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• This highly detailed review introduces Google’s first Android tablet: the Nexus 7, made by Asus. After briefly comparing the device’s features and specs to those of several other leading 7-inch tablets, we’ll examine the Nexus 7′s Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) user interface, and then demonstrate a selection of useful Android tools and apps for system management, communications, social networking, media streaming, entertainment, and productivity.

• I love my Nexus 7. It’s replaced my Apple iPad for daily use. But, at 7-inch display, people who want a full-sized tablet don’t like it as much as I do. For them, the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its 8.9-inch display, 16GBs of storage, and a price of only $299 may just hit their sweet spot

• Don’t think for a minute that the Kindle Fire HD is just for home-users. True, it’s got lots of consumerish features such as FreeTime, so your kids won’t spend all day on the tablet; Dolby audio for music and movies; X-Ray for Movies, which will let you get film info from IMDB while you’re watching a film; and so on. That’s all nice, but it was the business features that caught my eye.

• The 9.4-inch Xperia Tablet S is Sony’s latest shot at an Android slate. “Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Google tablet is priced at $200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.

• Over the years, I’ve heard (and I keep hearing) that you can’t do this or you can’t do that or you can’t do the other thing using Linux or using Open Source software. And guess what? Most of those things I’ll never do or rarely, if ever, need to do. As I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, I really don’t care what other people think or what they use their computers and devices for. None of that has any bearing on what I need and what to do.

• We wrap up our investigation of vector graphics editors with a look at Adobe’s Illustrator, along with a selection of more specialist applications, including Microsoft’s Visio and the free, open-source LibreOffice Draw.

• Melbourne is one of many cities around the globe that will mark Software Freedom Day next Sunday, September 15.

• Technology history is one of software platforms and control over those platforms. Generally, the more companies allowed to participate in a platform the more growth that platform can generate, because no one company can possess all the good ideas.

LinuxCon

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s mobile operating system project used to be called Boot To Gecko, but a series of images have revealed a platform, now called Firefox OS, which promises to deliver speed and portability through the use of HTML5.

• Firefox OS is a mobile ecosystem built entirely to Open Web standards. It will enable a revolutionary approach to smartphone software development, where every application can be written in HTML5. Mozilla’s European president Trsitan Nitot told TechWeekEurope that he expects to see hundreds of thousands of developers building apps for the new platform.

SaaS

• The official debut of the independent OpenStack Foundation was welcomed by most as a big step forward to establishing an open cloud but the inclusion of two big league proprietary vendors, namely VMware and Cisco, has raised a few eyebrows.

• As the OpenStack Foundation prepares to launch its most advanced open source cloud platform code-named “Folsom” within weeks, the organization held a coming-out day to celebrate its official independence, its ability to attract more than 180 companies and an excess of $10 million in funding and the acceptance of last-minute bigwig members Intel, NEC and VMware.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.

• While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are proud to announce the release of GNU Health 1.6.3, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version brings major improvements in the hospital information system, both from the administrative and patient management. Here is a quick summary of the main changes…

• The United Nations International Institute for Global Health UNU-IIGH – have sucessfully delivered another GNU Health training, in their “Free Software Hospital Information System Development Workshop” .

• The workshop was held during September 10-14th, at the the United Nations University facilities in Malaysia. There were delegates from Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, Tajikistan, Sudan, Kenya and Morrocco.

Project Releases

Licensing

• In the early days of commercial open source, misinformation was a major impediment to adoption. Many enterprises, for example, explicitly forbade usage of code released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). When asked about the justification for this prohibition, the most common response centered around difficult-to-articulate concerns about being compelled to open source code they did not wish to. The fear that this “viral” license would infect their private repositories was rampant.

• The truth, as became obvious following the mainstream adoption of GPL-licensed projects like Linux and MySQL, is that this was never the risk it was perceived to be. Simple usage of these technologies does not trigger the reciprocal provisions of the license, those that require modifications to be distributed under the same terms as the original source code, i.e. the GPL. More to the point, even if it was the case that applications built on top of Linux or MySQL were regarded as modifications, enterprises would not be subject to the terms of the license because of the so-called ASP loophole.

Programming

• Organising a conference is hard work. That’s one reason why there are as yet no formal bids to host the Australian national Linux conference in 2014.

• And the one group said to be putting together a bid, a group from Perth, is looking for a professional body to take over the organising.

Standards/Consortia

• The big news in the standards arena yesterday was a joint announcement by five of the standards setting organizations (SSOs) that have been most essential to the creation of the Internet and the Web: IEEE, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Internet Society (the last three being closely affiliated entities).

• Joint announcements by SSOs are rare, and the subject matter of this announcement was more so: each organization was joining in the endorsement of a set of five principles that they assert support a “new paradigm for standards” development.

Leftovers

• The BBC have recently written about a sample of PC’s in a study being pre-loaded with malware intentionally prior to buying them , so with the best will in the world on behalf of the consumer, you’ve lost before you have begun.

Health/Nutrition

• A decade and a half after farmers began planting the first genetically engineered (GE) crops, the future is clear. The scientists who pioneered genetic engineering thought of themselves as environmentalists, creating products that could reduce pesticide use. Instead, they have simply perpetuated the same “pesticide treadmill” as their pesticide-peddling counterparts resulting in the application of a greater volume of ever more toxic pesticides.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin?

• Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008.

• The future of New York’s water supplies and the health of its millions of citizens hang in the balance as Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to end the state’s moratorium on new wells to drill for “natural” gas through the controversial industrial process of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Activists estimated that over two thousand concerned citizens joined the march in Albany Monday to try to persuade Cuomo not to lift the moratorium — statewide or in some counties — a decision expected to be announced some time after Labor Day.

• Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” — a day of action against fracking — coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options.

Finance

• The National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business are working to make the anti-regulatory fervor their members share an issue in the last weeks of the campaign.

• The chamber and the manufacturers group have taken out issue ads saying the expense to business in complying with federal regulations is killing job creation. NFIB local affiliates are conducting tours and news conferences to let small business owners present their personal stories.

• Despite the divide-and-conquer tricks of both the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right, Occupy and the Tea Party were originally protesting the exact same thing: the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. Conservative and liberal protesters both railed against the unchecked power of the Federal Reserve.

• On Sept. 13, Harold Hamm, chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about achieving energy independence. He said his company, an oil producer, could produce much more if federal policies didn’t hold it back. Among them is the tax system. Mr. Hamm said his company paid an effective tax rate of 38 percent.

• Since we seem destined to have a national debate on the topic of government freeloaders in the wake of the Romney fundraising video, it might be worth asking how we think about someone getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for sitting on a corporate board for which they did little obvious work. Erskine Bowles, a possible future Treasury Secretary, is of course the poster child for such people.

• Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.

• The entire backdrop to this transaction is problematic. An FHFA official “wondered whether Fannie Mae squeezed Bank of America hard enough on price considering the bank was benefiting by “getting this stuff off their books.”

• Asian stock markets rebounded Friday, led by gains in technology and oil companies, despite uncertainty about the fragile global economy.

• Crude rose above $93, clawing back some of its recent large fall and helping to boost energy stocks.

• Strong orders for Apple’s iPhone 5, which went on sale Friday starting in Asia, gave a general boost to sentiment in the technology sector.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Negotiations between the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) failed to result in a contract before Sunday, September 9, 2012 at midnight, sparking the first teacher’s strike in Chicago in 25 years. The strike is now in its second day.

• The last teacher walk-out in 1987 lasted 19 days. Many hope and expect that this strike will be short-lived, both sides of the negotiations say they are close to a compromise, but have yet to settle important issues such as how much teachers will pay for their health benefits and how teachers will be evaluated.

• This final set of issues comes on top of a long series of demands made by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration which included longer work days, a longer school year, new ways of evaluating and rewarding teachers, and an expansion of non-union charter schools in the city. CTU leaders also cited concerns such as a lack of professional development opportunities, and the lack of air-conditioning in many sweltering classrooms. The union was pleased however to restore through negotiations some of the art, music, world language, technology, and physical education classes cut by the administration earlier.

• Manufacturers of flame retardant chemicals, an industry that got a boost from Big Tobacco’s shadow money decades ago, are being exposed to increased public scrutiny. In the fallout, a front group formed by the three biggest manufacturers, calling itself “Citizens for Fire Safety,” has been shuttered.

• The Chicago Tribune published its “Playing with Fire” series in May 2012, catapulting highly toxic flame retardants — present in many household consumer products — into the national spotlight. In the process, it not only highlighted the work of a handful of chemists who’ve been fighting to ban the most toxic of these chemicals, but it also exposed the “deceptive tactics” of the industry’s main front group.

Censorship

• An analysis of the orders issued by the Ministry of Communication & IT makes it difficult to discern the intentions of the authorities. The specific URLs sought to be blocked included the domains of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, Google Plus, Wikipedia, Times of India, Al Jazeera, FirstPost and other websites.

• Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides the Central Government, the power to block access by the public of any information, to maintain public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offense amongst other things.

• We write to you as the consultation on parental controls closes. In recent years there have been two comprehensive reviews into the issue of child safety online, the Byron Review and the Bailey Review. They considered a wealth of academic expertise, parental concerns and technical input and both arrived at the same conclusion – parents are the best people to decide what their children can see.

• Due to some problems with their website, the European Commission have extended the deadline for submissions to the ‘notice and takedown’ consultation. This is actually pretty good news for anyone who has yet to submit a response – you still have until Tuesday 11th September to have your say. The Commission are asking for responses to a questionnaire.

• The European Commission is holding a consultation -ending on the 5th 11th of September- about “A clean and open Internet”. Citizen input is critically needed to ensure that freedom of expression is protected, against the attempts of many lobbies to impose draconian repressive procedures to censor online content.

• It’s been a while since I wrote an article for OpenBytes. So I’m to look at a subject which is all over the news at the moment, but in this case take a look at it from a slightly different perspective.

Civil Rights

• Tonight at 7:45pm PST (4:45am CET), Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net will receive his 2012 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at a ceremony in the Project One Gallery in San Francisco. The whole team of La Quadrature du Net thanks EFF and congratulates Jérémie.

• A photo published by the Mail Online, shows one of the two women who accused besieged Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange of “rape”, happily smiling with him at a party … two days after he allegedly “raped” her. This casts even further doubt on what is already a highly dubious story, as it seems very unlikely that a rape victim would voluntarily attend a party with her would-be “rapist” at all, much less be smiling about it for the camera.

• Although the woman, known only as “Woman A”, has had her face obscured in the photo “for legal reasons”, The Mail reveals she’s 33 years old, which by a process of simple elimination means she must be Anna Ardin (who also goes by the pseudonym “Bernardin”), the 33 year-old militant feminist currently in hiding in the American-Israeli occupied West Bank, not her co-accuser, 28 year-old Sofia Wilén.

• The basis for both women’s accusations is also highly dubious. In Ardin’s case her sole claim to “rape” is that Assange’s condom broke during sex, and Wilén’s complaint (which she only made under coercion from Ardin) is that he didn’t wear one at all, but she “couldn’t be bothered” telling him to put one on. Suffice it to say Sweden’s “rape” laws are quite bizarre, if they seriously want to extradite Assange on the basis of something as trivial as “condom incompetence”. And that’s assuming any of their claims are true at all, given that Wilén’s testimony was apparently “embellished” by the police, and Ardin found it necessary to subsequently delete SMS and Twitter messages to cover up her distinct lack of emotional trauma after supposedly being “raped”. In fact, quite why Sweden felt it necessary to issue a European Arrest Warrant to extradite Assange in the first place is a bit of a mystery, given that they had more than adequate opportunity to question him while he was in Sweden, but chose to let him go, then bluntly refused to question him in the UK later. This is by far the most suspicious “rape” case I’ve ever heard of.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For some months now, there have been intense discussions on the threats raised by the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). In December, the 193 Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, will gather in Dubaï for this important conference aimed at amending the ITU’s founding treaty, the “International Telecommunication Regulations” (ITRs).

Copyrights

• The reverberations from yesterday’s Supreme Court of Canada copyright decisions will be felt for years (good coverage of the decisions include posts from Mark Hayes, IP Osgoode, Barry Sookman, Howard Knopf, the Toronto Star, and the CBC). While much of the coverage has focused on the music downloading issue, the continued expansion of fair dealing is perhaps the most significant development.

• I focused on the court’s expansive view of fair dealing in an earlier post, but I think it is worth digging a bit deeper to ask whether Canada has now effectively shifted from fair dealing to fair use. The Copyright Act obviously still speaks of fair dealing, but the expansion by the courts and the legislature may have effectively rendered it very close to fair use.

• Under a fair use system (such as that found in the U.S. or Israel), the list of qualifying categories or purposes is illustrative rather than exhaustive. In other words, the statute identifies purposes that may qualify as fair use, but acknowledges that the courts may add new purposes as they see fit. The key to fair use therefore lies not in the purposes – virtually any copying can qualify – but rather in the analysis that follows over whether the particular use is fair. The flexibility of fair use has been lauded as one of its great benefits, opening the door to new innovation that politicians might not envision when drafting the law.

• The Internet Archive has just enriched the BitTorrent ecosystem with well over a million torrent files, and that’s just the start of “universal access to all knowledge.” The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Founder Brewster Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.

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