● 09.28.12

● Links 28/9/2012: NVIDIA 304.51 Linux Graphics Driver, ZaReason Tablet

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The U.S. unemployment rate is slowly getting better, thank goodness. But with the unemployment rate at 8.3%, few people are saying the great recession is over.

• The past six months or so have seen a veritable flurry of tiny, Linux-powered PCs descend upon the market, including not just the widely embraced Raspberry Pi but also the Mele A1000, the MK802, and the Oval Elephant, to name just a few.

• A US congressmen has been left incensed after miscreants installed Linux on computers at his campaign office, possibly thrashing some data in the process.

• Michael Grimm, a Republican who represents a district in New York covering Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, has slammed the weekend break-in to his offices on as a “politically motivated” crime against the democratic process.

• As a general rule, OS X is not really best buddies with its Linux distribution cousins.

• The reasons vary, depending on who you ask. But at the end of the day, the division is a solid one. Still, it is worth mentioning that since today’s Mac runs with an Intel CPU, most Linux distributions run great on it.

• As luck would have it, the Mac’s compatibility with Linux recently saved my bacon after my wife’s iMac went into a bit of a meltdown.

• This is a walk-through detailing how Ubuntu 12.04 saved my wife’s Mac (data).

• There’s been a seemingly endless parade of tiny, Linux-powered PCs entering the market in recent months, including most recently the $49 Cubieboard and the $89 UG802.

Desktop

• Could Mozilla’s announcement of the Boot to Gecko roadmap, along with the continued development of other web-based operating systems, make which Linux distro you’re running less important than the desktop environment?

• All this talk of GNU/Linux not making it on the desktop is hypothetical. Where GNU/Linux was tried it has done well. In Portugal, some locally-built PCs were produced in several models. One of them had GNU/Linux and because of that had a lower price for software and better hardware. The result? It earned a decent share of the market, 10%. So, the fools who proclaim GNU/Linux has only 1% share due to geeks miss the effect of barring GNU/Linux from retail shelves, something totally on the supply-side. Consumers will choose GNU/Linux if it is offered.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• “Data in the computer is stored in files that are written on the hard disk which is like a giant closet with millions of drawers and each drawer has the same capacity (usually 512 bytes). If the data is stored in contiguous drawers, it can be accessed faster than if it was in a discontinuous (fragmented) order into the closet. So far, it is understood that “things” can be found faster in an ordered closet than in a messy one. The problem is to know how to keep the closet organized when it is frequently used.”

Graphics Stack

• Before getting too excited though if you’re a NVIDIA Linux customer, this latest 304 series driver release is mostly about bug-fixing.

• Yesterday was released Nvidia 304.51, the new release comes with many bug fixes rather than new features or significant improvements. Simply put, 304.51 driver is the stable version of the 304.48 beta.

Applications

• Two new stable versions have been released today: 1.1.0 and 2.0. Even though the features are same in both versions, 2.0 comes with GTK3 (only works with GTK3.4+). An old issue where content of Nuvola Player was only partially rendered, did not update and was non-responsive has been fixed with the GTK3 port.

• One of the reasons I enjoy using the Ubuntu desktop is that it offers what feels like an endless list of software titles right at my finger tips. But with that many software titles, it should come to no surprise that not all of them are as good as they should be.

• It’s been just about two months since the launch of the first alpha version of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, and that release was followed by two more alpha iterations over the course of the summer.

Proprietary

• You can get almost anything on a stick these days, including an entire computer. OK, just the operating system — but that’s all you need to enjoy the ultimate in portability, security and privacy.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Initially StuntRally had a very “cheap” feel about it with many bugs and looked unfinished. However, as VDrift is maturing as a project, lot changes are coming to StuntRally. The project has moved ahead adding more material, fixing bugs and seems to add more fun.

• There has been inclusion of 8 VDrift tracks and the game now has a total of 91 different tracks which are categorized according to their terrain. Even though the number of tracks are enough to cater to different tastes, number of cars fails to satisfy the gamers. The community is doing great by contributing lot of new tracks but there is a dearth of new cars to test drive.

• Humble Bundle has launched Humble Indie Bundle 6 which includes six great cross platform games.

• Valve has announced that a beta for Steam on Linux will begin in October. According to a blog post on Valve’s site, internal beta testing will begin next week, followed by a private external beta for 1,000 users later in October.

• The private beta will include Steam and one Valve game and will support Ubuntu 12.04 and above. It will not yet include Big Picture Mode or additional Valve games. “For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux,” the post notes. “We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.”

• It’s out! Watch it on youtube now, or download it later… links to downloads will appear in this post once mirrors have been synced. Torrents will also appear. Have fun! We’re happy!

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE is one such project which is purely driven by a community which believes in free software, which believes in giving complete control of the system to its users.

• I recently switched to KDE and am really impressed with the work developers have done on it. These developers don’t have magic wand or heavy corporate backing to create what you and I use every day. These mortals work with each other to create one of the oldest desktop environments (KDE was founded in 1996, Gnome/Xfce in 1997), they mostly community through the web, but nothing can match face-to-face real world interaction where these developers meet with each other and discuss various aspects of KDE.

• Initially the idea was to get all the source code for the software running on one of the many tablets which are sold with Android. But the idea faced problems because only binary drivers are provided by the vendors which are useless for Mer.

• Even if enough source code

GNOME Desktop

• The next major update to the Cinnamon desktop environment is nearing its feature freeze and is well on its way to a release. In a blog post, Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre says that the development team is “extremely active” working towards the next 1.6.0 release of Cinnamon and he provides various details of the current state of development, including a list of planned features.

• The GNOME Project has released GNOME 3.6 today, the new version bringing many enhancements and new features, including a redesigned Message Tray, smarter notifications, improved Activity Overview layout, new design for Files (Nautilus) and a new lock screen. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia Linux is a distro brought to you by the same people who previously produced Mandriva Linux. The new distro, first released in September 2010, provides an easy to use environment for Linux newcomers or experts. It is particularly suited for game play and works well with various processors, sound and graphics cards.

• While the Raspberry Pi has grabbed the most headlines as a tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, it’s actually only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.” As we’ve noted, there are various pocket-size Android devices selling online for under $100 (see the photo). For example, these thumbdrive-style mini PCs are available on AliExpress for $74, which includes shipping. Now, some of the most talked about Linux PCs-on-a-stick are shipping: the “Cotton Candy” devices.

Red Hat Family

• Shares of enterprise software maker Red Hat (RHT) dipped 3.3% in midday trading on Tuesday, after the company late Monday reported a mixed bag of financial results.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) had its price target upped by Goldman Sachs to $58.00 in a research report sent to investors on Tuesday morning.

• Infor has certified some of its products for Red Hat’s Linux and JBoss middleware and added support for the MySQL and MariaDB databases, as part of a new push into open-source software, the companies announced Wednesday.

Fedora

• Fedora Linux has not typically been closely associated with the business world. That realm was instead the purview of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which sponsors Fedora as a community project and uses it as a proving ground for technologies that often later appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But if the upcoming release of Fedora 18 is any indication, the open source operating system may be poised to become more business friendly in its own right.

• The default look of the XFCE desktop in Fedora 17, is a little boring, but this post, show how to pimp it up to look really great.

• I started with a standard XFCE 4.8 Fedora installation and upgraded to XFCE 4.10.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• John Bernard, the marketing manager for Canonical’s OEM unit, will be leaving his position at the end of this week in order to move across to Mozilla’s mobile Firefox OS unit.

• A Canonical spokeswoman confirmed Bernard’s decision to change roles in a statement on Tuesday.

• See that motley crew above? That is my team, the Community Team at Canonical. I am blessed to have such a wonderful team; not only are they all fantastic community leaders, but they are just a fun bunch of guys in general to be around.

• “We have really been cranking up the level of effort with Landscape over the past year or so,” said Federico Lucifredi, Canonical’s Landscape product manager. “Landscape is a very important piece of our enterprise strategy, and so Canonical’s commitment has increased dramatically.”

• As an operating system that proclaims itself “cloud ready,” Ubuntu ought to make it as easy as possible to log in to remote PCs and servers from the Ubuntu desktop. And that’s just what users will be able to do in Ubuntu 12.10, which will feature a remote login feature in the greeter screen. Read on for a look.

• The first beta version of Ubuntu 12.10, code-named “Quantal Quetzal”, has been released for testing ahead of its October final release. The new version brings together a range of enhancements the developers have been working on, from reducing the number of install images, to making 3D accelerated desktops run on non-3D hardware, and switching to Python 3.0.

• You’ve probably heard the promises that desktop Linux is more secure, faster and cost-effective than proprietary platforms. But did you know it can also increase employee satisfaction? So says Canonical in its latest effort to promote Ubuntu in the workplace. Read on for a look at this and other talking points.

• Admittedly, the suggestion that installing Ubuntu on your business’s workstations “will actively improve the efficiency and job satisfaction of employees” is only one of the many reasons Canonical gives for switching to Ubuntu. And Canonical doesn’t discuss the claim in detail. That claim, by the way, came in an email announcing the availability of a white paper from Canonical titled, “Ubuntu Desktop for the Enterprise.”

• The developers of the GNOME desktop-based Ubuntu derivative have, under the name Ubuntu GNOME Remix, released their first alpha version of the distribution. Based on the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” release, the developers describe the Remix as a developer snapshot to “give a very early glance at the next version”.

• Canonical, the distributor of the Ubuntu variant of Linux, wants to be on the cutting edge and be stable at the same time. And as anyone who has dated knows, that is a tough balancing act that few people can manage. But a new strategy from Canonical will line up the fast-changing OpenStack cloud control freak that is part of the latest Ubuntu Server distribution with the Long Term Support stable version of the company’s Linux.

• About three weeks ago, I published automated LVM and disk encryption in a pre-release version of what will become Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal.

• We have shared a wonderful post on few must have apps for Ubuntu 12.04 and I would like to extend that list the below post. Before I get into this post, best free apps for Ubuntu 12.04, I would like you check the previously linked post.

• The Linux desktop has always been a balancing act between convenience on the one hand and security and privacy on the other. However, Ubuntu’s recent decision to add results from Amazon to desktop searches creates such an imbalance that I wonder just whose convenience is being considered — Ubuntu’s, or the users’?

• I’ve been reading with interest the issues raised by some over the recent news that Dash search results in Ubuntu 12.10 are to include searches with Amazon. As with any new announcement (and in particular with a big name distro such as Ubuntu) feelings are strong. ”It’s the end of the world”, “Canonical have shot themselves in the foot” and a cacophony of cries proclaiming the end of the world. The reality is somewhat different, but then especially with the more vocal names on the net, why let reality ruin a good end of the world story?

• The new integration of Amazon search results in Ubuntu Linux 12.10 has stirred up quite a hornet’s nest of controversy over the past week or so among observers unimpressed by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s calm assurances that users’ privacy would be maintained.

• GNOME and Windows 8 developments have resulted in some controversial changes for Ubuntu 12.10 (codenamed Quantal Quetzal), which has now reached the Beta 2 stage. Fortunately, solutions now seem to be in place in time for the 18 October release to proceed as scheduled. Canonical has generated further controversy by introducing online scope results, specifically from Amazon, into the Dash search.

Flavours and Variants

• With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as its underpinnings, Linux Mint 13 (Maya) was recently released in three versions, KDE (new), Xfce, and Gnome-Cinnamon. We tested each version separately and while we still like Mint, we’re accumulating a nagging list of bugs – some of which are the fault of Ubuntu, and some are the twists that Linux Mint takes on its own.

• Ubuntu’s reign on Linux desktop dominance may soon be under threat with two new releases from Mint, but far from simply being a different take on a user-friendly desktop, the new Mint 13 is important because it diverges dramatically from Ubuntu, upon which it’s based. And it does so because it’s challenging the very direction Ubuntu is taking.

• The cloud era is coming. Some people can argue whether this is good or bad. Maybe that’s only the fashion. Maybe not. Although more and more people think of the cloud as if it were the inevitable future.

• Zentyal is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Server. The current stable edition is Zentyal 2.2, with Zentyal 3 as the next stable version. Unlike other distributions that release at least two versions per year, Zentyal takes a less rapid-fire development model, releasing only one stable version per year.

• We are proud to announce today, September 3rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 operating system.

• I had Linux Mint 12 installed on my laptop for quite a while but I was never settled with it. The reason for this was the choice of desktop. The Samsung R20 laptop does not seem to handle the Cinnamon desktop at all well and the Gnome classic desktop was just a bit rigid.

• I therefore had wanted to use the Mate desktop. The trouble was that panels kept disappearing and once they had disappeared it was a real hassle to get them to come back again.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• The Linux Foundation has released the source code and SDKs for the first alpha version of Tizen 2.0, its Linux-based smartphone OS, further fueling speculation that Samsung might be close to releasing a handset based on the platform.

• You could be forgiven for assuming Tizen was dead in the water – if you’ve heard of it at all. It’s a combination of Nokia’s Maemo, Intel’s Moblin, and the two companies’ joint MeeGo project, none of which enjoyed any market success. We’ve heard nary a peep about it here at El Reg since the Linux Foundation announced it last September, and no phones running the OS are available commercially.

• Tizen 2.0, the open-source smartphone operating system, is now available as an alpha release with an accompanying Software Development Kit (SDK), the Tizen project announced on Tuesday. The release lends credence to rumors that project member Samsung Electronics is planning to launch a version of its Galaxy S3 smartphone running Tizen instead of Google’s Android.

• Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s sixth-biggest maker of mobile phones, is looking to its smartphones to outpace global growth rates and drive a consumer gadgets business that will rival its flagship telecoms gear in revenue.

• [...]

• “Whatever consumers like, we’ll develop,” Wan Biao, CEO of Huawei Device, said in an interview on Monday at the company’s headquarters. “We’re also devoting resources into coming up with a phone operating system based on our current platform in case other companies won’t let us use their system one day.”

Ballnux

Android

• If you’re not happy with your Android phone or tablet collecting your data and sending it to Google, you’re not alone. The Russian defense ministry announced a stripped-down and encrypted version of Google’s operating ssytem, destined for government and military devices, will also be on sale to the public.

• Boost Mobile (no long-term contracts) and LG are releasing the LG Venice, not in Venice, but in the US. It’s light – only 4.41 ounces, has a 1GHz processor combined with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and a LG Optimus 3.0 interface in a 4.3-inch, scratch-resistant touchscreen combined with a 5MP camera and VGA front-facing camera.

• A startup known as NexCrea is working on a concept Android smartphone that can be used as a handset, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

• Intel’s processor platform code-named Clover Trail for Tablets could bring support for Android OS in addition to Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS.

• Initially Intel had informed that the Clover trail chip was optimized for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, which is due for release late October. However, latest info from Intel says that they are now porting Android to Clover Trail chips. Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Lenovo have already announced Windows 8 tables based on Clover Trail while 20 other tablet designs are in development.

• Android may not be as fully open as many FOSS fans would like it to be, but the fact remains that it’s essentially the poster child for Linux’s success in the mobile world.

• So it was with some dismay that those of us here in the Linux blogosphere looked on at the impromptu battle that sprang up recently between Google and Acer over Alibaba’s Aliyun OS.

• For those who missed it, Google recently caused Acer to cancel the Chinese launch of its new CloudMobile A800 smartphone because of its disapproval of Alibaba’s operating system, which is apparently an incompatible Android fork offering pirated Android programs.

• AMD and Bluestacks have announced a partnership to bring Android apps to Windows 7 and 8 PCs and tablets.

• Sony Mobile has kept the release date of the 4.3-inch water-resistant Xperia V close to its chest up until now, only giving a vague Q4 launch. However, Swedish online retailer Dustin.se has recently put the phone up for pre-order with a 3rd December 2012 release date. Dustin.se has it priced at SEK 4,299 + VAT, at current exchange rates this translates to a pre-VAT price of £404, €508 and $656.

• Google’s Nexus One Android phones will be controlling a new fleet of mini-satellites from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a tech site reported over the weekend.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The launch of the KDE tablet Vivaldi has been postponed for now, following major setback. The project received a severe blow after the manufacturer of originally chosen Zenithink C71 tablet modified the system board of the device. This means that the numerous adjustments that were made to the Linux kernel to support the previous board have all gone waste and the developers now have to start the development work from scratch.

• Quite a few options exist as far as Android tablets go. Some of them are great choices for personal entertainment and media consumption. Google’s new Nexus 7 is a powerful little beast designed to serve up media from Google Play. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a great device for tapping Amazon’s extensive content offerings. Undoubtedly, these tablets were designed to direct more of your money to the tablet-maker’s on-line content marketplaces. The glaring lack of SD card expansion on these devices confirms this. The ZaReason team designed a tablet that can be what the user wants it to be—one that supports users’ own content, that is not necessarily tied to a particular content store and that can be used as far more than a simple consumption device. Have they succeeded in creating the world’s first open tablet? Let’s find out.

Free Software/Open Source

• We’ve followed Diaspora for a while now, since its beginning when it was the largest project Kickstarter had seen and was being called “the Facebook killer.” Two years later, the “open source social network” is becoming more open by turning into a community-run project, and the Diaspora team is launching a new project, Makr.io

• Free and open source software (FOSS) plays an indispensable role in developing countries. As it is often a substitute for more expensive proprietary software, it can impact the economy and progress of a country, like India, in a very positive way.

• Up until about ten years ago, it was extremely unfashionable to be a geek. Geeks were considered the black swans of the social world: they were perceived as having limited social skills, little interest in non-programming activities, and few friends.

• Fast forward to today, and things have changed significantly for the geek. Geeks today run the coolest companies, create the most cutting-edge trends, and are popular guests on the social circuit. And as the geek has evolved, so too has his or her skills: today’s geeks are not just clever programmers, but they also know how to finance and market their products.

• There are moments when Open Source religion gets in the way of a jolly good thing. Raspberry released a cut price computer with Linux on board to help kids learn programming. What could be wrong with that?

• Everything, according to Peter Zotov, who is a noted Open Source developer. Writing in White Quark, Zotov damns the Pi for not obeying the rules of true Open Source and therefore ruling it out for education purposes.

• He said that kids will not understand the reality of computing because the Pi is “a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations. It isn’t even remotely an open platform,” he wails. Apparently kids can only learn programming if everything is completely open source, true and pure as God, or Richard Stallman, intended.

• [John] I’m the original author of GNU Octave and have been it’s maintainer from the beginning, in 1992. When I first started working on Octave I was post-doctoral researcher and systems administrator at the University of Texas. Then from 1995 until 2008 I was a researcher at the University of Wisconsin. But most of my time from 1992 until 2008 was spent working on Octave. Now I have my own software support company focused on supporting Octave.

• In 2009, an artist named Kutiman launched a project called Thru-YOU (a play on YouTube) that aimed to show what open collaboration could be on the internet. He played the “YouTube Orchestra” for a series of video remixes that made the network effects of music video on the web powerfully clear.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• At Google I/O earlier this year, developers were given a glimpse of Movi.Kanti.revo, a new sensory Chrome experiment designed by Cirque du Soleil and developed by Subatomic Systems. For people who are not acquainted with Cirque du Soleil, it is a Canadian entertainment company, whose performances are described as a dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment.

• Google has released Chrome 22 in a final, stable version as the browser continues to grab substantial global market share. The release includes improvements for gamers, JavaScript performance enhancements, support for new, high-definition screens and more. Also this week, Google released a new version of Chrome for iOS that supports the iPhone 5. Here is more on what to expect in Chrome 22.

• Chrome 22 is available now as a download for Windows, the Mac and Linux. As noted on eWeek:

• On September 25th, Google has unleashed the stable and final release of the Google Chrome 22 web browser, supporting the Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms.

Mozilla

• David Boswell has a couple of interesting posts (here and here) about how he is using metrics to measure how effective Mozilla is at attracting and engaging people who express an interest in helping contribute to the Mozilla mission.

• Back in June, the Obama administration along with The National Science Foundation and Mozilla unveiled Ignite, “an initiative to promote US leadership in developing applications and services for ultra-fast broadband and software-defined networks.” The initiative was described as an incubator ecosystem that will hook people up with novel technology ideas with fast networks, advanced infrastructure and more. Mozilla said the program would identify developers who can “build apps for the future.”

• Now Mozilla and The National Science Foundation have announced eight winners in the program, with ideas that “offer a glimpse of what the Internet of the future might look like.”

• You can find out more about the winning projects here. They include an innovative open source web conferencing app and a 3D interactive telepresence application. The competition features $485,000 in prize money, and here are the initial eight winning concepts:

• Additionally, Mozilla showed off its homescreen, app grid, and lock screen, which feels like a nice mashup of WebOS and Android, while some of its built-in apps share a small bit of iOS’ skeuomorphic tendencies while being much more elegant and less gaudy. Overall, it’s a handsome-looking OS that appears to have had a lot of thought put into it long before a phone would be available in consumers hands — we imagine that it won’t need to go through the same major visual revisions that Android did over the years.

• Back in 2010, Mozilla’s was all over the place promoting the open source browser vendor effort to sync Firefox on Apple iOS devices.

• I first wrote about Firefox Home in May of 2010, then again in July 2010 when the App officially debuted.

• Now, two years later, Mozilla is throwing in the towel, giving up on Firefox Home.

• Firefox 15, which has been released a few days ago, comes with some cool features disabled by default: native PDF viewer, preferences in tab and click-to-play plugins.

• These features have been in testing for quite a while, but they are not 100% ready so they aren’t enabled by default and there are no options in the Firefox preferences to enable them. But, if you don’t mind an occasional glitch, you can enable them using the about:config tool.

• Ikey Doherty proudly announced yesterday, September 2nd, the immediate availability for download of Legacy Edition of his SolusOS 1.2 Linux operating system.

SaaS

• The much anticipated ‘Folsom” version of OpenStack debuted today with new networking and storage features and Hyper-V support; the next version, Grizzly, is due in March of 2013

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Tracks on development, marketing, migration and community success The Document Foundation to host official ODF Plugfest and ODF Plugtesting

• The Document Foundation Membership Committee administers membership applications and renewals. This is an important job because without them, LibreOffice wouldn’t get new contributers. The Document Foundation recently announced the results of the Membership Committee election.

• Has it been two years already? Apparently so, because today Italo Vignoli posted to The Document Foundation mailing list, “The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach the next stage.” They’ve come a long way in just two short years.

• When it comes to virtualization on the desktop, two products stand front and center: VMware Workstation and VirtualBox. The former is the long-standing original keeper of the flame, from the company that gave us PC-centric virtualization technology as we know it. The latter is an open source project now under the stewardship of Oracle, with its own strongly competitive set of features.

• Berlin, September 28, 2012 – The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010. During the last 12 months, the foundation was legally established in Berlin, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee were elected by TDF members, where membership is based on meritocracy and not on invitation, Intel became a supporter, and LibreOffice 3.5 and 3.6 families were announced. In addition, TDF has shown the prototypes of a cloud and a tablet version of LibreOffice, which will be available sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

CMS

Funding

• Storage startup Inktank announced on Tuesday that it has secured a $1 million investment from billionaire Linux mogul Mark Shuttleworth. The investment, which is in the form of a convertible note, will be used to bring Inktank’s open-source distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.

• McNealy covers a lot of topics. He discusses his new startup WayIn that provides a corporate social media experience. He jokingly says Larry (Ellison) never calls, referring to Oracle, which acquired Sun Microsystems, the company he co-founded.

• A well-known figure in Australian free and open source software circles has created an organisation to help individuals start businesses without the overheads that prevent people from doing so.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday September 28th, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Project Releases

• ACE is an open source embeddable code editor. The developers have just launched version 1.0 of ACE along with their new website. ACE is written in Javascript, its features and performance is claimed to match that of native editors such as Sublime, Vim and TextMate. It can be easily embedded in a webpage or Javascript application. It supports syntax highlighting for more than 40 languages and can handle documents with up to 4 million lines of code.

• Upgrade to the latest version of GStreamer now for bug fixes and plenty of new optimization tweaks

• Upgrade to the latest version of GStreamer now for bug fixes and plenty of new optimization tweaks

Public Services/Government

• French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has issued a missive to French ministers, including a complete action plan urging government usage of LibreOffice and PostgreSQL. But the action plan calls for more. As noted on Slashdot: “He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software. The administration already submits patches and bug fixes for the applications it uses, but Ayrault wants to go beyond that, contributing to or paying for the addition of new functionality to the software.” This is just the latest example of strong pushes in the direction of open source going on in Europe.

• French government agencies could become more active participants in free software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers, while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes free software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas.

• Do you see government as an institution without much room for growth and change? The open source way is creating a path for citizens to become empowered and help their community make improvements where traditional methods have failed—through active participation, gained knowledge, and a two-way conversation with city officials.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Only a signature away, Governor Jerry Brown will have an opportunity to lower the cost of college textbooks by creating the nation’s first free open source digital library for college students and faculty.

• Friday, the California State Senate unanimously passed the first of its kind open educational resource digital library, or (OER), offering students free access to textbooks in the most commonly taken lower-division courses at public postsecondary institutions.

Open Hardware

Standards/Consortia

• The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) said on Thursday that it has proposed a plan to move the HTML5 spec into its official “Candidate Recommendation” status by 2014, and then HTML5.1 by 2016. So far this plan hasn’t been approved by the HTML Working Group (WG), but it’s open for discussion within the group along with the Accessibility Task Force, and the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group.

Leftovers

Finance

• Wall Street lobbyists are awesome. I’m beginning to develop a begrudging respect not just for their body of work as a whole, but also for their sense of humor. They always go right to the edge of outrageous, and then wittily take one baby-step beyond it. And they did so again last night, with the passage of a new House bill (HR 2827), which rolls back a portion of Dodd-Frank designed to protect cities and towns from the next Jefferson County disaster.

• The SEC announced today that it has filed a “pay-to-play” case against Goldman, Sachs & Co. and one of its former investment bankers. The SEC alleges that Goldman and Neil M.M. Morrison, a former vice president in the firm’s Boston office, made undisclosed campaign contributions to then-Massachusetts state treasurer Timothy P. Cahill while he was a candidate for governor.

Censorship

• A Brazilian judge ordered the arrest of the head of Google’s operations in Brazil for failure to remove YouTube videos that attacked a mayoral candidate, which runs counter to the South American nation’s strict pre-vote electoral laws.

Privacy

• New Zealand’s spy agency illegally carried out surveillance on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, an official report showed Thursday, prompting an apology from the prime minister and dealing a possible blow to a U.S. bid to extradite him.

Civil Rights

• THE US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States – the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

• Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with “communicating with the enemy”, a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.