● 11.23.12

● Links 23/11/2012: Linux Mint 14 Released & Reviewed, Replicant 4.0

Posted in News Roundup at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’ve always presented myself as a Linux geek to my neighbours and it has been nice seeing how the Linux word evolved (with funny and surprising quotes) during the past ten years in their minds. A friend of mine (Aretha Battistutta) made a little comic strip out of the topic and the result is simply amazing.

Desktop

• With the recent introduction of upgraded and lower priced Chromebooks from Samsung ($249) and Acer ($199), the platform may finally live up to its potential, especially now that netbooks have fallen by the wayside. Some (us included) would argue that these are the price points Chromebooks should have been selling at all along. But what about performance?

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Linux Mint 14 has been released. Planet KDE does awesome work. There’s an OpenStreetMap map-a-thon. Australia’s government is TLD-shy. Red Hat invests in MongoDB, there may be life on Mars, Apple will have to reveal how much HTC is paying it, and the UEFI saga is turning nasty. Hear our non-audio related discoveries, and your own brains and opinions in the Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

Applications

Proprietary

• While there are some limited exceptions, most proprietary software titles coming to Ubuntu are centered around recreating experiences we might have from other operating systems. Skype is one of my favorite examples, as it’s now more than ever the de facto video conferencing application for all three major computing platforms.

• Another area where smooth software migration is being sought after is with gaming. And as luck would have it, new proprietary games are beginning to float into the Ubuntu Software Center. Regardless of what your view might happen to be on proprietary software or games, one must ask oneself – what about the other distros out there?

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Team Fortress 2, a free to play first-person shooter (FPS) multiplayer game, is now available for everyone using the Linux Steam client, and not just those who have received a beta invitation, so non-beta users shouldn’t see the “server is too busy” error when trying to download the game any more.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE project has announced the release of first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform 4.10.

• Post this release the team will now focus on bug fixing and further polishing new and old functionality as the API, dependency and feature freezes is already in place.

• So, what’s new in KDE SC 4.10? With this release KDE is introducing a brand new Screen Locker, a new screen locking mechanism, which is based on QtQuick brings and offers more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop. It also introduces a new print manager which makes improves setting up of printers and monitoring jobs.

• My browser of choice on the desktop has been Firefox for many years. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine. As a backup Web browser I use Konqueror but configured to use WebKit, rather than KHTML, as the rendering engine. I’ve tried Chromium, Opera, Midori, rekonq, SeaMonkey and a bunch of others, but always found them lacking in some way in comparison to Firefox (I find Opera Mobile better than Firefox for Android on my mobile phone, though).

GNOME Desktop

• It was recently announced that GNOME 3.8 would not be including the GNOME 2 fallback mode. This had a lot of folks a bit concerned. Apparently it was used more than GNOME developers figured. Not wanting to go backwards, Matthias Clasen has thought of a way that may pacify users of the departing fallback mode.

• Clasen posted to a GNOME mailing list today that he thinks using some community extensions to bring back GNOME 2-like features is the answer. He said exactly, “we have a pretty awesome extension mechanism in gnome-shell (extensions.gnome.org), and there are a ton of extensions out there which allow users to bring back many of the ‘classic’ UX elements.”

• I’m referring, of course, to Matthias Clasen’s announcement that, having dropped fallback mode, GNOME will support a core of extensions that will recreate the GNOME 2 interface.

• This announcement marks a major reversal of GNOME’s policy. For the past two years, the project has officially defended the radical redesign introduced by GNOME 3, making few — if any — acknowledgments of users’ complaints.

• In fact, eighteen months ago, influential members of GNOME were arguing against encouraging extensions for GNOME Shell at all. For instance, Allan Day, one of the leading designers of the GNOME 3, wrote in a discussion on the gnome-shell list:

• I can’t say much more than whats in the title just yet, but I thought I’d give everyone a heads up – forums for GNOME users, developers, etc are in the works! Hopefully soon we’ll be building a community of users, contributors and other interested folks to make GNOME better than ever! Stay tuned!

Distributions

• MEPIS Linux is celebrating its 10th anniversary today! WOW! This small distro actually reached 10 years!

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• Linux distributor and middleware maker Red Hat has extended its online training services to Europe. Red Hat Virtual Training, which was previously only available in North America, currently offers 21 different courses to help participants hone their skills and receive certificates in a range of Linux and JBoss-related areas.

Fedora

• Good news for patient Fedora users, they will get to test the beta of Fedora 18 on November 27, 2012 (not 2013).

• Fedora 18 Spherical CowFedora 18 Spherical CowI’ve been remixing Fedora 18 pre-release for quite a while now. As you may recall The Fedora Project has delayed the release of Fedora 18 Beta several times now… mainly due to blocker bugs in their new installer and Fedora Updater (fedup). I think the rest of the distribution has benefited from the delays because I’ve been running it a while and it has been very solid for me… as or more solid than Fedora 17. In fact, Fedora 17 and Fedora 18 share a lot in common… because a Fedora release, during its lifecycle, gets a lot of updates and upgrades.

• I started by putting Fedora 18 on my netbook. Then I put it on my home desktop system. I ran it for more than a month… oh, and by the way, I disable the updates-testing repository. Since it has been so solid on my hardware at home I finally decided, perhaps being a little haphazard, to put it on my workstation at work. When did I decide to do that? Well… I picked the day before Thanksgiving about 1 hour before it was time to go home. Care to follow me on my journey?

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) brought a lot of new features to the users. From an improved Unity to the brand new web apps feature that blended the web and the desktop, this release makes Ubuntu a strong contender to the contentious Windows 8.

• One of the best things about Ubuntu is that it allows users to search the web as well as the desktop right from the dash. You can look up your recently used file the same way you can look up the latest videos from the videos lenses. However, the searching experience is not limited to the pre-installed lenses and scopes. You can, with a couple of clicks, install some great new lenses that will make your Ubuntu the best desktop ever.

• The Unity cross-platform development tool version 4 has been released from beta into the growing world of Ubuntu game development. Every Unity developer is now only a few clicks away from publishing in the Ubuntu Software Center with Unity 4.0’s new Linux Deployment Preview. You can download a 30-day preview of all the Pro features, Linux export will always be in the free version.

• Ubuntu 1304′s default wallpaper has been unveiled – some 5-ish months ahead of schedule!

• The Sputnik is Dell’s cleverly code-named latest laptop endeavour. It’s a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook that has a line up of hardware that Dell feels will lure developers away from competing vendors.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Jolla – the startup built by the team behind the smartphone OS that Nokia abandoned in favor of Windows Phone — revealed its first big smartphone customer deal today, the mobile operator DNA of Finland. Jolla also gave a first look at the UI of Sailfish, the mobile operating system they’ve created from the remnants of Nokia’s MeeGo project, and released an SDK.

Android

• Several months of work have culminated in the release of Replicant 4.0 0001, the latest version of the completely open source distribution of Android. The new version is based on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and introduces support for the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S2. On the Galaxy S, the camera is now supported and improvements to the telephony stack benefit all supported devices.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• I prefer the smaller tablets because I find them to simply fit me better. For me, tablets are primarily for consuming data. I watch videos on them, I read books on them, I use them for Web-browsing, and I use them for e-mail. If you want to use a tablet for a work, you really want a full-sized tablet such as the iPad 4, Nexus 10, or a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. Me? I’ll use a laptop. For sheer enjoyment though give me a mini-tablet any day of the week.

• Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. No one is really offering “deals” on any of the top 7″ tablets except for the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. For all the rest, expect to pay full price. That said, you should look for bargains on such accessories as the microSD cards for more storage and cases.

• The Nook HD and the HD+ can now be brought in the UK with prices starting at 159 English pounds. People who have pre-ordered can expect theirs any day now through the post.

Free Software/Open Source

• Catalyst IT has taken over fellow open source developer, Christchurch-based Egressive.

• Egressive will formally become Catalyst’s South Island branch from the end of this month (November).

• The takeover is friendly, says Egressive director Dave Lane. “In fact it would be fair to say we initiated the process.” The company had grown its business to the point where its small staff had as much work as they could handle, he says, and it was limited by its location.

• Yesterday DreamWorks released its latest animated feature with the holiday-themed Rise of the Guardians. But for animators who watch the film and wish they could do something similar, there’s good news — one of the tools used on the project is free and open source. Called OpenVDB, the tool is used to create volumetric 3D effects like smoke, and DreamWorks previously used it on both Puss in Boots and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The studio’s hope is that by making OpenVDB free, it will eventually become an industry standard. “That ends up benefiting us,” DreamWorks’ David Prescott told the Wall Street Journal.

Events

SaaS

Databases

• In a recent post, I introduced an initiative, along with Dima Kassab, for teaching open source NoSQL databases. We collaborated to prepare course materials for three NoSQL databases to 22 students at the Informatics Department of SUNY Albany, and we made all those material available under a Creative Commons by Attribution License.

Funding

BSD

• A senior OpenBSD developer has complained on a mailing list that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change.

Public Services/Government

• Over €10 million (approximately £8 million or $12.8 million) has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city’s own Linux platform. The calculation of savings follows a question by the city council’s independent Free Voters (Freie Wähler) group, which led to Munich’s municipal LiMux project presenting a comparative budget calculation at the meeting of the city council’s IT committee on Wednesday. The calculation compares the current overall cost of the LiMux migration with that of two technologically equivalent Windows scenarios: Windows with Microsoft Office and Windows with OpenOffice. Reportedly, savings amount to over €10 million.

Openness/Sharing

• Collaboration is changing. Gone are the days of excuses for not collaborating, like “we work better in person,” or “we’re in different time zones.” Technology makes it easy to work together. It’s simple and it’s free (assuming you have a computer, webcam, and internet connection).

• The editors of Make Magazine are a good example of 21st century collaboration. They recently held their first public “editor hangout” using Google Hangout. The Make editors are scattered across the country, yet this Google Hangout brings all of them together. Google Hangouts are really cool because you can see all of the members at the bottom, and the person speaking is automatically highlighted in a larger video screen.

Open Access/Content

• Dr. Douglas Fields penned an article at Huffington Post on open access. There are so many factual errors, false analogies and misleading statements in this article, that I need to highlight just few of the ‘wrongest’ statements

Open Hardware

Programming

• Did you know how many times you use some open source software in a day? No clue? Each time you access a Web site, use an app (application) or play a game, you use one or more open source software.

• How about creating one? Google, the digital media and search engine company, has announced Google Code-in contest for students in the age group of 13 and 17 years.

• Beginning November 26, contests can work on 10 different open source organisations, taking part in certain online tasks to win prizes.

Leftovers

• The Federal Trade Commission may not have enough evidence of harm to consumers to proceed with an antitrust claim against the heart of Google’s business, search, Bloomberg reported.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Drone strikes look like the perfect solution: clean, low risk, inexpensive, and only the target, and possibly the weapon, gets hurt. At first glance it looks like the absolute perfect military device. And of course in many ways it is the perfect military device. It strikes from afar, it’s highly accurate, there is little or no risk of life on our side, and it’s extremely effective.

• 17,000 formal complaints have been filed about TSA “enhanced” pat-downs since 2009, according to a news report by Scott MacFarlane of WSBTV Channel 2, Atlanta. This is after a Congressman, Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, reported that his 17-year-old niece was exposed during a pat-down. Since this is a Congressman, there is now a federal investigation underway. Once again, it pays to have friends in high places.

Cablegate

• The movement behind WikiLeaks may lead to an even bigger digital exposé

• Uzbekistan’s former chief mufti Sheikh Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf is still regarded as a major Islamic authority in Uzbekistan, but US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show different sides of his personality.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• It is unacceptable to shield a nuclear project from Freedom of Information says Access Info Europe

Finance

• …due to growing copyright infringement concerns which have resulted in an extremely strict and in some cases privacy-violating set of requirements being laid down by the payment processing company.

• Leading City analyst says both banks had access to research about alleged banking irregularities at UK software firm

• There’s a painful subtext to yesterday’s public finance figures. While most of us are paying more tax, many big companies are paying less

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• “Some recent developments have come to our attention, though, and departing together is the best alternative we can take,” Consiglio continued before the team wrapped up the newscaster equivalent of flipping the bird at the big bosses.

• Though the collaborative offense wasn’t exactly keyed into the teleprompter, station vice-president and general manager Mike Palmer told the Associated Press that the pair simply quit before they could be fired.

• “Sometimes people leave before they’re officially told to leave,” he said. “There are things that they know.”

• That development appeared to be… well, news to Michaels, who told the AP she had “no clue” her job was in jeopardy and felt that their actions fell on the proper side of the respect spectrum.

• “We wanted to be able to say a thoughtful, heartfelt goodbye to our viewers and to the many communities we served over the years. We did not defame the company in any way over the air. The goodbye was cordial, sincere and done with integrity,” she wrote in an email to the news agency.

• The AP notes that Michaels expressed concern over the way political stories were presented and believed the station focused too much on unimportant news.

• Stripped to essentials, the fiscal cliff is a device constructed to force a rollback of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as the price of avoiding tax increases and disruptive cuts in federal civilian programs and in the military. It was policy-making by hostage-taking, timed for the lame duck session, a contrived crisis, the plain idea now unfolding was to force a stampede.

Censorship

• Since the GOP decided to chicken out on holding the very necessary debate on copyright reform, let’s keep the debate going without them, and hope they join in. As we’ve discussed, the Republican Study Committee released a fantastic report from staffer Derek Khanna, and then retracted it under lobbyist pressure. The RSC wants to claim that the paper didn’t go through its full review process, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that this is simply not true, and that the RSC is pushing this story to appease angry lobbyists (apparently the US Chamber of Commerce has taken over as the leader of the cause on this one, following the initial complaints from the MPAA and RIAA). Either way, all this has done is draw much more attention to the report, which you can still read here.

Privacy

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• An anti-piracy company has found itself in the middle of a huge controversy. CIAPC, the company that had The Pirate Bay blocked by ISPs in Finland, tracked an alleged file-sharer and demanded a cash settlement. However, the Internet account holder refused to pay which escalated things to an unprecedented level. In response, this week police raided the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.

• Rap star Coolio has launched a savage attack on the music industry, accusing record labels of engineering a cover-up of decent music.

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