Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:08:40

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 2:51

Release Candidate:
On Sun, 6 May 2012 15:34:14 Linus Torvalds released kernel 3.4-rc6
This is what Linus had to say about it:

“There still are more commits here than I’d like, so it would be nice
if things would calm down even further, but things on the whole have
been pretty smalll and simple.
…
But all of the commits look pretty damn trivial, so on the whole I
feel good about things.

Go forth and test,”

Approximately half of the changes in this rc are drivers (with networking taking up about half of those), With most of the rest being architecture, filesystems, and non-driver networking.

Mainline:
3.4-rc6

Stable Updates:
On Mon, 7 May 2012 09:33:46 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.31
There were 53 files changed, 584 inserted, and 164 deleted.

On Mon, 7 May 2012 09:34:21 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.3.5
There were 93 files changed, 1176 inserted, and 355 deleted.

On Sat, 12 May 2012 00:44:25 London Time Ben Hutchings released kernel 3.2.17
There were 174 files changed, 1551 inserted, and 700 deleted

 

Kernel Developer Quote:
Last week, I had the best conversation I’ve ever had at a Linux conference:

Him: “What operating system are you using on your laptop, why aren’t you using OS-X, that seems much easier to use these days.”
Me: “Um, this is Linux”
Him: “But why use it? Isn’t it really complex?”
Me: “This is my code, why wouldn’t I use it?”
Things degenerated from there.

And note, this was an invite-only Linux conference…
–Greg Kroah-Hartman

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 6:06

Distrowatch.com

• 5-9 – SolusOS 1 – based on Debian’s “stable” branch featuring the GNOME 2 desktop, but also an updated kernel and applications
• 5-10 – Salix OS 13.37 “MATE” – “MATE” edition, a Slackware-based distribution featuring the increasingly popular fork of the GNOME 2 desktop:
• 5-10 – Rocks Cluster Distribution 5.5, 6.0 – CentOS-based open-source toolkit for real and virtual clusters
• 5-12 – Liberté Linux 2012.1 – a Gentoo-based security live CD with the primary purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Fedora – 1577
4. Mageia – 2090
3. Ubuntu – 2298
2. SolusOS – 2654
1. Mint – 3677

Mary Distro Review

Time: 13:19

Each week SMLR lists the newest Linux distro updates, so when Salix appeared on the list for the week of May 7, I decided to give it a try.

Salix is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an “extra” quality source of software for their favorite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light & the product of infinite care.

Going to the web site I was presented with a choice of Salix with several well-known desktops: KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Mate, FluxBox, and a less well-known, minimalist window manager, RatPoison. RatPoison? I had never heard of it. Ah yes, a slackware-based distributation with a minimalist windows manager. Life on the edge… Inquiring minds wanted to know …and so did I.

Salix, itself, says this about the RatPoison release:

“This is probably the first ever linux distribution release featuring Ratpoison as the main window manager. The aim of the Ratpoison edition is to create a system that is fully usable with the keyboard only, no mouse required! For everyone that is not familiar with Ratpoison, Ratpoison is a window manager for X “with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence.”

Naturally, like a moth attracted to light, I decided to download the RatPoison version of Salix. And I didn’t need no stinkin’ LiveCD, either. I downloaded the direct to install version.

Salix installed easily enough using a ncurses installer. It’s perfect for the retro 1990s look that I like. I did not have to manually compile a kernel which was good because I wanted to finish this project before I retired. Those of you who listened to my earlier challenges trying to get Crux to boot after I compiled the kernel will understand.

However, it took three installs of Salix before I could successfully boot the system. The first two failed with a kernel panic: The root file system could not be found. What? It was there the last time I looked! But, as they say, the third time is the charm and I successfully booted into the RatPoison desktop/window manager after the third install.

To say RatPoison was spartan and minimalist doesn’t really do it justice, but what can you say when the only thing appearing on your monitor is wallpaper? That’s right…no panel, no icons, no clock…nothing. Just pixels after pixels of desktop wallpaper, albeit a very attractive airy style wallpaper with lots of overlapping, slightly out-of-focus rectangles.

To navigate RatPoison, you must use arcane keystroke combinations It reminded me of Emacs…and why I never much cared for emacs. Vi was much easier to use. (Oh–I hope I haven’t reignited the emacs versus vi wars of old.) Control C – t is the core of most keyboard computer interactions. For example to display the menu of available programs, you type Control C-t r. You also can bind certain

I set several modest goals for the keyboard-centric RatPoison:

1. Open two or more apps and tile them using RatPoison’s keyboard machinations.
2. Connect to my wireless network (which uses WPA2)
3. install a software package, using the slapt package manager and the CLI tool.
4. Open multiple programs/apps and tile them ala RatPoison.
5. Use the terminal for some miscellaneous stuff.
6. Do all this stuff by using only the keyboard.

The results:

1. I was able to open a couple of different apps but at first it was slightly maddening to try to control them using combinations of keys before I realized that CTRL C plus two more keys just to open the applications menu.
2. Yes, success was achieved. Surprisingly, it was relatively easy to connect to my home network. RatPoison uses the wicd network manager.
3. install a software package. – Yes. I selected Koffice, naturally, plus Handbrake and a music player, Whaaw! However no non-free codecs were available so no mp3s or commercial DVDs could be played. I was devastated.
4. Yes, I tiled three applications: a browser, a terminal window and a third app, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Oh yeah, it was Whaaw!
5. Use the terminal for some miscellaneous stuff – Yes…changed directories, created directories, etc. Never has the command line felt so comfortable!
6. I regret to report that I cheated as far as achieving goal #6. When I was in the browser, I was presented with a cursor that I took full advantage of.

Salix with Ratpoison – Not my cup of tea…but it could be yours if you like a minimalist desktop.

Tech News:

Time:

5% Of PCs Shipped Next Year Will Have Ubuntu Preinstalled

At the Ubuntu 12.10 developer summit Chris Kenyon, VP of sales and business development, Canonicals relationship with OEMs and ODMs. In the process he threw out some numbers about Ubuntus’ adoption.

The big number that grabbed my attention was this one:

“Next year they expect… 18 million units world-wide, or what Chris says would be 5% of PCs shipping world-wide would be with Ubuntu Linux.”

I also tend to agree with Jef Spaleta, of the Fedora project and his comments on this statement:

“Ship does not mean sold…generally speaking. And I have pretty much no information on China and India and other emerging markets. They could really have an upward trend there..but its not exactly easy to try to verify even in a ballpark sense.

The real question I have is: If they did ship as many as they say last year… why isn’t that enough revenue to be self-sustaining? And if they get to 5% next year… will that be enough revenue to be self-sustaining at present expense levels? There OEM partners are going to throw them under the bus as soon as Canonical needs to start passing costs on to OEMs instead of eating them.

I fear they continue to focus on the wrong metrics. Hitting 5% and not having a sustainable business model to service that growth is classic boom/bust business. Do OEMs value Ubuntu enough to pay an equitable share of the cost of its development? So far its not clear that the answer to that is yes. And until its clearly yes… this is not a clear win. The bigger Canonical gets and the longer this drags on, while servicing red ink there ledger, the harder it will be for them to steer the ship off the rocks.”

Let’s travel back in time for a minute. At UDS in Budapest last year Mark Shuttleworth talked about having 200 million Ubuntu users by 2015. Even if they double the their preinstalled PC sales they are going to need a truckload of new customers to reach this goal.

Another topic is where are these preloads going to be sold. Well according to industry statistics they are going to be sold in Asia. Now the generally accepted thought on this is that they are going to be purchased over a Windows PC as a cost savings. Then they are going to be wiped and a bootleg copy of Windows installed.

Ubuntu is already sold at more than 200 Dell stores in China. They have knowledgeable employees on hand to help consumers with questions.

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FBI Wants Back Door Into Social Media Sites And VOIP

The FBI is quietly asking Internet companies to not oppose a new regulation that would require companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to create backdoors to ease government surveillance. The White House, U.S. senators, and senior FBI officials met with industry representatives in order to discuss the dramatic change that the Internet has made in communications over the old telephone system, and the need to be able to surveil these new technologies.

The FBI is basically asking for an expansion of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). Currently CALEA only applies to telecommunications companies, and they want to expand it to cover social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks. Apple is currently lobbying against the CALEA expansion, according to disclosure documents filed with Congress. Microsoft says its lobbyists are following the topic because it’s “an area of ongoing interest to us.” Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have yet to comment.

Not only is the FBI making a legislative proposal, the FCC is considering a reinterpretation of CALEA to demand that products for video or voice chat over the Internet e.g. Skype, Google Hangouts, and Xbox Live create surveillance backdoors to help the FBI. They also want to make CALEA apply to technologies that are a “substantial replacement” for the telephone system.

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Apache Announces OpenOffice™ 3.4

This is the first release since Apache took over development. In the press release they call themselves “the leading open source office productivity suite”. OO is available in 15 languages with a complete productivity suite including spreadsheet, word processing, presentation, database, and drawing. There is also a large third party development community providing over 2300 templates and over 800 extensions.

Since donation to the Apache Foundation OO is developed by an entirely volunteer group of developers, testers, translators, and other contributors. Apache OpenOffice source code, downloads, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/. As an Apache Incubator project they first had to remove then reimplement all code that was incompatable with the Apache Software Foundation license policy.

This is all well and good but can Apache ever catch up with LibreOffice. LibreOffice has over a one year head start and the feature difference is huge. If you look at the side by side comparison between the two projects the difference is dramatic. The only part of the project where OO leads LO is in the drawing tool. You can see a graphic illustrating this here .

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Microsoft Up To Their Old Tricks

Both Mozilla and Google have come out publicly to protest Microsoft’s Windows RT, which is the name for Windows on ARM, policy. Microsoft has announced that Windows RT will only allow IE as a browser. What happened here? Have we gone back to the early ’90s? What about the US and EU antitrust and anticompetitive practices trials?

Harvey Anderson, Mozilla general counsel, and Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Firefox director, claimed the this move violates a 2006 statement of principles by Microsoft.

Google had this to say about this Microsoft restrictive policy:

“We’ve always welcomed innovation in the browser space across all platforms and strongly believe that having great competitors makes us all work harder. In the end, consumers and developers benefit the most from robust competition.
Microsoft’s decision to lock down Win RT is not news: introduced as WOA in February, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky said WOA would only support a small number of existing Microsoft apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote with Internet Explorer 10. x86 apps would not run on WOA. WOA would be populated with apps via the Windows Store.”

This appears to be an illegal return to Microsoft’s monopolistic practices of the past. Was anybody really surprised. They will continue these practices until they are finally broken up like should have happened the last time. At the time of this writing there was no comment from MS.

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Open Source Under Assault By Yahoo And Their Patent Portfolio

Yahoo’s assault on open source with their patent portfolio, in an effort to regain profitability, draws huge criticism from the tech world. It comes down to Scott Thompson, Yahoo CEO, claiming that “they own the web” due to their large patent portfolio. they are even claiming to own patents on some open source technologies as well.

Facebook had to disclose a letter from Yahoo in their S-1 filing for their IPO. In this letter Yahoo claims 16 patents that Facebook is violating. Face claims that all 16 of these patents relate to open source technology that they use in their data centers. One of the claimed technologies that violate Yahoo’s patents is memcached. This could prove disastrous as this technology is used by numerous big data and database projects.

Is Yahoo’s new business model to become a patent troll. It would most likely be a death knell for Yahoo if they give into the short sited cries from investors to start wielding their patent portfolio as a club. The only road for long term success for Yahoo is to get back to it’s roots of innovating and creating aw some products.

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RMS Falls Ill At Conference In Spain

During his presentation, at the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Cataluna, 59 year old Richard Stallman fell ill. Contrary to some reports on social media he did not suffer a heart attack. About half way through his presentation he signalled event organizers to call an ambulance. He was reportedly suffering from an attack of acute high blood pressure.

He continued his speech while he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He did keep his composure and sense of humor. After having waited 20 minutes for the ambulance he made a joke about Spanish President Mariano Rajoy Brey wanting to kill them all with his new austerity measures. After the ambulance arrived he was treated off stage in a different room. The audience was then informed that the conference was going to be suspended indefinitely. It was reported the RMS left the building at a later time under his own power.

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Oh Boy, There’s Another Problem With Nokia’s Lumia 900 Windows Phone

Some units of Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone, the Lumia 900, are experiencing a glitch that causes the screen to display a purple tint.

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Siri says Nokia Lumia 900 the best smartphone ever

When iPhone 4S owners ask Siri which smartphone is the best ever made, the obviously disgruntled virtual personal assistant responds saying it’s the Nokia Lumia 900 4G running on AT&T’s network…

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Visualising the Free Software / Open Source operating system users around the world !
A map on which you can register your Linux distribution.
OSHackers is a website that aims to count GNU/Linux users and place them geographically using their Linux distribution as the marker. You can visit OSHackers and put yourself on the map, and you can search for people that use Linux around your area.

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Ubuntu will hit the big time on Amazon: Here’s how
Open … and Shut The cloud is the new operating system, and Amazon owns the cloud. Big iron vendors like IBM and HP are feeling the heat as workloads itch to move off expensive mainframes into Amazon’s public cloud. Even Microsoft, the once undisputed king of the operating system, is under siege as its Seattle neighbor embraces and extends .NET and SQL Server, making Amazon, not Microsoft, the one-stop shop for enterprise computing needs…..

…Indeed, while Red Hat dominates the data centre, every survey I’ve seen suggests that Ubuntu is still the dominant cloud OS, above RHEL, CentOS, and even Windows. This is the case for AWS, Rackspace, and other public cloud infrastructure. It’s also true of the market for public websites where Ubuntu also surpasses Red Hat….

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New Flash Drive!

Is it Alive?

Time: 48:34

The quiz show segment where Mary challenges Mat and Tony to identify whether if a Linux Distro is alive or dead? The distros for the May 12 show:

BlueWall Linux
Bluewall GNU/Linux was a Debian-based Linux distribution with a twist – instead of apt, it used NetBSD’s pkgsrc as its preferred package management software. Perhaps that is why it only had two releases according to Distrowatch.

Mat: DEAD
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: DEAD

***************
Bonzai Linux (formerly miniwoody)

Bonzai Linux was a kde-centric distribution based on the Debian stable branch. Also called Debian on a diet.

Extra credit: From what country did the Bonzai project originate? (Germany)

Mat: ALIVE
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: DEAD

*****************
Kurumin Linux is a new Brazilian project based on Knoppix.

Kurumin Linux was a Brazilian run-from-CD Linux distribution based on Knoppix. Its main features were excellent hardware auto-detection, support for Brazilian Portuguese and small size.

Mat: ALIVE
Tony: DEAD
Verdict: DEAD

*************
Finnix

a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian’s testing brancH

Mat: ALIVE
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: ALIVE

***********
Quimo Linux

A Xubuntu-based distribution for very young children.

Mat: DEAD
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: ALIVE

********************
FINAL SCORE:
Mat: 2
Tony: 3

Listener Feedback

Time: 53:12
Brad Alexander – Wireless Kernel mod and Skype gov backdoor and KDE questions
gilaet – Arch Linux
gilaet – Conky and such things

Mat’s Soapbox

Time: 57:23

Outtro Music

Time: 1:03:11
Heritage Place by Josh Woodward

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:11:53

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 7:36
Release Candidate:
On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:47:52 Linus Torvalds released kernel 3.4-rc5
He had this to say about the release:

“-rc5 has almost 50% more commits than -rc4 had. Not good. That said, I don’t think there is anything hugely scary there.”

The bulk of the changes are drivers with 50% followed by architecture at 20% then 15% were file system with most of those being btrfs and nfs related, and 5% networking with the remaining 10% just random noise.

Mainline:
3.4-rc5

Stable Updates:
No stable updates this week.

Kernel Developer Quote:

“Guinea pigs really are worthless. Just glue some hair on a stone, and you have a better pet.”
–Linus Torvalds

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 9:38

Distrowatch.com

• 5-1 – OpenBSD 5.1 – BSD operating system with a focus on security
• 5-2 – ArchBang Linux 2012.05 – lightweight Arch-based desktop distribution featuring the Openbox window manager
• 5-4 – Lightweight Portable Security 1.3.4 – the project’s security live CD designed for secure and anonymous use of web-based applications
• 5-5 – Puppy Linux 5.3.3 “Slacko” – lightweight distribution compatible with Slackware Linux 13.37
• 5-5 – Vyatta 6.4 – Debian-based specialist distribution for firewalls and routers
• 5-6 – Slackel KDE-4.8.2-1 – Slackware-based distribution tracking Slackware’s “Current” branch and providing extra software in its own repositories

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Magia – 1482
4. Fedora – 1560
3. ArchBang – 1665
2. Ubuntu – 2797
1. Mint – 4196

Mary Reviews Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.5
Trisquel 5.5 Review

Trisquel is one of a myriad Ubuntu derivatives. It’s notable claim is that it’s one of several “libre” versions, of course, libre—meaning free as in unencumbered by proprietary software. After receiving some reader feedback from JMathis, indicating that we sounded a little biased against Trisquel, GnuLinux, I decided to give it a try.

My initial boot to the Trisquel/GnuLinux live CD was smooth. On the desktop is the option to install. I took the plung. If you’ve installed Ubuntu, then you’ve mostly experienced an install ofTrisquel. Solid, dependable…an install without incident. The login music snippet is very new age-y and nice. The non-proprietary Nouveau driver for Nvidia cards was installed and worked great. The desktop looked clear, crisp, attractive.

I noticed a red X over the networking icon. …not good. I clicked into the networking app and enabled wireless networking but change had no impact. More on that later.

Two items that can be problematic in non-proprietary systems are flash and video. I was particularly interested in seeing how Trisquel GNU/Linux, running on my Zareason laptop, handled Flash. I ran a test, using the flash-based game-Machinarium. Trisquel handled it perfectly on my system.

OK, back to my wireless situation. I knew I had to do some digging so I ran lspci to confirm my wireless driver: 05:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61). I checked the Trisquel forums and it looked like my wireless chipset was going to be a problem. I investigated further and confirmed the driver required by my Intel chip, iwlagn, did not have a non-proprietary counterpart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers

The solution offered by those who frequent the Trisquel forums, including members of the community is a curious one. They tell people to buy a wireless card which have corresponding free drivers, e.g., Atheros. Let me see if I have that right…I need to spend money with a corporation in order to get my community-driven GNU/Linux system fully functional. It seems to me that a community-based effort to develop a free driver is a better way to go. Fund-raising sites like Indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/) allow organizations and individuals to pitch projects for funding by the public. Kdenlive did this and successfully reached their monetary goal. I contributed to that effort and would contribute to any effort to develop non-proprietary drivers for the Intel 4965 chipset.

For a group who’s as passionate as these guys are—some of them very blunt with forum posters when the topic of proprietary drivers is brought up—a community-driven fund-raising effort seems like a better approach.

Tech News:

Time: 24:00
When Ubuntu Gets It Right

As may or may not know I do not run or like Ubuntu. Having said that I also have to say when they get something right I have to give them credit.

Since Ubuntu 11.04 they have incorporated Zeitgeist into the system. For those who are not familuar with what ZeitGeist is (the Linux software not the German word meaning the spirit of the times)here is a description right from thier website:

“Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.”

It keeps all of this information locally on the machine. It then offers this information up to other applications in order “customize” the user experience. An application is populated with the most and recently used data that was used with it. This also applies for folder where the most and recently used files are displayed in its jump-list.

In response to privacy concerns about how this data was managed Ubuntu now includes a Privacy panel. You can find this in Ubuntu’s System Settings window. With the Privacy panel you will be able to configure how this data is captured and stored. you can disable the activity recording entirely or just fine tune what information is captured and stored. You also have the ability to delete the activity history either entirely or just for a recent period in time.

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Google Chrome OS Desktops Has New Fan, Linus Torvalds

Linus has been a long time Gnome user but lately has become disgruntled with the direction that is being taken with version three. Well lately he has been using Aura, the Chrome OS interface, and digging it. This is what he said about it on Google plus:

“It allows such radical notions as having easy mouse configurability for things like how to launch applications. Things gnome removed because those kinds of things were “too confusing”, and in the process made useless. And a auto-hide application dock at the bottom. Revolutionary, I know.”

He talked about how his family uses it mainly as a stand alone calendering device. He then goes on to say how much better Aura is for this than the previous version:

“And I have to say, it also seems to improve on the experience even in the non-laptop mode. Making the calendar start as a “window” instead of as a browser tab also means that when you use it in the single-use mode that we traditionally did, the app takes up the whole screen, without the browser buttons etc.

So the new Aura approach seems to work both as a traditional window manager and as a more limited “apps take up the whole screen”. Maybe this whole “browser as an app” thing can really work.”

The problem is the devices that Aura is installed on, Linus also pointed this out. The chrome books are great for browsing and doing lite tasks on but to do real work I need something beefier.

I also need to disagree with Linus. I have been using Gnome 3 as my main desktop for the last four days and I have to say I am really liking it. In fact I have not used Cinnamon at all for the last two days.

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US Department Of The Interior Chooses Google Apps

The Department of the Interior today announced a contract award for Department-wide cloud email and collaboration services using Google Apps for Government. This is part of an initiative that will leverage modern technology to save up to $500 million in taxpayer dollars by 2020. Onix Networking, a Google Apps for Government provider, Was awarded the contract. Desktop users will be given the option of either using the web based apps or a tradition desktop style software environment. New video and audio chat features will complement traditional email communication tools, while Google Docs, Calendar and Sites will enhance the Department’s collaboration capabilities. This new system will offer seamless intergration with mobile devices for both mobile and remote workers.

The implementation of a single enterprise-wide email system will replace seven different existing email systems at Interior, cutting waste and eliminating redundancy. Completion of the procurement for cloud email and collaboration services directly supports IT Transformation’s goal to transform Interior’s IT systems into an agile, reliable, and cost effective service that better supports IT services across the entire Department.

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Next Fedora Has A Codename

Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Project Leader, announced the rsults of the release name poll for Fedora 18. And the winner is:

Spherical Cow

Voting was open: Friday 2012-04-20 00:00:00 to Friday 2012-04-27 00:00:00

Using the range voting method, each candidate could attain a maximum of 3,432

Results:

Votes Name
——————————-
1359 Spherical Cow
1087 Halva
1072 Chamoy
1035 Pamukkale
964 Tandoori Chicken
930 Frankfurter
821 Pop Soda
536 Ketchy Ketchup

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Microsoft using Linux to power skype
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft.ars

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http://www.unixmen.com/configure-conky-lua-in-ubuntu-11-10-12-04-fedora-debian-and-linuxmint-howto-conky/

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See Who is Tracking you with Collusion Plugin
TED Talk : Tracking the Trackers
https://disconnect.me/tools (Chrome plugin)
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/ (Firefox Plugin)

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Linux Rings the Bell in New York

From the ‘Solaris and Windows? at NYSE? Ha!’ files:
In New York’s Financial District, Linux is your MAMA. The Linux Foundation (that’s Greg Kroah-Hartman in the center and to his right is Jim Zemlin) rang the closing bell at the NYSE yesterday.

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/linux-rings-the-bell-in-new-york.html

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B&N Pulls Linux Format Magazine Over Feature on Hacking

“UK-based Linux Format magazine was pulled from Barnes and Noble bookstores in the U.S. after featuring an article called ‘Learn to Hack’. They used ‘hack’ in the populist security sense, rather than the traditional sense, and the feature — which they put online — was used to illustrate how poor your server’s security is likely to be by breaking into it.”

http://tuxradar.com/content/learn-hack-was-pulled-barnes-and-noble

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Is it Alive?

Time: 50:20

The quiz show segment where Mary challenges Mat and Tony to identify whether if a Linux Distro is alive or dead? The distros for the May 6 show:

Impi Linux
Impi Linux was a South African Linux distribution which focused on the enterprise and government sector. The project name originally referred to Impi meaning warrior in the Zulu language. In September 2005, Mark Shuttleworth invested R10 million in return for 65% of Impi Linux. The project was discontinued in April 2009 after Impi was incorporated and later purchased by Business Connection. http://www.impilinux.com/

Mat: Dead
Tony: Dead
Verdict: DEAD

************************
Linpus Linux -
Linpus Lite Desktop Edition is an extremely powerful yet versatile desktop, all-in-one, notebook and netbook operating system. Based on Gnome 3.2, it has a significant array of enhancements that mean it is the ideal choice whether you require productivity, entertainment or lead an extremely social, connected online life. http://www.linpus.com/

Mat: ALIVE
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: ALIVE

***********************
JarroNegro Linux
This project was born from Muser project, which sought to develop a distribution for servers of different architectures (including SPARC).
The name was born from the combination of RedHat with Jug (for a soft drink company of Mexico). The logo was provided by a Mexican illustrator bachan (Sebastian Carrillo). ttp://jarronegrolinux.com/

Mat: Dead
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: ALIVE

***********************
Amber Linux – DEAD Amber Linux, Debian-based linux distribution operating system It aimed to be the first distribution business tailored to the needs of users Latvian acquisition cost was about 19 ​​to 66 dollars, and had support for English, in addition to Latvian.
Mat: ALIVE
Tony: DEAD
Verdict: DEAD

**********************
Exherbo Linux
Source based Linux distribution with up-front configuration. http://www.exherbo.org/
Mat: DEAD;
Tony: ALIVE
Verdict: ALIVE

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FINAL SCORE:
Mat: 3
Tony: 4

Listener Feedback

Time: 55:30
Michael – to Mary

Comment by Frida Kufel on Episode 020 – Spam?

Christopher Grau wrote in to say he loves the show but had a couple of questions about your LMDE/Debian Testing Hybrid distro.

1. How lightweight is it? I have been testing the speed of Linux Mint LXDE, Lubuntu 11.10, and now Lubuntu 12.04 on my single core, Atom 1.66 Ghz, 1 GB Ram netbook. Does the Cinnamon on top of your LMDE weigh it down on such a light weight machine?

A) It is not lightweight at all, my laptop has Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.60GHz and 4GB of RAM.

2. I’d love to read a walk-through of replacing the repos. I’m a beginner Linux user, working my way towards intermediate while trying to not nuke my main Window’s install on my laptop.

A) It really is not hard, it is just a matter of editing /etc/apt/sources.list. I will post a walk through on my page of the smlr.us website.

Mat’s Page

He also went on to say:

“If you play Mass Effect 3, one of your party members is an AI in an android body. If you are attacking AI enemies, she will shout things like, “executing sudo command,” or, “achieving root access!”"

I do not really play video games but my son does and he confirms this behavior which I find totally hilarious.

Mat’s Soapbox

Time; 1:03:17

Outtro Music

Time: 1:05:15

Look and Feel Years Younger by artist Brad Sucks

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 54:30

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 4:56
Release Candidate:
No Release Candidate This Week

Mainline:
3.4-rc4

Stable Updates:
On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:47:47 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.29
There were 55 files changed, 500 inserted, 207 deleted

On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:49:38 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.2.16
There were 69 files changed, 488 inserted, 247 deleted

On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:50:18 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.3.3
There were 78 files changed, 538 inserted, 319 deleted

On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:14:55 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.30
There were 66 files changed, 314 inserted, 266 deleted

On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:46:54 PDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.3.4
There were 96 files changed, 544 inserted, 382 deleted

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 7:13

Distrowatch.com

• 4-24 – Tails 0.11 – Debian-based live DVD designed for anonymous Internet surfing
• 4-24 – Scientific Linux 5.8 – distribution rebuilt from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 and enhanced with extra software and tools useful in academic environments
• 4-24 – Linux Mint 201204 “Debian” – Linux Mint 201204 “Debian” edition
• 4-24 – Untangle Gateway – Debian-based distribution designed for firewalls and gateways
• 4-25 – Tiny Core Linux 4.5 – ast and minimalist Linux distribution for desktop use
• 4-25 – Dragora GNU/Linux 2.2 – “libre” distribution built from scratch and featuring Xfce as the default desktop
• 4-25 – ClearOS 6.2 “Community” – based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and designed for small business servers and gateways
• 4-25 – Swift Linux 0.2.0 – lightweight desktop distribution with IceWM – now based on Linux Mint’s “Debian” edition
• 4-26 – BackBox Linux 2.05 – Ubuntu-based distribution designed to perform penetration tests and security assessments
• 4-26 – * Ubuntu 12.04 – Canonical’s flagship operating system featuring the Unity user interface and Head-Up Display menu system
• 4-27 – Proxmox 2.1 “Virtual Environment” – an open-source virtualization platform for running virtual appliances and virtual machines, based on Debian GNU/Linux
• 4-28 – ROSA 2012 RC – Mandriva Linux and enhanced with a variety of innovative desktop utilities and applications

ROSA Icons – Making KDE look even better

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/04/21/replace-oxygen-with-rosa-theme-on-any-kde-powered-distribution/

Creepy – A python program that aggregates twitter and flickr geolocation information.

http://diveintoinfosec.wordpress.com/

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Magia – 1453
4. Swift – 1457
3. Fedora – 1727
2. Ubuntu – 4732
1. Mint – 5153

Tech News:

Time: 21:09
Google Drive Released, Not So Much For Linux

The long rumored on line storage from Google has been announced as a reality. Unless of course you are running a Linux desktop. I don’t know but if it where me and my entire business was built on top of Linux that it might be the first client I produced. They have an Android client how difficult can it be.

Every subscriber will get 5GB for free with the opportunity to upgrade to any of the following plans.

Storage       Monthly Rate
25 GB           $2.49
100 GB         $4.99
200 GB         $9.99
400 GB         $19.99
1 TB              $49.99
2 TB              $99.99
4 TB              $199.99
8 TB              $399.99
16 TB            $799.99

You can access the service at dirve.google.com. Although it is currently not ready for me (insert picture). It will support over 30 file types that you will be able to open right in your browser. It will integrate with Google+, Gmail, and Google Docs. You can share files or folders with anyone, and control whether they will be able to view, edit or comment on your stuff. Extensive search capabilities including OCR for pictures and scanned documents. And my favorite feature document rollback for up to thirty days. Google Drive tracks all changes so that when you save a document, a new revision is saved. You can look back as far as 30 days.

---

Slackware Alive And Well Despite Rumors

When the main website for Slackware went down the rumor mill went into hyper-drive. These Discussions where hot and heavy on LinuxQuestions.org and DistroWatch. The discussions very quickly shifted from website problems to the long term viability of Slackware. This was compounded by Eric Hameleers, a top Slackware contributor, when he posted this early in the LinuxQuestions discussion “Old hardware, lack of funds…”. I am sure that it was not his intended effect but this was like throwing gasoline onto an already raging fire. The conversation quickly veered into the what can be done to save Slackware land.

The fires where then fanned even higher when Caitlyn Martin, developer of Yarok Linux, made this statement on Distrowatch disparaging the long term viability of Slackware:

“You remember that comment about my involvement in the development of a Slackware derivative? Forget it. We’re already discussing about delaying the release and rebasing off of something with a more secure future,”

This successfully torqued off a large number of people in the discussions on both websites. She responded to these comments by maintaining her stance that she was only concerned about upstream stability. The positive to come out of Martin’s comments was that it prodded Hameleers into clarifying his comments:

“The slackware.com server is down. This is a technical malfunction. It costs money to do something about that. Something will be done about that server, but if it takes a while, it is most likely caused by prioritizing and finances. Slackware was without its own web server for a long time in the past. And still active are ftp.slackware.com and connie.slackware.com, so what’s the big deal?

This turning of the rumour mill is pretty much unfounded, and I see some of the same old people pouring oil on the fire as usual.

There is no reason to doubt the availability, stability and long term viability of Slackware, the distribution. It has not been a one-man show for some time, the development effort is substantial and plainly visible in the ChangeLog, and there are no plans to switch to another development model or even ditch the distribution.”

Hameleers went into greater detail about Slackwares finacial situation on LinuxQuestions:

“It’s not that difficult: if everybody suddenly stops buying stuff from the Slackware store, then Slackware will not last another year in its present form–the Store sales are Pat’s income (and it feeds several other people too), but remember, the core team surrounding Pat do not get a penny of these revenues at all. Therefore, the rest of the team is not impacted in any way by Slackware sales figures and we will keep working with Pat on the distribution just like we have been doing for the past years. Look at the ChangeLog–sometimes there is a period of relative silence but that does not mean that no work is being done. Like last week, the updates can come in big gulps. Slackware will not die, its philosophy will not change, the team is dedicated and full of ideas.

“If people start chickening out and cancel their subscriptions, then that is a pity. Thankfully, I see lots of other Slackware users who decided that this is a good point to make a donation or buy something at the Store (if their financial situation allows it). Thanks to all of you for ‘supporting the cause.’ And remember–if you can not financially support Slackware, then helping your fellow Slackware users in forums like this one is an invaluable form of support as well! Slackware will not die because of financial issues, it will die if all of its users leave.”

As Hameleers points out a project like Slackware can never really go away as long as there is a strong community around it. Even if the project folds financially and Patrick did not transfer the copyrights on Slackware to the community it would continue under a different name. However for now there is absolutely no indication that any of that is either in the near or distant future.

---

Hungarian Government Solidifies Commitment To ODF

Last year the Hungarian government announced that from April 2012 forward all government documents needed to be produced in an internationally recognized open document standard. To further this commitment they are going to invest 370 million HUF (Hungarian Forint) which is approximately 1.7 million USD in applications that utilize the open document format (ODF). The two main beneficiaries of this investment will be the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged and Multiráció, an open source development company.

Multiráció developed an open office suite, originally based on OpenOffice.org, called EuroOffice. they are now going to produce a version for tablets and improve the collaborative functions within EuroOffice. Kázmér Koleszár, a developer at Multiráció, said that the development responsibilities would break out like this:

“The University of Szeged will do the quality assurance and usability related research and tool development. Multiráció will develop the office application and work on several extensions.”

All I have to say is good on you Hungary I wish that countries like mine would do more to push open formats. I have even considered suing entities like may state government for their continued use of proprietary formats on their websites.

---

Microsoft Office 15 to support ODF 1.2
Microsoft has told attendees at the ODF Plugfest in Brussels that the next versions of Microsoft’s Office products, Office 15 and Office 365, will support Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Microsoft-Office-15-to-support-ODF-1-2-1560464.html

---

Less Than 25% Of OSS Used In Corporations Managed Correctly

Sonatype released the results of a recent survey showing that 500 out of 2500 respondents said they were locked down to only use corporate approved components. Only 49% said that their companies had a policy in place. Then 63% indicated that their corporate standards where not enforced or that they did not have a policy.

Sonatype also noted that the use of open source components is on the rise. Almost 80% of respondents said they used open source tools regularly. Around 50% have migrated to an open source development stack. Also over 65% claimed to contribute to open source projects.

In their press release Sonatypesaid this about the use of open source:

“Key to modern development practices is the use of open source components to build mission critical applications,”

---

Red Hat, SUSE, And IBM Form Partnership While Canonical Stays On The Sidelines

IBM’s new POWER server line will be available with either Red Hat or SUSE Linux but not Ubuntu. After more than a year in development IBM rolled out their new POWER server systems and solutions. These machines are Linux specific utilizing the POWER7 processor-based hardware. These machines are targeted at midrange to large range enterprises. they are designed for big data analisis and delivering open source infrastructure services. Canonical chose not not to offer their server product on these units. Coould that be due to a fear of having to actually support an enterprise class customer.

This is how IBM envisions the use of this new server line:

“The new PowerLinux Solutions and supporting systems are designed to provide customers with lower deployment time and costs, and greater performance, dependability and workload density than competitive x86 platforms at similar price points.”

So where was Canonical in all of this? they had been working with IBM to deliver Ubuntu on IBM’s System p mini computer. That partnership however floundered into nothing.

Here is how Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, spun the announcement:

“We don’t support POWER because, by mutual agreement with IBM, there’s little to no overlap between the POWER user base and Ubuntu. People are choosing Ubuntu for farms of commodity servers, and POWER has been adopted for highly-specialized mission-critical roles. If IBM ever wanted to reach either the cloud or bulk computing market with POWER, then I expect the stats above would be relevant for their choice of OS, because they reflect the real choices of those markets.”

Hunh? I had a hard time following that statment but what I think it boils down to is this. IBM and Ubuntu agree that Ubuntu would be hard pressed to actually support a large enterprise customer. IBM, Red Hat, and SUSE still believe that their is a market out there for the big machine built on quality hardware. As opposed to large farms of x86 systems trying to do the job of a bigger machine.

Convention Scene

Time: 36:17

AnDevCon III
Android Developers conference
May 14 – 17
AnDevCon III is the technical conference for software developers building Android apps.
http://www.andevcon.com/AndevCon_III/index.html

Libre Graphics Meeting 2012
May 2 – 5 2012
The 7th Libre Graphics Meeting will take place in Vienna at the UAS Technikum.

The conference is the number one event for users and developers of free software for graphic design, photography, 3D modeling and animation.
http://libregraphicsworld.org/

Flossie 2012
May 25 – May 26, 2012 , London
Flossie 2012 is a free, two-day event for women who work with or are otherwise interested in Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and in Open Data, Knowledge and Education.
http://www.flossie.org/?tribe_events=flossie-unconference-for-spring

Linaro Connection
May 28/ through 6/1
Gold Coast Hotel Hong Kong.

Convention to discuss and develop features, infrastructure and optimizations for the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and beyond on ARM.
http://www.linaro.org/

LinuxTag
May 23 – 26, 2012
Linux Tag the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. The 18th LinuxTag will take place o at the Berlin Fairgrounds.
http://www.linuxtag.org/2012/
FOSSCOMM
May 12 – 13 2012
FOSSCOMM (Free and Open Source Software Communities) is a Greek conference aiming at Open Source enthusiasts, developers, and communities. The fifth FOSSCOMM will take place at the Technological Educational Institute of Serres, Greece.
http://serres.fosscomm.gr/
Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012
May 21-22 2012
San Francisco, CA, USA – Hyatt Regency San Francisco
Open sources influence on cCloud, data, mobile software
https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/31601/50188/?&

The Samba eXPerience 2012
in Göttingen, Germany is the 11th international Samba conference for users and developers. Meet the Samba Team and discuss requirements, new features and get an update on current developments! The conference is organized by SerNet.
May 8th – 11th, 2012 – Hotel Freizeit In Göttingen – Germany

The Utah Open Source Foundation
Utah Open Source Conference
“Storming the cloud 5/3-5
This year’s conference will be graciously hosted by Utah Valley University in their Computer Science and Engineering Building,

Mil-OSS
Military Open Source Software
The Rise of Open Source in a Declining Budget

Charleston, SC 5/22-24

Penguicon

Time: 39:36
Mat – grsecurity, sound redirection (ls -la > /dev/dsp)
Mary – HP Lovecraft
Tony – BYOBU

Chrome Remote Desktop – Provide remote connection between two computers. Chrome Remote Desktop is available in the Chrome Web Store

Listner Feedback

Time: 46:19
J. Mathis – Trisquel Gnu/Linux

Outtro Music

Time: 48:32

Can’t stop it by Shearer

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 56:29

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 4:27
Kernel News

Release Candidate:
No RC release as of this recording because once a month we record the show on Saturday after our regular LUG meeting.

Mainline:
3.4-rc2

Stable Updates:
On Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:46:39 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.28
There where 45 files changed, 486 files inserted, 182 files deleted

On Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:48:01 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.2.15
There where 71 files changed, 549 files inserted, 235 files deleted

On Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:49:04 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.3.2
There where 97 files changed, 817 files inserted, 415 files deleted

Kernel Quote:
A quote from Linus about the myth of c++ having “stronger type safety” than c.

“So the C++ people then completely made up the argument that “C++ has a stronger type system, we can’t use ‘void *’, so the C style ((void *)0) is wrong for C++”.

Which is utter and complete bullshit, and any amount of brains would have realized that (since C++ at the same time happily continued to special case the *integer* zero).”
Linus Torvalds

If you want to you can read the entire post here or the whole thread if you choose here.

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 6:43

Distrowatch.com

• 4-13 – Lightweight Portable Security 1.3.3 – live CD with strong privacy protection features created by the United States Department of Defence, is out
• 4-12 – Slackel KDE-4.8.2 – distribution based on Slackware’s “current” branch, with the goal of integrating the latest KDE desktop, the Calligra office suite and some custom artwork into separate live (installable to hard disk) and installation DVD images
• 4-12 – Devil-Linux 1.6.0 – a specialist live distribution for firewalls, routers and servers which boots and runs completely from a CD-ROM or a USB Flash drive
• 4-11 – Plop Linux 4.2.1 – distribution built from scratch and designed to rescue data from a damaged system, backup and restore operating systems, and automate tasks
• 4-11 – SliTaz GNU/Linux 4.0 – minimalist but extensible Linux distribution with its own package management system
• 4-10 – Superb Mini Server 1.6.5 – a Slackware-based distribution for servers, was made available earlier today
• 4-10 – Snowlinux 2 “LXDE”, “Xfce” – based on Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 and featuring custom LXDE and Xfce desktops
• 4-8 – Semplice Linux 2.0.2 – lightweight distribution (with Openbox) based on Debian’s unstable branch

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Fedora – 1487
4. openSUSE – 1615
3. ROSA – 1719
2. Ubuntu – 2260
1. Mint – 4108

Tech News:

Time: 17:41

Government Agency’s Infrastructure Built On Open Source

Don’t get me wrong I am not in favor of either more or bigger government. As one of my favorite modern day thinkers, Dennis Prager, is want to say:

“The bigger the government the smaller the citizen.”

However if you are going to start a new government agency why not start by using Open Source solutions. Having been established, by a knee-jerk reaction to do something, in 2010 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has that opportunity. Since it was not encumbered by any proprietary legacy solutions they were able to take advantage of the flexibility of Open Source.

Matthew Burton, in a recent O’Reilly Radar guest post, said the goal of establishing the agency IT infrastructure was not only to use open source, but to share code with the public (whenever it didn’t compromise system security). He also went on to say public money was used to create the code, so why not make it public whenever it’s possible to do so. He then followed that with this statement:

“The mission of this agency, as he points out is to protect consumers. Its only right for his agency to be as transparent as possible about how it goes about doing its business — and providing source code is one good way to do that.”

It does not happen often but when it does you can definitely see the advantages with using an Open Source stack to build your company/agency on.

---

Kubuntu Gets A New Sponsor

As we all know Canonical stopped supporting Kubuntu several months ago. Transitioning it to a community based distribution only. Now there is some good news for you Kubuntu users, Mary. Blue Systems is going to pick up the sponsorship for the project. Kubuntu lead developer, Jonathan Riddell, has announced that he will be leaving Canonical for Blue Systems after the up coming Ubuntu Developer Summit. This is not the first KDE project that Blue Systems has sponsored, they also sponsor Linux Mint KDE, Netrunner, Folderview, Muon Software Center, Kde MenuEditor and more.

---

Finally BlackBerry Users Get Linux Support

There is a now a BlackBerry integration tool out for the Linux desktop. It is called LinBerry, and you can download it here. They have both deb and rpm packages available but state they have only tested the deb package. When you download it and unzip/untar it you will have the LinBerry package along with three libraries for dependencies. I only needed one of the dependencies as my SolusOS install had the other two already. The site is in Spanish but Google’s translator did a good job and I was able to download it and get it installed. After installation most of the interface used English however some of the pop-ups were in Spanish. I was able to use all of the features except for the Modem as that interface is completely in Spanish and my carrier was not in the drop down. And the restore function just because I did not want to possibly loose any data. I did however make a backup, edit some contacts, and installed/uninstalled some apps.

They claim to have tested it with the 8520, 8900, 9000, and the 9650. I have a 9330 so can confirm that it does work with that device also. Even though it is in beta it worked very well. The only issue is some of the interfaces not being translated into English.

---

Hey Nokia How’s That Windows Phone Working Out For You

If you have watched television at all in the US lately, you have seen a commercial for the Nokia Lumia 900. This is Nokia’s first attempt at a 4G phone. It was released into the US market on April 8th and not even three days later a bug was discovered that cause the data connection to randomly drop. Not really the expected behavior for a phone that has a tagline of “an amazingly fast way to connect.”

This is the third phone from Nokia since they decided to go with Windows for their OS. They had so much hype in this launch that all of the eyes in the industry are on them. This could be devastaing as they say a fix will not be in place until at least April 16th.

Nokia,s stock price has fallen 50% since they made the announcement that they wee switching to Microsoft in February 2011. Their market share in the US has also fallen to less than 1%. Not a very shining outcome for the company that created the smartphone with its Communicator model phones.

---

Open Source Textbook Start Up Sued By Big Three Textbook Publishers

Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education have decided to sue the start up company Boundless Learning. Over their business model of producing open and free alternative textbooks. They build these textbooks by using creative commons licensed and other freely available material. We have to note here that this description comes from the entities suing them as they are still in closed beta.

A student would choose what textbook they needed from one of the major publishers. Boundless learning would then pull all of the material needed to reproduce the book from freely available open sources to recreate the textbook. We have to stress that all of the content would be from freely available open source repositories.

The big three textbook publishers are calling this copyright infringement. Even when no actual images or text from the book are used. They use an example of this biology textbook, Campbell Biology with MasteringBiology® (9th Edition), In which images of a running bear and a bear catching a fish are used to demonstrate two of the laws of thermodynamics. the boundless version does use similar pictures of bears but not the same ones, also the pictures used were from Wikipedia and licensed under a creative commons license.

In essence what they are saying is the fact that we used bears to do this means that you can’t. This is ridiculous on it’s face. Let me quote from the federal governments Copyrights Basics PDF available here on what is not copyrightable:

“titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration.”

This case appears to be unsustainable on its face. However in today’s wacky world of copyright we shall have to wait and see.

---

CloudFoundry, Linux Of the Cloud

CloudFoundry was launched about a year ago by VMware as their Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). This week VMware announced that they were going to open up the platform more in an effort to gain dominance in the PaaS market. Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware, had this to say:

“We see CloudFoundry as being the Linux of the cloud… You need to be open source to be able to port across different cloud infrastructures.. That’s what CloudFoundry is about; it’s an open source approach for providing portability for applications across clouds.”

The reason he says he compares CloudFoundry to Linux is because, of Linux’s ability to provide application portability across many different architectures. He want CloudFoundry to become that environment across the different cloud architectures out there. He also goes onto stress that CloudFoundry has been completely Open Source since day one.

---

My project last week: Install and use PeaZip
PeaZip is a cross-platform file archiver utility that provides an unified portable GUI for many Open Source technologies. I downloaded it (QT version) and installed it. I test extracted an ISO, DMG, ZIP and all extracted without a problem. I likeed this utility so much that I donated $15 to the project.

---

Suse Linux: 20 years and going strong
Red Hat may be celebrating its new role as the first open source company to reach $1 billion in annual revenue, but it’s not the only Linux provider to reach a key milestone recently.

Suse Linux, in fact, is not just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, but last week, it also announced that its customer base now numbers 15,000.

---

Microsoft Intros New Open Technologies Unit

Microsoft has announced a new focus on openness, with the launch of a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies.

---

Zero-day security hole in BackTrack Linux uncovered by student
A zero-day security flaw has been identified in the latest version of BackTrack Linux, a version used by security professionals for penetration testing.

Listner Feedback

Time: 32:03
Brad
Brandon

Interviews

Time: 33:43
Klaatu
Jessica McKellar

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:07:31

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 5:47
Release Candidate:
Sorry I missed this last week but Linus did not release it until all most 8pm EDT on Saturday and I did not check Sunday morning before we recorded.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 at 19:58:35 Linus Torvalds Released Kernel 3.4-rc1

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 19:09:38 Linus Torvalds Released Kernel 3.4-rc2
“So go forth, my eager minions. Go forth, and compile and test. Because nothing beats that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you’re on the bleeding edge, but at the same time -rc2 is not quite so bleeding edge that you need to worry too much.”

Mainline:
3.4-rc2

Stable Updates:
On Mon, 2 Apr 2012 at 12:52:39 Greg Kroah-Hartman Released Kernel 3.0.27
121 files changed, 1172 files inserted, 450 files deleted

On Mon, 2 Apr 2012 at 13:35:54 Greg Kroah-Hartman Released Kernel 3.2.14
168 files changed, 1606 files inserted, 793 files deleted

On Mon, 2 Apr 2012 at 13:54:51 Greg Kroah-Hartman Released Kernel 3.3.1
227 files changed, 2007 files inserted, 1207 files deleted

Kernel Quote:
This was posted by Linus in response to Greg Kroah-Hartman publicly making fun of a kernel contributor for doing something massively stupid.

“Publicly making fun of people is half the fun of open source programming.

In fact, the real reason to eschew programming in closed environments is that you can’t embarrass people in public”

— Linus Torvalds

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 8:27

Distrowatch.com

• 4-4 – Puppy Linux 5.3 “Wary”, “Racy” – “Wary” and “Racy” editions of Puppy Linux, targeting older computers, are ready and available for download
• 4-2 – DEFT Linux 7.1 – Ubuntu-based distribution designed for forensic analysis, penetration testing and related tasks
• 4-2 – Fuduntu 2012.2 – the latest of the regular quarterly release updates of the project’s rolling-release distribution previously forked from Fedora

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Fedora – 1511
4. Fuduntu – 1612
3. Puppy – 1714
2. Ubuntu – 2355
1. Mint – 3763

Tech News:

Time: 27:56
Udev Source To Be Merged Into Systemd tree

Kay Sievers, lead developer for udev, announced on the Linux hotplug mailing list plans to merge the source code for udev into the systemd tree. When this happens systemd will continue forward using the udev version number, so it will jump from 45 to 184.

After the merge it will still be possible to build it for non-systemd systems. He went on to say that builds of this nature will be supported for a long time to come. This is necessary so as not to break systems with initrds that lack systemd. Distributions that do not want to adopt systemd can build as they always have except they will need to use the systemd tar ball.

The decision to merge the two projects was based on the fact that init needs to be completely hotplug capable. Making udev’s device management and knowledge of device life cycles integral to systemd. This makes this merge a change in build scheme not a change in direction or interface. This leaves the libudev API untouched.

So what all of this boils down to after the brouhaha settles down is that in essence nothing really has changed.

---

Google Glass, Jetpacks Must Be Just Around The Corner

I have been a fan of science fiction since I could read. Well everyday reality seems to be catching up with the science fiction of my childhood. If you have not seen the video yet head on over to YouTube and check it out:

These are the kinds of things we geeks have been saying are coming since we were children. They are so futuristic that I am still having a hard time believing that they are actually in testing.

The Internet rumor mill has been swirling around this for awhile now. Google calls it Project Glass and it is being developed at Google[X], Googles R&D laboratory. The announcement on Wednesday, 4/4 about field testing for Google Glass was released in a post on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/111626127367496192147/posts). It is however for Google employees only. The designs shown on Wednesday are just a selection they have more including one that can be incorporated into your existing eyewear.

The biggest questions raised by this announcement have already been answered. Those questions being, won’t these get in the way of reality, and, won’t these just separate us more from from real life, well according someone who has used these, in an interview with the NY Times, the answer is no:

“They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”

The glasses do have a unique look about them, and people will know you are wearing them right away. They will hopefully get smaller and be able to be integrated into a regular looking pair of glasses.

I don’t care if these are impractical or don’t work I want a pair of these right now. This is the science fiction stuff I used to dream about when I was a kid. How far away are the personal jetpacks.

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ICANN Writes A How To For Governments To Seize Domains

Coming to you directly from the “Not Cool” department. It was pointed out to ICANN that it was providing a disservice by not speaking out against governments seizing domains. So what does ICANN do? They publish a white paper that is basicly a how to for governments to seize domains. They have also made public statements that they will work closer with governments to help them seize and censor domains. This unfortunate turn of events just further illustrates the uselessness of ICANN to protect the Internet. It instead shows how they are actively undermining the very principals of the Internet.

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IBM And Red Hat May Join OpenStack

From the I made this up to sound important bag. GigaOm reports that IBM and Red Hat are joining OpenStack. Neither company nor OpenStack has confirmed this report. OpenStack was started about two years ago as joint effort between NASA and Rackspace. Since its inception it has grown immensely with over 150 companies and 2,000 developers. I do not know how much cache these two will bring to the party however as the list of companies already includes the likes of HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, and Cisco.

OpenStack released the fifth version of its software this week code named Essex. They are having a Design Summit April 16-18 in San Francisco. This could be where new partners will be announced.

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April 4, 2012. KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

Significant bugfixes include
* making encryption of multiple folders using GPG work,
* XRender fixes in the KWin window and compositing manager,
* a series of bugfixes to the newly introduced Dolphin view engine
* improvements in the Plasma Quick-based new window switcher,
* Kontact and its device counterpart Kontact Touch have received a number of important bugfixes as well as performance improvements.

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Yahoo Open-Sources Mojito JavaScript Framework

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KDE Tooltips— when is too much, too much? Well for me when it’s associated with KDE tool-tips
Despite the fact that I am a big fan of KDE, there is one thing that annoys me every time I install a KDE-based distro—the numerous tool-tips and pop-ups that appear in an attempt to be helpful.

Recently while searching for some KDE information, I found that someone else also had expressed similar sentiments and went on to list all of the tool-tips that he had disabled. His version of KDE was 4.5—but it had not changed too much for 4.8.1. Here are the various tooltips that I have deactivated.

System Settings tool-tips: Are you bothered by KDE displaying the list of items for each configuration category within the System Setting area: Disable it thusly:.
1. Open System Settings
2. Select the Configure button
3. Uncheck the “Show detailed tool-tips”
Icon-only Task bar tool-tips: If you’re using the icon-only task bar, you will appreciate this information instructing how to suppress task bar pop-ups.
1. Right-click on the task bar.
2. Select Icon-only Task Manager Settings
3. In the Appearance section, Select “Do Not Show” in the tool-tips drop-down and save.
Panel balloon pop-ups: Do these balloons make you want to blow up? Selecting this option will suppress the pop-ups that appear when you hover over shortcuts and icons on the desktop.
1. Open System Settings
2. Select Workspace Appearance and Behavior
3. Select Workspace Behavior
4. Select Workspace
5. In the Informational Tips widget, select the “Do not show” option.
.
Title bar buttons (Maximize, Minimize, Close):
Open System Settings
Select Workspace Appearance
Select Window Decorations
Select the Configure Buttons button
Uncheck the “Show window button tool-tips” check box
This feature appears to be broken on my desktop—no tool-tips either way, plus my extra buttons with spacing are not appearing on the title bar. Perhaps my just downloaded and installed upgrade to 4.8.2 will fix this problem.
Dolphin: Stopping the mother of all pop-up tooltips…This action prevents Dolphin from taking the content of the information panel (which can be set to appear on the right side) and repackaging it as a tool-tip..a very large tool-tip This may come in handy for some people, but for me it was over the top.
1. Select the Settings menu
2. Select the Configure Dolphin… option
3. Select the General tab
4. Uncheck the “Show tool-tips” check box.

LibreOffice: The tool-tips that appear when you hover over the tool-bar will disappear.
1. Select Tools, Options.
2. Under General, uncheck the Tips box.

Listner Feedback

Time: 47:29
Keith Pawson
Steve Barcomb
Brad Alexander

Mats Soap Box

Time: 50:00

Outtro Music:

Time: 1:03:36
MultiPunk by Bilou le skankerfou

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:10:34

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 4;06
Release Candidate:
Nothing

Mainline:
Remains 3.3

Stable Updates:
None

The only thing we have is a kernel quote
Kernel Quote:
Greg Kroah-Hartman
Funniest thing I’ve read today:

* NOTE TO LINUX KERNEL HACKERS: DO NOT REFORMAT THIS CODE!
*
* This is shared code between CVS archive and the
* Linux Kernel sources.
* Changing the source just for reformatting needlessly breaks
* our CVS diff history.

Company name redacted to try to be nice, but really, someone needs to stop using cvs…

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 5:21

Distrowatch.com

• 3-30 – Gentoo Linux 12.1 – a live DVD demonstrating the latest Gentoo technologies and open-source software applications
• 3-30 – Proxmox 2.0 “Virtual Environment” – a specialist Debian-based distribution designed for running virtual appliances and virtual machines
• 3-28 – Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-37 – a specialist Debian-based live CD designed for cloning disks, has been released
• 3-28 – Webconverger 12.0 – Debian-based browser-only distribution designed for deployment on web kiosks

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. openSUSE – 1434
4. Fedora – 1445
3. Pear – 1714
2. Ubuntu – 2703
1. Mint – 3650

April Linux Conventions:

Time: 15:37

Linux Conference Scene – April 2012

Linux Storage, Filesystem, and MM Summit
Organizer: Linux Foundation
Dates: 1-2 April 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA – Hotel Nikko
The Linux Storage & Filesystems Summit is a small by-invitation event which focuses on collaboration and implementation.

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/lsfmm-summit

High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets
Date: 02-APR-12 to 02-APR-12
The focus areas of the show will be issues related to virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems. Venue: Roosevelt Hotel, New York,

http://www.flaggmgmt.com/linux/

Collaboration Summit (CollabSummit) 2012
Organizer: Linux Foundation
Dates: 3-5 April 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA – Hotel Nikko
An exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit

Indiana Linux Fest
Dates: 13-15 April 2012
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana – Wyndham Indianapolis West Hotel
Indiana LinuxFest is a community F/OSS conference, which is showcasing the best the community has to offer in the way of Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware, and Free Culture.
http://www.indianalinux.org/

Penguicon (Penguicon) 2012
Organizer: Penguicon, Inc.
Dates: 27-29 April 2012
Location: Dearborn, MI, USA – Hyatt Regency Dearborn

Think of a weekend long Linux Users Group meeting with hundreds of other geeks, which also just happens to have nationally acclaimed guests, its own wireless network, hotel room parties, lots of folks talking about Science Fiction and Fantasy, a place to buy cool t-shirts and buttons and such, amateur singing, anime, a costume contest, and free caffeine and snacks always available. Scheduled guests include:

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a “security guru,” he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

Jim Gettys — Jim Gettys was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on it again with X.Org, where he served on the board of directors. He previously served on the GNOME foundation board of directors. He worked at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

http://www.penguicon.org/CMS/

LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW) 2012
Organizer: Bellingham Linux User’s Group
Dates: 28-29 April 2012
Location: Bellingham, WA, USA – Bellingham Technical College
KDE Cascadia will be held in partnership with LinuxFest Northwest. This is a pilot of regional KDE gatherings in conjunction with established grassroots FOSS conferences. The goals are to reduce the effort and expense associated with a single annual stand-alone meeting, and to increase user and developer involvement in KDE.

http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/

Linux Enterprise End User Summit 2012 (invitation only)
Organizer: Linux Foundation
Dates: 30 April – 1 May 2012
Location: New York, NY, USA – New York Stock Exchange
An invitation-only event bringing together the core Linux maintainers and development community representatives to collaborate with senior IT leaders from the largest and most dynamic Linux users in the world for education and collaboration.

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Tech News:

Time: 21:04

The Tricorder Is Powered By Linux

Dr. Peter Jansen created a tricorder like device based on the unique looking design of the 24th century Star Trek version. He began the project in 2007. He produced two working versions and was working a third that greatly reduced the production cost, he later abandoned the third version as he stated it departed to radically from what the tricorder was supposed to look like. He has started work on a version four that is aimed at reducing the production cost and maintaining the tricorder look. Schematics and software source code for versions one and two are available for download from his website (http://www.tricorderproject.org/). Jansen say that the purpose of the project is to “encourage scientific curiosity and help people better understand the world.” He expands upon this with the following statement:

“I think for me, it’s really about curiosity. And helping to find ways to see and intuitively visualize the world around us, to help share that curiosity, and get folks excited about science,”

The second version tricorder, named the “Mark 2″, is the more sophisticated of the two working models he has created. It runs Debian GNU/Linux on an ARM920T-based Atmel micro-controller. The clamshell design has two OLED resistive touch screens, with one appearing to be dedicated as a keyboard and the other as a display. It has built in sensors that measure temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, magnetic fields, color, ambient light level, GPS location, and distance to a surface.

Jansen however was not the first one to recreate the Star Trek tricorder. A company called Vital Technologies produced an elaborate sensor device back in 1996 that they marketed as a tricorder. Jansen’s Mark 2 does more closely resemble the tricorder from Star Trek than the one from Vital Technologies. Over the years there have also been many tricorder toys sold with no functionality at all.

---

Linus Torvalds Shows Microsoft Patent Invalid

Forbes ran an article back 2007 in which Microsoft (MS) claimed that Linux infringed 235 of its patents. The article was entirely one sided and an obvious attempt by MS to create FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) around Linux and to scare off large companies from using Linux. These claims were exposed as bogus, well as much as possible since MS refused to name any of these patents, back then however that did not dissuade MS. They are still swing the big phony patent hammer around signing undisclosed deals with manufacturers over Android. So far all of these companies have fallen prey to MS except for Barnes and Noble (B&N) and Motorola. Microsoft tries to avoid a legal battle whenever possible as it would expose them for the frauds they are. The B&N case has shown this pretty well so far. One of these patents being used against B&N and Motorola is #352 which explains a method for:

“storing filenames with lots of characters in old filesystems such as the Windows FAT (File Allocation Table) filesystem that are designed to use very short filenames. Mobile phone makers use this type of technology so that their devices interoperate with other operating systems, including Windows,”

Motorola uncovered a post from Linus Torvalds which predated the patent by three years. MS lawyers argued with Linus over confirmation of the date to the point where Linus finally just told them “OK stop this stupid argument, can we go onto something else?” Making this patent invalid will certainly have an effect on MS practice of forcing companies to sign deals over bogus patent claims.

---

Munich Shows Open Source Solution LiMux Is Less Expensive And More Reliable Than Windows

In response to a question from the CSU Party of the Munich city council Christian Ude, the Lord Mayor, said even though the project had to be extended until 2013 and the budget increased by 50% that when the project is completed it will show a 25% saving over a comparable Windows installation.

The current cost of LiMux is €11.7 million. It would have cost them €11.8 million to continue with the Windows installation they had in 2005. However the number of computers needed has increased requiring an additional €1.65 million for software. Also an additional €2.08 million used for optimizations and extensions as part of the LiMux project. He went onto say that had they continued with Microsoft an upgrade to the current level of the LiMux installation would have cost at a minimum €15.52 million. This number does not take into account the license fees for the required software. The license fees for the current Windows installations that are left cost €2.8 million.

They also asked how many problems had been reported by employees. He said that problems were not tracked a way that lends itself to statistical analysis. He did note however that individual administrators were reporting fewer disruptions to service. The number of disruptions has fallen from 70 a month to a maximum of 46 per month. The remaining 2,500 PCs of the councils 12,000 PCs are slated for conversion to LiMux by the end of the year.

---

Red Hat Joins The Big Boy Club
(First Open Source Software Company To Do So)

Red Hat the first “Pure Play” open source software company to reach revenues over a billion dollars. Lets define what “Pure Play” means, it is a company whose shares are publicly traded and that either has, or is very close to having, a single business focus i.e. Coca-Cola as they sell only beverages, but not PepsiCo as they also own the snack food company Frito Lay.

Red Hat reported a fourth quarter revenue of $297 million dollars bring thier fiscal year revenue to a total of $1.13 billion, up 25% year over year. That fourth quarter revenue translates into a fourth quarter profit of $36 million. Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, had this to say about thier fourth quarter earnings:

“The strength of our fourth quarter was a fitting conclusion to a remarkably strong year for our business”

Jim Whitehurst also explained why it takes an open source software company like Red Hat to achieve this goal:

“Red Hat could get to $5 billion in due course, but that entails replacing $50 billion of revenue currently enjoyed by other computer companies.”

What he means by this is that in order attain that $5 billion of revenue Red Hat would have to displace software that currently costs $50 billion.

The company also announced a new stock repurchase program to buy $300 million of it’s own shares. This program supersedes an existing program which has brought $214 million in shares back to the company.

---

Difference engine: Free is too expensive
Article in the economist about the status of desktop-linux in the corporate environment.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/03/desktop-linux

---

All dressed up and nowhere to go…
The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren’t ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation’s retail partners won’t distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking….

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/first-batch-of-35-linux-computer-arrives-in-uk-awaiting-ce-compliance-testing.ars

---

Dell, Ubuntu Team for Updated Linux Cloud Platform
What is with Dell? They make it very difficult to find Ubuntu laptops on their site, yet they team with Ubuntu for a Linux cloud platform.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Dell-Ubuntu-Team-for-Updated-Linux-Cloud-Platform-429036/

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Google Drive

---

Google Drive rumors have been piling up lately, with the service reportedly on the verge of launching in the first or second week of April

---

Linux Tycoon – The Linux Distro Building Game

The idea is simple: You design and manage your own distribution of Linux and compete against other Distro’s.

---

Bubulle’s weblog
Languages to be deactivated in Debian Installer
http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/03/31#di-deactivation-status

Listner Feedback

Time: 55:53
Keith Pawson

Mats Soap Box

Outtro Music:

Time: 103:50
Start to relax by Distemper

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:03:04

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 8:25
Release Candidate:
No RC this week

Mainline:
On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:25:05 EDT Linus Torvalds released kernel 3.3

“So after the extra -rc release last weekend, now the final 3.3 is out there in the usual locations.” “… the 3.3 release means that the merge window for 3.4 is now open…”

Also with this release some of the Android kernel has been merged back into the mainstream kernel.

Stable Updates:
On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:17:49 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.25
Their were 41 files changed, 350 inserted, 131 files deleted

On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:18:38 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.2.12
Their were 49 files changed, 377 inserted, 174 files deleted

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:59:08 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.26
Their were 11 files changed, 38 inserted, 25 files deleted

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:59:56 EDT Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.2.13
Their were 19 files changed, 73 inserted, 58 files deleted

Kernel Quote:
No Kernel Quote this week

---

Linux and Android, together at last

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 12:48

Distrowatch.com

• 3-23 – Pear OS 4 – Ubuntu-based Linux distribution of many names, including Pear Linux or Comice OS, has been released
• 3-22 – Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 – Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the latest build of the Enlightenment 17 window manager
• 3-22 - VectorLinux 7.0 “Light” – a desktop distribution featuring four lightweight desktop configurations with JWM, IceWM, Openbox and LXDE
• 3-21 – Legacy OS 4 “Mini” – Puppy-based desktop Linux distribution designed to run on obsolete Pentium 3/4 personal computers and laptops
• 3-19 – Zorin OS 6 “Lite” – Lubuntu-based distribution featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop environment

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Debian – 1429
4. Fedora – 1484
3. openSUSE – 1978
2. Ubuntu – 2069
1. Mint – 3813

Tech News:

Time: 21:09
LibreOffice Last 3.4 Release And Gets Ready For The Cloud

On March 22nd The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the last maintenance release of the 3.4 fork. This fixes a security hole in XML handling along with small tweaks. Now the development efforts will focus on 3.5. They will also be driving towards LibreOffice in the cloud. Here is what Italo Vignoli, a TDF spokesman, had to say about the cloud:

“At the moment we are focusing more on this because of some of the opportunities that are arising, which we can’t disclose now,” he explained. “We will have the cloud version out in April.”

They have already released 3.5.1 and they are also looking to port this version other platforms. LibreOffice for Android is well into development claimed Vignoli. It is about 80% complete with the majority of what is left to code being the interface. He then went on to say that after the release for Android is out they will then focus on the iOS port.

TDF is also in the final stages of getting its certification program out. This will be a process of certifying developers and third party consultants, so enterprises looking to migrate to LibreOffice will be able to hire qualified people.

TDF has been able to generate a lot of support from the community. They have been adding between 10 and 20 developers a month. They are steaming right along putting out 12 builds within 18 months. While LibreOffice parent OpenOffice still has not had a major release although Apache does say one is one its way.

---

Iceland Becomes Latest Government To Announce Move To Open Source

From the that is great news bag Iceland has announced plans to migrate every desktop to Open Source software. The plan is to complete the project within a year. This does not mean everyone will be on Open Source in a year. This is what Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the project leader, had to say:

“The goal of the project is not to migrate public institutions to free and open source software in one single year but to lay a solid foundation for such a migration which institutions can base their migration plans on”

In order to ease the transition they plan to implement a joint infrastructure between different organizations. They have also enlisted a group of specialists to monitor the project and guard against possible failures. this policy is a continuation of the program that for the last four years has been moving schools and other public bodies to open source from proprietary software. It all stems from an initiative introduced Icelandic Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, that charged all governmental organizations to evaluate open source solutions on an equal basis with proprietary solutions.

---

Microsoft Tries to “Bribe” European Union Parliament Staffers

If you remember back in March of 2011 the European Commission had been accused of favoritism when it decided to migrate their internal IT systems to Windows 7 without a public tender. This was contrary to their own advice for public sector organizations to avoid lock-in.

What MS is doing is offering free versions of some of it’s most popular software Office, Visio, and Project, to EU Parliament staffers. This a common tactic for MS in its contracts with large organizations. However the EU Parliament should be held to a higher standard. Even though the offer does not extend to elected officials we all know who does the real grunt work and makes the suggestions to the legislatures, their staff. They also control all of the access to the members.

This just looks bad, for the people who create and enforce regulations to be offered these “Gifts”. If they accept these gifts how does that look then when they decide in MS favor sometime in the future.

---

Patent And Trademark Office Guts Oracle’s Lawsuit Against Google

In 2010 Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright violations relating to Java in Android. At Google’s request the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) re-examined the patent’s Oracle was using in their claim. After the PTO made it clear that the vast majority of these patents would not stand up in court, Oracle withdrew all except two.

When the lawsuit was first filed it was a shock to the community. Oracle a founding member of the Linux Foundation was suing someone over Android, a mobile variant of Linux. When Oracle acquired Sun, Java came along for the ride. James Gosling, creator of Java, had this to say about the integration meetings when Oracle purchased Sun:

“Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code.”

Oracles expert Iain Cockburn, a professor at Boston University, originally claimed that damages would be worth $6.1 Billion. Judge William Alsup, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has whittled that figure down. And recently Google using Cockburn’s latest numbers says they’d owe Oracle only $37.5-million if found guilty on all counts. Worse yet Oracle came up with an even lower figure of $32.3-million using the same numbers.

Oracle wanted billions from this lawsuit and will most likely only get millions. Then after legal cost will most likely lose money on the litigation. It would have cost Oracle less if they would have just granted Google an open ended Java licenses in the first place.

---

Programming the Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton
A webinar to help Raspberry Pi users get their unit up and running and begin their programming revolution is scheduled for April 4, 2012 at 9:00 AM CDT (America/Chicago). Go to this site to register: http://www.element14.com/community/events/3282 .

---

Kdenlive reaches crowdfunding goal
The Kdenlive (http://kdenlive.org) project has managed to raise $4000 on the crowdfunding web site Indiegogo in under a week. To complete the rewrite of the program’s source code, which was begun in 2011, the project started a crowd-funding campaign to hire a full time developer.
Extremadura CIO plans Linux rollout on 40,000 desktops
The CIO of Spanish autonomous region Extremadura says it is planning to move the administration’s 40,000 desktop systems to a Debian distribution. According to a report on the European Commission’s “Joinup”, CIO Teodomiro Cayetano López says that the project is “really advanced” and deployment will begin in the spring and be completed around the end of the year.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Extremadura-CIO-plans-Linux-rollout-on-40-000-desktops-1419281.html

---

Google patent: Background noise from phone calls could be used to target ads
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/google-patents-background-noise-phone-calls-target-ads/

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Eucalyptus?

“Enterprises can now take advantage of a common set of APIs that work with both AWS and Eucalyptus, enabling the use of scripts and other management tools across both platforms without the need to rewrite or maintain environment-specific versions,” Terry Wise, director of Amazon Web Services Partner Ecosystem says in a statement.

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http://www.humblebundle.com/

All the games in the bundle are available for the first time ever on Android!

Pay what you want for awesome games. Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android.

Listner Feedback

Time: 52:05

That Dude gives a workaround for the “invalid rss format” problem. He added our rss feed to his google reader then has dogcatcher get our show from his google reader.

Mat’s Opinion piece

Outtro Music:

“Stamp” (by The Rural Alberta Advantage)

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 1:09:54

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 12:55

Kernel News
A little no52:04te about the kernel releases this week. Once a month we record on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday morning after our LUG meeting. So when Linus releases to late to get the rc in it rolls over to the next week.

Release Candidate:
On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:09:04 Linus Torvalds announced the release of kernel 3.3-rc7

Mainline:
3.3-rc7

Stable Updates:
On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:33:59 Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of kernel 3.2.10
There were 116 files changed, 1081 files inserted, and 585 files deleted

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:34:51 Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of kernel 3.0.24
There were 86 files changed, 855 files inserted, and 492 files deleted

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:13:33 Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of kernel 3.2.11
There were 2 files changed, 1 files inserted, and 16 files deleted
This is a single build error fix for the 3.2.10 kernel.

Kernel Quote:

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 15:43

Distrowatch.com

• 3-17 – Toorox 03.2012 “KDE” – Gentoo-based distribution and live DVD featuring the KDE 4.8.1 desktop
• 3-17 – Ultimate Edition 3.2 – Ubuntu-based distribution on a DVD with extra applications and desktop environments
• 3-16 – Linpus Linux 1.7 “Lite Desktop” – a distribution for desktops and notebooks featuring GNOME 3 and a number of usability enhancements
• 3-15 – Vinux 3.0.2 – Ubuntu-based distribution designed for visually impaired users
• 3-14 – Salix OS 13.37 “Live KDE” – Slackware-based live DVD featuring the KDE 4.5.5 desktop
• 3-14 – Calculate Linux 11.15 – Gentoo-based distribution for desktops (with KDE, GNOME 3 or Xfce) and servers
• 3-14 – Guadalinex 8 – Ubuntu-based, easy-to-use, desktop Linux distribution developed to facilitate the access to information technology for all citizens.
• 3-12 – Skolelinux 6.0.4 – Debian-based specialist distribution for schools, also known as “Debian Edu”

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Debian – 1450
4. Mageia – 1583
3. Fedora – 1630
2. Ubuntu – 2094
1. Mint – 4074

Tech News:

Time: 30:45

Ubuntu Overtakes Red Hat In Server Deployments
(Or Mark Shuttlworth Beats Chest)

If you have not been under a rock this last week you have heard Mark Shuttleworth shouting how Ubuntu has overtaken Red Hat. Well he is correct Ubuntu did over take Red Hat. If you look at the number of web server deployments, as established by W3Techs (http://w3techs.com/), you see that on March 1st, 2011 Ubuntu had 13.1% while Red Hat had 15.3%. Pretty close together but Red Hat did have the lead. Then you look at March 16th, 2012 and Ubuntu is at 18.4% and Red Hat is at 12.2 so yes they have overtaken Red Hat and by a significantly larger percentage than Red Hat was beating Ubuntu.

What Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t tell you is that Red Hat was not number one and Ubuntu is currently not number one. What basically happened was number four and number three traded places. If you take a look at all of the numbers for the top eleven Linux based web server deployments (http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux) we see that Debian and CentOS are basically in a dead heat on March 1st, 2011 with Debian at 28.6% and CentOS at 28.9%. Then when you look at March 16th, 2012 Debian has risen to 30% and CentOS has remained at 28.9%. Which makes Debian not Ubuntu the Alpha Dog. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Shuttleworth. If your curious, and you should be, you can see the way W3Techs arrives at their figures here (http://w3techs.com/technologies)

There is a reason that I use Debian for most servers, rock solid and no frills, just what you are looking for in a server. In all of my clients server rooms that I have control over what the servers run it is overwhelmingly Debian with the occasional CentOS box, never ever Ubuntu though. So now I am going to sit back and enjoy a Frankenmuth Brewery Munich style Dunkel Lager.

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The “Spark” Gets Renamed “Vivaldi”

A trademark issue has forced the renaming of the new tablet that is going to be running KDEs’ Plasma Active desktop. The KDE project leader and creator of the tablet Aaron J. Seigo had this to say:

“ran into a problem with trademark for the name we had chosen, and this pushed us back to the drawing board… This may have been a blessing in disguise as we looked into some of the broader pictures around this topic. In the end, we decided to go with a musical theme that celebrates some of the brightest lights in human history when it comes to making, playing and living interesting lives.”

I could not find the exact trademark issue that caused the renaming.

The website taking the pre-orders for the tablet, MakePlayLive, has updated the website to reflect the name change. Pre-orders have also been closed for the tablet as they have reached the capacity of the initial product run.

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London Underground Gets WiFied By Virgin Media

Of the 270 London underground stations Virgin Media will have 80 of them wired for free wifi by the time the Olympics rolls around. With another 40 in the offing by the end of 2012. The service will only be in the stations, it will not extend into the tunnels or onto trains. The big catch here is that as soon as the last Olympic tourist is out of the city the service goes into a pay by the minute service for access. If your a Virgin Media customer then you will get free wifi indefinitely, also if you are only looking for travel information that will also be available for free. This is what Virgin Media had to say on the subject:

“With the eyes of the world on London this summer, we’ll be showing off our capital as a leading connected city on the global stage. We’re putting the power of Virgin Media’s fibre optic network in the hands of millions of Londoners, commuters and visitors and are delighted to be launching Wi-Fi for free throughout summer 2012 and beyond.”

Nobody is talking about how much the cost is for this undertaking except for the official statement of this “is covered by the commercial contract that has been awarded to Virgin Media”. What does that mean, well I believe it means that Virgin Media is sucking up the cost of the initial roll out hoping to make it up on the back end.

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Android Kicks Siris Ass In Japanese And English

DoCoMo’s Syabette Concier beats Siri in a fair head to head test in Japanese. When asked for directions to the hospital the DoCoMo app provides them without even blinking and then when Siri is even given a second chance it still does not produce directions. Then it completely mishandles a simple request for a curry recipe while the DoCoMo app serves an answer up straight away. See a video of the test here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FaeYavOLgc), it is entirely in Japanese so unless speak Japanese you will only be able to see that the results are not the same but not know what is being searched for.

This is not the first time Siri has taken a header into the shallow end of the pool. After Motorola claimed that the voice recognition on the Atrix2 was significantly better than Siri Gizmodo put it to the test. When the testing was complete it showed definitively that even with just the default software Android was far superior to Siri.

I think everyone is missing the point here however. People do not buy Apples products. They buy them for the cache, they buy them because they are Apple products. So all of you Applephiles can go right on using your inferior iPhones and the true lovers of superior technology will keep right on using those Androids.

Now for a little fun go and check out this satirical add for Siri – http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MVEw0Ca09tc

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User sues Apple saying Siri not as smart as advertised
 
iPhone 4S user Frank Fazio wants his money back and is suing Apple to get it. According to a post at CNET News, the disgruntled consumer says that the company has dramatically oversold the capabilities of its Siri information system.
In the commercials from what the lawsuit calls Apple’s “multi-million dollar advertising campaign,” the operating system functions like a highly capable digital personal assistant. Many iPhone 4S users, however, are finding that their experiences with Siri are more like the story documented in Fazio’s complaint.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/13/user-sues-apple-saying-siri-not-as-smart-as-advertised/

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Judge orders failed copyright troll to forfeit “all” copyrights
Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit “all of” its intellectual property and other “intangible property” to settle its debts.
The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/judge-orders-failed-copyright-troll-to-forfeit-all-copyrights.ars

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So what are those two digits anyway…
This article provides a clear description of fstab, especially the two digits at the end of the partition mount point line – http://www.linuxstall.com/fstab/

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Your Free Open Source Music Studio Distributed By Alfred Music

G.W. Childs, sound designer and prolific author of Your Free Open Source Music Studio, offers valuable information on low- to no-cost options of the very latest music-making technology as well as insight from do-it-yourself musicians and producers. With easy-to-follow tutorials and helpful graphics on how to use a wide variety of open-source programs, readers delve deep into the world of pre-screened, useable, and reliable music shareware, freeware programs, including various multi-track recording programs. Various available plug-ins are also covered, from virtual instruments to correctional plug-ins, as well as stereo audio editors like Audacity, which are a necessity for mastering, destructive edits, and more.

http://www.flossmanuals.net/

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Chumby co-founder designs open-source Geiger counter

When Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Chumby co-founder and author of Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, saw Japan devastated by last year’s earthquake and tsunami, he decided to help by designing a stylish radiation monitor that could be used by normal humans, unlike the bulky instruments available today. He details the design process on his blog, from the very beginnings of the project as he partnered with Safecast, to his movement through several different design approaches. Original sketches called for a smaller, compact device with an incorporated flashlight, but the necessity of certain Geiger tubes drove things in different directions, including an all-white design that displayed influences from Wall-E’s Eve, to the final black model with an OLED screen.

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If you know: email show at smlr.us

Listner Feedback

Time: 1:03:03

“Linux for the reset of us” is a Podnutz.com podcast and they talk about
us and quotes Mat’s article about the linux desktop overtaking windows
in 59 years. They go on to say how they like Mary!

Episode #80 about 21 min in.
http://podnutz.com/lftrou

Outtro Music:
Time: 1:05:26

Revolution Now by Josh Woodward

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Podcast: Play in new window

http://smlr.us

Downloads:

MP3 format (for Freedom Haters!)
OGG format (for Freedom Lovers!)
Total Running Time: 52:04

Intro:

Mat Enders, Tony Bemus, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 1:30
Release Candidate:
None

Mainline:
3.3-rc6

Stable Updates:
On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 18:09:11 Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Kernel 2.6.32.58
Greg had this to say about this kernel release:

Kernel Quote:

“This is the last 2.6.32 kernel I will be releasing. The 2.6.32 kernel is now in “extended-longterm” maintenance, with no set release schedule from now on. I STRONGLY encourage any users of the 2.6.32 kernel series to move to the 3.0 series at this point in time.”

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 3:50

Distrowatch.com

• 3-09 – Linux Mint 12 “LXDE” – fast and lightweight variant of the popular Ubuntu-based distribution
• 3-08 – CentOS 5.8 –
• 3-07 – IPFire 2.11 Core 57 – the latest update of the project’s specialist distribution for firewalls

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Debian – 1512
4. CentOS – 1653
3. Fedora – 1753
2. Ubuntu – 2306
1. Mint – 4265

Tech News:

Time: 11:31
Microsoft Contributes “Mayhem” to Open Source

No not literal mayhem all though they have done enough of that in the past. The point and click scripting “language”. It is billed as a simple scripting system for non-programmers. Outercurve is going to be the organization trying to drive its use and development. Outercurve promotes collaborative software development within open source communities.
Mayhem is licensed under the Microsoft Public License, which according to GNU.org is not GPL compatible. You can read the license in its entirety here (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/licenses.aspx).

Mayhem is supposed to allow regular users to have different services and devices interact with each other. Mayhem connects graphical programs in a way that is similar to how batch files string together programs in the Windows command-line environment. Like connecting an alarm clock to a coffee maker so your brew is ready for you in the morning. In fact just about any device or service within Windows ecosystem can be used to add events and reactions to Mayhem. Paul Dietz, who is Microsoft’s project leader for Mayhem, said this about Mayhem:

“Any interconnected device could communicate with any other through simple trigger events (if the alarm clock rings) and reactions (then start the coffee maker.) Unlike writing a program, the user simply selects an event and a reaction, and then turns on the connection between the devices. No code, app or programming required,”

Mayhem takes instructions of the form “when this event happens, do this reaction” and an event could be for example:

pressing a key on a game
saying a verbal command
or using an interface on your mobile phone

Mayhem will also react to network-based events that use data from the Internet such as for example:

stock prices or exchange rates
weather
social networking updates

To aid in creating more Add-Ons to increase the power of Mayhem, the Outercurve Foundation is hosting the “Make Your Own Mayhem” Contest 2012. Developers are invited to submit any number of creative add-ons to Mayhem by midnight (Pacific Time), April 30, 2012. Submissions will be evaluated by judges Johnny Chung Lee, Rapid Evaluator, Google; IBM Fellow John Cohn, and MK Haley, Associate Executive Producer – Faculty, Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center. Awards include Honorable Mention, Most Awesome Add-on, People’s Choice (most ‘Likes’ on entry video) and the Mayhem Master’s Award 2012, awarded to the developer of the best collection of Mayhem add-ons. Over US$5000 in prizes will be awarded. Microsoft spun the not-for-profit open-source Codeplex Foundation group off in 2009. In 2010, they renamed themselves the “Outercurve Foundation.”

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Kernel 2.6.32 The Real Story

Greg Kroah-Hartman tells the real story behind the 2.6.32 Kernel. You can continue reading my paraphrase and synopsis of his post on his website or you can head over and check it out from the horse’s mouth here (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/2.6.32-stable.html).

On 3/4/12 Greg released what he said would his final release of the 2.6.32.58 kernel. He goes on to say that this kernel will continue to be maintained by the current 2.4 maintainer, Willy Tarreau. This was, by number of users, one of the most successful kernels ever.

An important part of how the stable kernels was released was the idea of “throw it on the floor” when Linus released a new kernel. For enterprise distributions this just does not fit the business model. At the time Greg was working for Novell/SUSE. They getting ready to release SLE10 based on the 2.6.16 kernel. As engineers for Novell/SUSE they were looking at the painful proccess of maintaining this kernel for 5-7 years. Since he was already maintaining the stable kernel he already had all of the scripts and work flow created. So he decided lets see how long he could maintain the 2.6.16 kernel. This experiment lasted for 855 days from 3/6/2006 to 7/29/2008 longer than any other release Greg had ever managed.

The work, and the experience gained from keeping this kernel alive for enterprise customers, brought this proposal about The Future of Enterprise Linux Kernels (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/enterprise_kernel_future.html) in June of 2007.

The kernel developer community is very tight-knit. Even though they work for many different companies, often in direct competition. They all work together daily via email, talk on IRC, and socialize a couple of times a year at various conferences. At some of these meetings in mid to late 2009 the developers working for the different distributions all realized that they were all working on their next long term release. With the success 2.6.16 kernel they all agreed informally to push for the adoption of the 2.6.32 kernel. When they got back to their respective companies they started planting the seeds for the 2.6.32 kernel. Greg goes on to related that the seed planting worked so well that he had to stifle laughter when in a meeting a project manager announced that his team had decided that the 2.6.32 kernel would be best and what did engineering think about it.

All of this behind the scenes work came to a head when SLE11 SP1. Debian “Squeeze”. RHEL 6, Oracle Linux 6, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS all released on the 2.6.32 kernel. “Hacking” these different and competing groups to coordinate and release this specific kernel, was a demonstration of how the community really can achieve remarkable things.

Greg’s old argument for moving the kernel of an enterprise distribution forward finally came to be realized by 2 of the 3 major players. Oracle Linux and SLE 11, latest releases, have moved to the 3.0 kernel, regardless of leaving practically the rest of the distribution alone.

What Greg learned from maintaining the 2.6.32 kernel have resulted in a proposal he made last year for the longterm kernel (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/longterm-proposal-08-2011.html). Which results in a long term kernel being chosen once a year. Even though the Linux user and developer community has moved on and enterprise distributions are no longer the main consumer of the kernel. The explosion in the embedded market however has created a need for for this type of kernel support a continued necessity. The LTSI project (http://ltsi.linuxfoundation.org/) is hoping to fulfill this need.

Greg goes on to specifically thank some Debian kernel developers who he says carried a much larger portion of the water than any of the other kernel developers. He commends their dedication to the Debian user community. These developers are Ben Hutchings, Maximilian Attems, Dann Frazier, Bastian Blank, and Moritz Muehlenhoff who he says “that without their help, the 2.6.32 kernel would not have been the success that it was. The users of Red Hat and SuSE products owe them a great debt.”

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Stuck On Windows But Need Some GNU Goodness Try GOW (GNU On Windows)

You can get the fantastic GNU tools you are used to working with on Windows now without the overweight bloat of Cygwin. Despite its lightweight footprint, about 10MB, it has most of the GNU tools you could want or need, like bash, curl, gawk, grep, putty, rsync, sed, sftp, and zip for a complete list see the list here (https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list).

It also includes the simple GOW tool. The tool only has three options –help, –version, and –list which can be very useful if you want to find out if a specific tool is included. It is extremely easy to install. It comes as a single binary that puts all of the tools into the Windows path so it makes it very convenient to use them at the command line, and where else would you use the GNU tools. Even though they compiled for 32-bit systems it runs just as readily on a 64-bit installation.

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SOPA, PIPA Who Needs Them If It Is A Dot Com, Dot Net, Dot Org We Can Shut You Down

Well that is according to prosecutors in the state of Maryland anyway. In the past you could avoid U.S. jurisdiction by having your registrar offshore and the servers offshore. Not so anymore if you have a .com, .net, or .org since these domains are controlled by Verisign based in the U.S. they are fair game. On February 26th U.S. authorities seized the domain name bodog.com. They did this by serving Verisign with a warrant ordering them to redirect traffic for the site to a warning page advising that it has been seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This was one of the big concerns with SOPA and PIPA that it would give the U.S. the ability to break the Internet. Well it appears that they already can. Bodog had nothing in the U.S. except that that is where the registry lives. This is the worst overreaching of power I have heard of in recent times.

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Did Apple Steal Their New Map Software?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/03/08/did-apple-steal-their-new-map-software/

At its  iPad 3 unveiling Wednesday, Apple made a big deal about their new version of iPhoto built for mobile devices, featuring a system for geotagging photos and placing them on a map.
Apple also seemed to be using a new map service instead of the usual Google Maps for the program. But Several bloggers quickly noticed that the maps bore a striking similarity to OpenStreetMap, an open-source map service with over 400,000 volunteer contributors worldwide. Upon further investigation, it became eminently clear that Apple had lifted the maps directly out of OpenStreetMap.
OpenStreetMap is, of course, open source software, so it isn’t illegal for Apple to use it in their program. In fact, it’s actually a real validation for the Open Street Maps Community that a company like Apple used their data over the traditional Google Maps. But the usage policy requires proper attribution, and it’s abominable netiquette to use open source software without crediting it. Apple is drawing a fair amount of internet ire for their actions, as chronicled by Carl Franzen at Talking Points Memo.
More here:
http://alastaira.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/apple-maps-aka-apple-are-thieving-bastards/

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Raspberry Pi Linux distro released, but the $35 computer faces new delays

The Raspberry Pi foundation has suffered a production setback that could delay delivery of the organization’s $35 Linux computer. The manufacturer accidentally used ethernet jacks without integrated magnetics, built-in transformers that provide DC-isolation and help filter noise.
The wrong jacks have been soldered to the Raspberry Pi boards and will have to be removed and replaced before the product can ship to end users. According to the foundation, the ethernet jacks are relatively easy to replace. The problem is that sourcing a sufficient quantity of the right ethernet jacks might take some time. This will be the second time that the Raspberry Pi project has suffered a minor delay due to component sourcing difficulties.
“All the stock of jacks we believed we had in place and ready to turn into the ethernet ports on your Raspberry Pis turn out not to be the correct part, so we’re having to start again and move through the negotiating/ordering/delivery cycle as fast as we can,” a representative of the foundation said in a statement on the organization’s blog.
The foundation says that it discovered the problem with the ethernet jacks several days ago, but waited until now to disclose it because they wanted to be sure that there were no other issues. The organization apologized for the delay and asked its eager customers to remain patient while the matter is resolved.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/raspberry-pi-linux-distro-released-but-the-35-computer-faces-new-delays.ars

Fedora Remix – Official OS for Raspberry Pi?

The raspberry pi announcement via OSTATIC.com

“The Remix is a distribution comprised of software packages from the Fedora ARM project, plus a small number of additional packages that are modified from the Fedora versions or which cannot be included in Fedora due to licensing issues – in particular, the libraries for accessing the VideoCore GPU on the Raspberry Pi. The SD card image for the Remix includes a little over 640 packages, providing both text-mode and graphical interfaces (LXDE/XFCE) with an assortment of programming languages, applications, system tools, and services for both environments.”

– Ostatic.com

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/805

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NVIDIA now a member of The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation have announced the addition of new members to their organisation, including graphics giant NVIDIA. Drivers for NVIDIA hardware are already officially supported on Linux, although they are currently closed source.

Joining NVIDIA as new members are: Fluendo, one of the major companies behind GStreamer; Lineo Solutions, creator of embedded Linux systems; and Mocana, a security platform for mobile devices and apps. The Linux Foundation made this statement in their press release:

“The ongoing support from companies and organizations across industries and geographies demonstrates not only Linux’s ubiquity but also its ability to quickly adapt for a variety of technical and market opportunities,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services at The Linux Foundation. “Fluendo, Lineo Solutions, Mocana and NVIDIA each represent important areas of the Linux ecosystem and their contributions will immediately help advance the operating system.”

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/nvidia-now-a-member-of-the-linux-foundation/

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Linux.com’s Weekend Project: Take a Look at Cron Replacement Whenjobs

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/552976-weekend-project-take-a-look-at-cron-replacement-whenjobs

From the whenjobs web site: Whenjobs is a powerful but simple cron replacement.
Two key advantages over cron are a simpler syntax for writing rules and a powerful dependency system that lets one job depend on variables set when other jobs run (allowing, for example, one job to run only when another job has finished successfully).
Reviewers take : Not ready to completely replace cron

Link to program: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/whenjobs/

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make your dumb TV smart

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Listner Feedback

Time: 46:32

Outtro Music:
Time: 49:11

“The Beach! The Beach!” (by Holy Coast)

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.