Episode 063 – Happy Holidays!
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Total Running Time:
Un-edited Live session – https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xYu11808xxI
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show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page
Summary
Kernel News: Mat
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Distro Talk: Tony
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Mary Distro Review
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Tech News:
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Is it Alive? – Mary
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Listener Feedback
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Mat’s Soapbox
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Outtro Music
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Intro:
Tony Bemus, Mat Enders, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner
Kernel News: Mat
Kernel News
Release Candidate:
On Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:00:58 PST
Linus Torvalds released kernel 3.8-rc1
Here is what he had to say about it:
“The longest night of the year is upon us (*), and what better thing to do than get yourself some nice mulled wine, sit back, relax, and play with the most recent rc kernel?
This has been a big merge window: we’ve got more commits than any other kernel in the v3.x kernel series (although v3.2-rc1 was *almost* as big). It’s been a rather busy merge window, in other words.
The diffstat looks normal: about 63% of the patch being to drivers (staging, networking, scsi, gpu, sound, drbd etc) , 18% architecture updates (with various ARM platform things being the bulk of it as usual, sigh), and the rest being “various”, like core networking, filesystems (new f2fs flash-optimized filesystem) and include files etc.
I’m appending the “merge shortlog” which is about the only half-way readable automated data I can give you. There’s a *ton* of stuff here. Go out and test it,
(*) And by “us” I mean mainly people in the same timezone and hemisphere as I am. Because I’m too self-centered to care about anybody else.”
–Linus Torvalds
Mainline:
Stable Updates:
Kernel Developer Quote:
“I wonder how many email systems out there cut at 8 or 32 characters still or have “%” processing still enabled and may also be vulnerable to games”
–Alan Cox
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Distro Talk: Tony
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- 12/18 – Clonezilla – 2.0.1.15
- 12/19 – PC-BSD 9.1
- 12/19 – IPFire – 2.11
- 12/19 – Sparky Linux – 2.0.1
- 12/20 – Rosa – 2012
- 12/21 Gentoo – 20121221
- 12/21 – CinnArch – 2012.12.21,
- 12/21 LinuxMint 14 XFCE Edition
- 12/21 PF Sense – 2.0.2
- 12/22 – Netrunner – 12.12
- 12/22 – Knoppix – 7.0.5,
- 12/22 – Wifislax – 4.3
- 12/23 – Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition
Distro of the Week: Tony
- Coming soon
- Coming soon
- Coming soon
- Coming soon
- Coming soon
Mary Distro Review – Freezy Linux
OK, I will admit to selecting this distro based on its name. Sometimes a name will lead you to an interesting distro and sometimes not. Last week, Linux BBQ caught my eye and provided me with opportunity to review an interesting distro. So would Freezy Linux leave me chillin’ and groovin’ kind of like the chill on a good beer or would this distro leave me cold. Here we go! First…
The Vitals:
Name: Freezy Linux
Maintainer: Luca Forina
Distro Latest Birthday: ?
Derivative: Ubuntu
Kernel: 3.2.0
Review Desktop: Gnome 3.4.1
Live Environment:
Freezy Linux boots easily enough to the live environment. And why shouldn’t it—it’s the Ubuntu live boot process, complete with the Try Ubuntu or Install Ubuntu options. For a few seconds I thought I had grabbed the wrong CD. But, yes, I wrote Freezy Linux on the CD after I burnt the iso, so it must be Freezy Linux .
After booting to live, the first thing I notice is the wallpaper. It’s called “Emotion” from VladStudio.com. This wallpaper also was included in the set of desktop wallpapers released for KDE 4.0…yes, that KDE…the one that was not quite ready for prime time. But it does have a crisp look—kinda Freezy and cool, so I move on. The graphics look crisp when they’re rendered through the open source nVidia drivers which also were included.
A single panel at the bottom of the screen contains system tray contents and a button for the menu launcher
The next thing I notice is the networking icon—I don’t have wireless. Now this distro is a re-spin of Ubuntu, a distro that I have installed many times. Ubuntu has been solid for me and has always handled my wireless chip without an issue.
Graphics: ( nouveau)
Wireless: ✘ (iwl4965)
The Big Three
Default Browser: Chromium
Office Suite: LibreOffice
Mail Client: Thunderbird
Default File Manager: Nautilus
The Install Process:
Close your eyes and imagine Ubuntu, because that’s exactly what it is.
Installed Environment:
The first thing I noticed after booting to the installed environment, was the painful reminder that no wireless networks were found—again because no wireless drivers were included on Freezy’s install disk.
The second I also noticed the desktop wasn’t quite as crisp looking as the live environment. I decided to check whether the nuveau kernel module had been loaded. If it hadn’t, I planned to do that.
But wait! Where was my cursor? It was not to be found. My batteries were good and the cursor was visible when I ran Freezy in a live environment but after the “Ubuntu” install, it wasn’t there.
I have to admit I called it quits at this point. Why should I waste my time…?
Other interesting Programs:
There was really nothing to write home about any nify apps or programs on Freezy Linux
Zim – A desktop wiki or note-taking program
Cheese – would have been interesting if my web cam were found.
Dropbox – a Dropbox menu item which allows you to set up dropbox.
Rating:
1.2 of last week’s iced coffee, made of beans from the freezer. It’s yet another Ubuntu re-spin but one that delivers far less than it should.
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Tech News:
Pi Gets Apps
The popular Raspberry Pi gets it’s own app store. This could be what bring the Pi out of the tinkerers shops into the mainstream. You can access the Pi Store through the Raspbian operating system (the distro specificaly for the Pi) or through a browser. It will be open to community contributions of applications, videos, games and projects built with Scratch, a popular visual tool for on-the-fly Pi applications.
Here is the announcement from the Raspberry Pi folks:
“Today, together with our friends at IndieCity and Velocix, we’re launching the Pi Store to make it easier for developers of all ages to share their games, applications, tools and tutorials with the rest of the community…The store runs as an X application under Raspbian, and allows users to download content, and to upload their own content for moderation and release. At launch, we have 23 free titles in the store, ranging from utilities like LibreOffice and Asterisk to classic games like Freeciv and OpenTTD and Raspberry Pi exclusive Iridium Rising. We also have one piece of commercial content: the excellent Storm in a Teacup from Cobra Mobile.”
When you put a project up on the store, you get to choose to make it free or paid. They also have a “tip jar” mechanism, so even free apps may get some donations.
F2fs The Flash Friendly Filesystem Gets In 3.8 Kernel
Linus has pulled F2fs into the Linux kernel’s main development branch. F2fs is a filesystem that was mainly developed by Samsung employees and is specially tailored for storage media that uses flash memory chips. F2fs is a Log-structured File System (LFS). Like Btrfs, such filesystems use Copy-on-Write (COW) – when a file is overwritten, the filesystem will store the new data in a different place and delete the reference to the old data. However, unlike Btrfs or Ext4, F2fs fills up storage media sequentially, always saving new data behind the most recently stored data with no regard for fragmentation. Only once it has reached the end of the storage medium will it start again at the beginning and use any newly unreferenced areas for storage. This will ensure that flash chips are evenly used because they only tolerate a limited number of writes.
Red Hat Revenue Up
Red Hat has reported that its third quarter revenue is up 18% year-on-year, at $343.6 million, with subscription income rising 19% (to $294.2million). With estimates placing Red Hat at 29 cents a share, the reported earnings beat those estimates, coming in at 30 cents a share. According to Bloomberg, that was enough to see Red Hat shares rising in late trading. Under the headline figures, Red Hat’s recent acquisitions and associated costs took their toll, with GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) operating income down to $49.9 million, a 7% drop year-on-year.
Time:
Top Linux Distributions, 2012
http://www.unixmen.com/top-linux-distributions-2012/
Top Linux Trends 2012-2013
Here are the nine trends and stories that shaped 2012 the most for the community and that are likely to continue to influence events in 2013:
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/top-linux-trends-2012-2013-1.html
Measuring Linux’s Success in 2012
http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/14/measuring-linuxs-success-in-2012/
lsof Command Examples
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/08/lsof-command-examples/
KDE Corner
KDE/OwnCloud Customization
http://owncloud.org/support/synchronisation/kde/
KDE SC 4.10 Beta Released
On December 19, KDE Shipped First Release Candidate of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.10. Everything is on schedule for a January 23, 2013.
New Episode of KDE Tea Time #10
– Qt 5 released
–How to be a KDE developer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT42D1k0O4Y&feature=plcp
Homerun 0.1.1 was released
Homerun is a KDE full-screen launcher that has some very nice configuration capabilities. To install add the following ppa to your Kubuntu repositories:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:blue-shell/homerun
Then run the following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install homerun
http://agateau.com/2012/12/19/homerun-0.1.1/
http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun#Application_launcher
Tutorial: http://thelinuxvideo.com/?p=448
Is it Alive (The Christmas Edition)?
Time:
During this segment of the show, I challenge Mat and Tony to identify whether a Linux Distro is alive or dead? We twist the concept for this week’s show when Mary challenges Mat to decide if the named entity was a Linux distribution originates from a country that celebrates Christmas. Extra credit will be given if you can say Merry Christmas in the language of that country. The items for the December 23 show:
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Bayanihan
http://www.bayanihan.gov.ph/
MAT: No
TONY: –
VERDICT: Yes (Philippines)
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Berry Linux
http://berry-lab.net/
MAT: Yes
TONY: —
VERDICT: No (Japan)
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Hanthana Linux
http://www.hanthana.org/
MAT: Yes
TONY: ..
VERDICT: No – Sri Lanka
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Kademar
http://www.kademar.org/
MAT: No
TONY: –
VERDICT: Yes (Spain)
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Mat: 0
Tony: —
Tony missed an opportunity to beat Mat this week!
Listener Feedback:
I did not write anything up and have deleted it sorry.
😀
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