LXer Weekly Roundup for 28-Nov-2010

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In the Roundup this week we have all kinds of Open Source goodness for you including the news that Novell has been acquired by a company that may or may not have ties to Microsoft, how to wake up a Linux server remotely, Part 1 of how a KDE 3.5 user moved to KDE 4.4, ARM’s co-founder says Intels days of dominating the desktop are numbered and on a personal note today is the 5 year anniversary of the day my relationship with Linux got serious. Enjoy!

What’s Microsoft’s role in the Novell-Attachmate deal?: Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. is buying Novell for $2.2 billion, the companies announced on November 22. At the same time, Novell announced the “concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash.” So far, Microsoft is saying little about its role in the deal.

Novell Agrees to be Acquired by Attachmate Corporation: Novell, Inc., the leader in intelligent workload management, today announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. Attachmate Corporation is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash, which cash payment is reflected in the merger consideration to be paid by Attachmate Corporation.

How a “Welded-to KDE3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE4.4 – Part 1: In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

Linux Backup Server: Remote Wakeup, Automatic Shutdown: At last I can write this up for you, my fine readers. Today we’re going to learn about using Wake-on-LAN to wake up a server remotely, and automatic shutdowns. My master plan for my backup server is to automate everything– wake it up, run backups for all the computers in my house, and then everyone shuts down for the night.

Wayland VS X – Some Perspectives: The Linux world has been very talkative for the last few weeks with the news that Ubuntu plans on switching from the classic X server to Wayland for it’s graphics environment. What is Wayland exactly and why the change?…

Top Five Linux Deployment Mistakes: The days when Linux is an unknown quantity in a business are largely over — but that doesn’t mean that every organization has tons of experience deploying Linux. Even if your organization has deployed Linux before, there are some common mistakes to be aware of. Here’s five things you need to watch for when planning a new Linux deployment.

The best open source netbook distro of 2010 revealed!: Linux User & Developer magazine reviews four of the best netbook distros currently available in a bid to uncover the ultimate open source user experience for your netbook computer…

Intel Is Dead on the Desktop, Says ARM Co-Founder: Its days are numbered and the downfall of the Wintel monopoly has been forecast for some time. Intel has indeed lost significant ground to ARM chips, and Microsoft faces equally annoying competition from the likes of Google’s Android, which is climbing onboard practically every computer that isn’t a desktop PC or server.

Moving Desktop Windows users to Linux: More than a year ago I wrote a post concerning my personal experience. I manage our computer systems at work and never tried to convert user Pc’s to Linux, instead sometimes I showed them some of the nice stuff and played with them when their windows system crashed, or simply because network printers stopped working.

Goodbye Fedora, welcome back Debian, Part 1: I really did like Fedora 13. I liked it enough to solve more than a handful of problems. I liked it enough to use a proprietary graphics driver for the first time (didn’t like that; not only was it outside the package-management system and hard to update, it didn’t perform so well either). I love the Fedora community, the openness that’s everywhere, the lack of pretense. But just as everything was roses, furry kittens and such when I first ran Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel, it started to go dark with the change — in mid-cycle, mind you — to the 2.6.34 kernel.

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LXer Weekly Roundup for 21-Nov-2010

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The big stories this past week included an update on how far away Chrome OS is, a Ubuntu vs.Fedora comparison, 5 unusual games for Linux and a 200 line kernel patch that makes your desktop snappy. Enjoy!

Ubuntu vs Fedora: which is best?: Linux is always in a state of flux. On any given day, millions of lines of new code are being written, tested, double-checked, merged, packaged and downloaded from software repositories delivering another dose of opensource goodness. Unlike most desktop operating systems, release schedules are based on months rather than years (well, for most flavours of Linux) and so the experience of using Linux is one of trickled iterative change.

Schmidt: Google Chrome OS ‘a few months away’: Google boss Eric Schmidt has said that Chrome OS will be available “in the next few months” — which may be an indication that the company’s browser-based operating system has been delayed. Since unveiling the Chrome OS project last year, Google has said that systems using the operating system would be available by the end of this year. But the end of the year is a mere six weeks away. As he dropped the “a few months away” line at this week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt said that Gingerbread, the new version of Android, was “a few weeks away.”

Tensions Between Ubuntu, Fedora Mount Over New Website: In an ideal world, free-software developers would happily get along and cooperate towards the same ends. But the world’s far from perfect, as rising tensions between the Ubuntu and Fedora camps have made clear recently in the wake of the founding a new website intended, ironically, to promote “respect” within the open-source ecosystems.

The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders: In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small — just over 200 lines of code — but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

The Linux desktop may soon be a lot faster: Linux is fast. That’s why 90%+ of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers run it. What some people don’t realize is that Linux is much better at delivering speed for servers and supercomputers than it is on the desktop. That was by design. But over the last few years, there’s been more interest in delivering fast desktop performance. Now there’s a Linux kernel patch that may give you a faster, much faster, desktop experience.

Alternative To The “200 Lines Kernel Patch That Does Wonders” Which You Can Use Right Away: Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.

The Perfect Desktop – Linux Mint 10 (Julia): This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 10 (Julia) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 10 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Fixing Akonadi’s warning of the non-existing leap second table: Ever since I installed Kontact 4.5, it has been showing an MySQL warning when starting. The exact error in the logs is:

Can’t open and lock time zone table: Table ‘mysql.time_zone_leap_second’ doesn’t exist trying to live without them

While it’s only a warning, I don’t like to have my logs filled with warnings. Hence, I went on a hunt to prevent this warning. Lots of posts said this issue is fixed in newer versions (certainly not for me!), or it doesn’t matter. But that wasn’t good enough for me..

5 unusal games for Linux: We often hear that there are no games on Linux, or that are much worse than their counterparts for windows, so today I want to show some unusual games that run perfectly on our favorite operating system. Caph Caph is a sandbox game, based on physics. The game target is to make contact red object with green object. You can use various objects, solid, wire (rope), and bendable objects. Gravitation will help you.

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LXer Weekly Roundup for 14-Nov-2010

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In the LXWR this week we have why Wayland is good for the future, Apache tells Oracle they are leaving the JCP, a music player with an ugly name, does Linux competing with Windows matter anymore? and 24 things we would change about Linux. Enjoy!

Why Wayland is good for the future…: The recent announce at UDS about the fact that the venerable X server & protocols will not be the default choice for Unity and as a consequence Ubuntu was a shock for some, it is clearly a relief for me…

Is it time for Free software to move on?: A remarkable continuity underlies free software, going all the way back to Richard Stallman’s first programs for his new GNU project. And yet within that continuity, there have been major shifts: are we due for another such leap?

24 things we’d change about Linux: If you use Linux long enough, you’ll soon discover a list of things you wished were different. Here are 24 things that we wish were different.

Linux: Does Being Competitive with Windows Matter?: How many times have you heard this statement: “It’s the year of the Linux desktop.” Not recently? Then how about “Linux is making gains on the Windows desktop”? Still leaving a bad taste in your mouth? Bet I know why. For years, both the statements above have been over-used to the point that either idea is now completely meaningless. Not due to anything negative with the Linux desktop, mind you, rather due to inherent differences in how Linux is marketed to the world, who its intended audience is and whether mainstream adoption even matters in the first place.

Apache to Oracle: We’re leaving the Java Community Process: The Apache Software Foundation is usually a nice, quiet organization that supports the development of quite a lot of open source software. Unlike the Free Software Foundation, it doesn’t usually get political or controversial. But the ASF is calling Oracle out over its handling of the Java Community Process (JCP).

What can all managers learn from Free, Open Source Software?: The 2010 edition of the Free/Open Source Software in Academia Conference (fOSSa) was an interesting event, with several talks that are quite relevant for everybody who cares about effective business and human resources management in ANY sector, not just in the software industry.

Two Features Wayland Will Have That X Doesn’t: While the discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server and Canonical’s plans to deploy Ubuntu atop Wayland continue to be ongoing within our forums (here, here, and here) and elsewhere, some new technical capabilities and plans for Wayland have been discussed. Here’s two features that Wayland is set to have that is not currently supported by the X.Org Server.

DeadBeef – Simple, Lightweight Music Player for Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid: DeadBeef is probably the simplest and the most lightweight music player I have ever used in my Ubuntu. If you are someone who loves to keep it simple and useful at the same time, DeadBeef is one music player you definitely don’t want to miss.

Just Stop It, Microsoft: We all know that Microsoft doesn’t like people messing with their stuff. For example, Microsoft really hates the amount of piracy that surrounds Windows and Office. The company frequently releases updates that make piracy of those products harder and harder. This is completely legal considering that only Microsoft owns Windows and Office. You pay about 300.00USD to have MS Office and MS Windows, and those would be introductory versions of each. Now, apparently, the company wishes to control things even more.

Distro Developers Need Dollars!: Distro developers work hard and could use your financial support. These are hard times, and a lot of people are hurting financially. Jobs and money are hard to come by, and many folks are just getting by. It turns out that even your favorite distro developers could use a few bucks to help them keep churning out new & updated distros for desktop use.

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Stop Scaring Me

I have finally had a chance to watch the President’s press conference so I could make sense of what I heard from pundits all day. For one, I have never seen a President asked those kind of questions by reporters with such a blatant lack of respect in their voices and demeanor. It was sickening for me to watch after a while. Not one of them would have dared to act that way to Bush Jr. or Sr, Clinton or God forbid Ronald Reagan. And just what was “it” that was asked starting in the press conference and repeated again and again by pundits afterward that he isn’t getting?

The only difference I can ascertain between Obama and every other President that has ever held office is the color of his skin. Other than that he just like all the rest, agree with me or not I don’t care. He is not any more or less trustworthy or honest or have any less skeletons in his closet than any other career politician. I have no more or less reason to trust him than any of the rest. I have never in my life seen a President get heckled during a Presidential address. Not ever, not even once. Not until Obama took office. I have never heard a President talked to, or about in the way he is talked about in the Press.

The two party system is broken, badly. We need a viable third party in this county but the Tea Party is not it. But then if they can pull all the ultra conservatives out of the Republican and Democratic parties then so be it. Maybe we need a party of crazies so we know where they are. And no, I am not kidding. I will agree we need a much smaller government and tax reform but that is never going to happen so their whole platform is a joke to me.

Why do federal level politicians get to keep receiving their salary after they have left office? And they get all the pay raises that get voted in after they have left too. And they get world class health care for them and their families for the rest of their lives and can will it to their husbands and wives when they die? They they don’t even pay into it, we the regular tax payer get to do that for them. And we expect them to willingly vote to stop that? Are you kidding?

I don’t care about gun rights because I do not own any guns and have no real plans too nor do I fret over how much my taxes are considering I don’t make that much. I don’t care about Social Security because I’m pretty sure I won’t get any and I don’t believe in God (I am a Secular Humanist) so I don’t fit in with any party. I want to know how we can get millions of non-violent criminals out of jail, but that would lose money for all the private prisons trading on wall street. I live in a country where it has somehow become good business to incarcerate people.

You will never get any kind of smaller government or tax reform with 10% or more of your population permanently behind bars and 10% permanently unemployed. That is one fifth of the population dependent on or incarcerated by the government in some form or another. Don’t forget to factor in all the businesses that work for and with the Government. It is immensely large and growing even today.  A government that has to protect you from a threat that may come from anywhere at any time (terrorism) and has to provide for you and makes money off of incarcerating you has to be big enough to do so. Which means that the government will never be big enough.

Our government will never be big enough to protect us from outside threats, protect us from ourselves and provide for us when we can’t and control us all at the same time, never. But that is more and more becoming what the Government’s job is lately, between the Patriot Act, mandatory health care, Social Security, Katrina, The BP spill, fighting two wars we shouldn’t be and the first gulf war, the corporate, auto industry and banking bailouts (again), the real estate bubble (again)..I could keep going.

The press conference made me aware of something, I guess I do not watch enough T.V. to already have known; I am going to have to wait either two or six more years to know whether I have seen the beginning of the end of something. Either the end of politics as we know it due to the total loss of respect and civility towards the President, or if it was because he was black. If after Obama leaves office all of a sudden we have respect for the office of the President then I will have learned something terribly revealing..

I am scared for the future of my country.

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LXer Weekly Roundup for 31-Oct-2010

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In this week’s Roundup we have; What makes Linux compelling to use? Ubuntu moves away from GNOME, Learning Linux the hardcore way with Linux from scratch, Microsoft is a dying consumer brand, Why Unity in Ubuntu is good for the future and Ronald trip’s response to why Unity is clouding up the desktop. Enjoy!

Linux: What Makes Linux Compelling to Use?: I find Linux to be an excellent general purpose computing platform for day to day personal and small business use. I like the fact that Linux does not cost me money. No, my time is not worthless, but I have wisely spent the time I needed learning how to install, configure and use Linux and the free, open source software that comes with it.

Leaving the OpenOffice.org project: Today is a special day. I feel both sad and relieved, happy and somewhat disgusted. I have officially resigned from all my duties, roles and positions inside the OpenOffice.org project. My resignation is effective immediately and I am leaving the project. I will now be contributing to the Document Foundation, while of course continuing to work at Ars Aperta and at the OASIS as a member of its Board of Director, eGov Steering Committee and ODF Committees. These past days have been tense. In a sense it was to be expected, but on the other hand I feel that it was in fact quite surprising and unprofessional.

Ubuntu moves away from GNOME: The big news at the Ubuntu Developer Summit? Moving to Unity as the default interface for Ubuntu Desktop with Natty Narwhal (11.04), rather than GNOME Shell. Earlier this year, Canonical representatives had to deny that they were forking GNOME with the work on the Unity interface. (Quick disclaimer, I’m a GNOME Member and help out with GNOME PR.) Unity is a Canonical-sponsored project that was initially delivered for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. GNOME Shell is the interface being developed for GNOME 3.0, which was delayed to spring 2011. Apparently, Canonical were being asked the wrong question. During the opening keynote, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical is committing to making Unity the default desktop experience “for users that have the appropriate software and hardware.”

What’s The Fastest Linux Filesystem On Cheap Flash Media?: Compact Flash and SD storage cards are everywhere; gigabytes for cheap in a tiny form factor. Most come formatted with VFAT. So what is the fastest Linux filesystem for these little devices? Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They’re not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they’re backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion … you name it.

Learning Linux the hardcore way: Linux From Scratch: I was excited to see that the Linux From Scratch (hereafter, LFS) project just released a new and stable documentation “build” for version 6.7 this past September. I have known about the LFS project for many years but I didn’t start experimenting with it until not too long ago.

Why Unity in Ubuntu is good for the future..: The hype is all about cloud and the end of the desktop as we know it. The recent move from a “pure” gnome desktop to Unity by Ubuntu/Canonical is clearly a sign that of a fast-track type of (r)evolution. Why is it good for the key-players (Ubuntu/Debian, Canonical, Gnome and … the User), what are the risk associated with this somehow bold move?

Microsoft is a dying consumer brand: After several missteps, MS is dying as a consumer brand. Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

Using an IMG instead of an ISO to put Debian on a USB Flash drive: Now that I have a laptop that boots from USB, I’ve been using IMG images instead of ISOs when they’re available to test new Linux and BSD systems because they’re so easy to deal with.

Adoption of Unity is the Most Significant Change Ever for Ubuntu, Says Mark Shuttleworth: It’s going to be Unity all the way for Ubuntu’s next major release codenamed Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”. During Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) at Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu’s default interface not just for netbook editions, but also for Ubuntu desktop editions.

Unity Clouding Up The Desktop: Mr. Des Ligneris wrote that the adoption of Unity is a bold move and a good one for Canonical and Ubuntu, as the focus of computing is shifting wholesale to the internet and “The Cloud”. It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet Device”. Their use cases don’t overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.

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