FOSSPlanet

There’s blogging nowadays and everyone has to be writing stuff on the web all the time about what they have been doing. Sometimes even to the cost of not actually doing it properly. There is a whole bunch of newbies out there writing poor howtos, pretending to save the day of a fellow GNU/Linux user, but not teaching him any real knowledge. I want to share a couple of examples of this behaviour I have seen in the last days and a real suggestion for you, fellow user.

Handbrake 0.9.4 is released. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.

The basics for MySQL are important to understand so you can make adjustments. The first in the series showed you how to set up a LAMP Server, the second in the series showed you how MySQL needs to be configured and this now shows some of the basic settings that you need to know.

eBox Platform is an open source small business server that allows you to manage all your services like firewall, DHCP, DNS, VPN, proxy, IDS, mail, file and printer sharing, VoIP, IM and much more. These functionalities are tightly integrated, automating most tasks, avoiding mistakes and saving time for system administrators. This tutorial shows you step by step how to use eBox as a Windows Primary Domain Controller. At the end of it you will be using eBox Platform 1.2 for users and shared resources management on your Windows domain.

Somewhere between the debut of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala for those into animal names) and today, the developers/maintainers/overlords of what many consider the leading Linux distribution have fixed the dreaded "kernel mode setting bug" that rendered the X Window system on many computers using Intel video hardware unusable until kernel mode setting was turned off.

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel (a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file) so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that.

Opensourc3 is a magazine dedicated to Unified and Cloud Computing using open source technologies. It is published on a monthly basis and is available free to readers worldwide.

LXer Feature: 26-Nov-2009

Here's a quick blog, because I'm really in hurry, so please forgive any mistakes.

Microsoft worked together with Apple to bring Silverlight video to the iPhone. What this solution basically does is take a video at the server side, cut it in parts and convert the parts to separate H.264 streams. Then stream those files to end users with IIS Media services. These have .ts extensions, a format mplayer understands.

Linux Journal reports that Sun will remove one license from its X.org contributions. "One project with a proliferation of licenses — though thankfully compatible — is X.org. We count some seventy-six separate licenses in the xorg/xserver's COPYING file, most of which are derivatives of the "standard" license, itself an MIT license. Most derivatives bear roughly the same language along with a single distinguishing feature: '...and that the name of [the copyright holder] not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission.' That file will soon have one less license, however, as Sun Microsystems' Alan Coopersmith announced yesterday that the company will begin licensing its contributions under the "standard" license, which does not bear the advertising/publicity provision. Further, Sun will re-license all of its prior contributions — some twenty-one years of substantial contribution — under the "standard" licenses, ridding the code entirely of its derivative license."

Joe Brockmeier looks at Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on ostatic. "If you just can't get away from email over the holidays, you can at least help test the release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. The Mozilla folks released Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on Tuesday with more than 100 changes in the release. It's been a long time in coming, the first release in the 2.0 series was back in 2007. But Thunderbird 3.0 looks like it might be worth the wait when the final is released. What's new and interesting? The user interface changes are probably the first thing you'll notice, especially the new tabbed interface. Instead of opening messages in a new window, they'll now open in a tab." Thunderbird is available here.

About a half year after big technological changes, the KOffice project has released version 2.1 of its office suite, even if it's not quite ready for everyday use.

A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won’t hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead. I write this knowing full well that I am going to make a lot of people angry. This might be the first time a writer receives very angry responses from both camps — KDE and GNOME’s users might actually (finally?) join arms and fight just to show everybody how wrong I am! Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?

Are the fights that matter just the ones between giant companies? Doesn't the health of the Net and the Web matter more than any commercial battles? These questions came to mind when I read How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search in TechCrunch recently. In that piece Mike Arrington supported Jason Calacanis' suggestion that Murdoch stick it to Google by cutting an exclusive search deal with rival search engine Bing. Even Jay Rosen took the same side. (Though perhaps in jest.)

According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today.

As I explained in the previous post, replacing my notebook's hard disk with an SSD significantly improved the overall system performance -- even without any additional tweaking. But there are also a couple of simple tricks that can boost performance even further.

This article describes how you can upgrade your Fedora 11 system to Fedora 12. The upgrade procedure works for both desktop and server installations.

With the release of a new Ubuntu (Linux for human beings) distribution, Karmic Koala, we felt it was time to go back to the roots and beyond. This guide that’s both great for Linux initiates, and Linux intermediates. Over 50 pages of cool copy-paste tutorials and hacks, it belongs in the virtual library of every Linux user!

One of the articles on Phoronix last week was entitled Intel Linux Graphics Shine With Fedora 12, which showed off the nice state of Intel graphics on this latest Red Hat release when it came to kernel mode-setting and its 3D stack with it working well "out of the box" and offering some nice performance gains over the earlier Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 releases. While the Intel stack may be improved in Constantine, the ATI support has taken a hit, as users were quick to point out in response to last week's article. In particular, when using the ATI kernel mode-setting driver in Fedora 12 (which is the default for pre-R600 hardware), there is a large performance discrepancy compared to using the traditional user-space mode-setting for ATI Radeon hardware. Today we are looking at what exactly the performance cost is for using ATI KMS in this new release.

I had previously pointed out that the lack of supported platforms was a serious problem for Silverlight, especially when compared to Flash. The root of the problem was that Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight, is usually at least one release behind the Windows and mac versions of Silverlight. Rather than working to fix the problem it seems that Microsoft is making it worse by introducing Windows only features in Silverlight 4.

KDE.News covers the rebranding of KDE. Essentially, the "K Desktop Environment" expansion is deprecated, KDE refers to the community and is an "umbrella brand", what is currently called a KDE release will instead be a "KDE Software Compilation" release, and so on. "In the process, KDE's identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere. [...] KDE is no longer software created by people, but people who create software. [...] To be able to communicate this clearly in our messaging, it is necessary to reposition the KDE brand so that it reflects the reality. We therefore also need distinct brands for the products we produce." KDE hacker Aaron Seigo has some thoughts as well.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment, management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob friendly.

BURG stands for Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB. It's based on GRUB, and add features like new object format and configurable menu system.

ars technica looks at a decision from the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) to remove the GIMP from the default install. "An important part of the 10.04 roadmap that emerged during UDS is a tentative plan to remove the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Tool, from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision is viewed by some as controversial, the reasoning behind it is valid. The removal of a niche professional graphics editing tool reflects Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users."

CentOS has updated kdelibs (C4: arbitrary code execution).

Debian has updated libvorbis (arbitrary code execution).

Fedora has updated php-pear-Net-Ping (F10, F11, F12: arbitrary code execution) and php-pear-Net-Traceroute (F10, F11, F12: arbitrary code execution).

Gentoo has updated uw-imap (multiple vulnerabilities), dstat (arbitrary code execution), and wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated kdelibs (RHEL 4 & 5: arbitrary code execution).

rPath has updated httpd, mod_ssl (rPath 1, rPath 2: man-in-the-middle/SSL injection) and sun-jdk, sun-jre (multiple vulnerabilities).

Hey Windows fans, would you like to take Linux for a spin to see what everyone's buzzing about? It's easy to do in just five easy steps. You can test Linux for yourself without having to setup multibooting, worry about partitioning or installing over your current Windows system. That's right, you can. Try out that Linux power and coolness for yourself using these five easy steps. Don't worry, you'll never have to leave the comfort of Windows to do any of them--not even to a command line. Let's get started!

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 26, 2009 is available.

Bryce Harrington is agonizing over the nontrivial task of delivering a working X server for Ubuntu. On the Ubuntu desktop mailing list he speaks of a flood of bug reports and appeals to improving the situation.

Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos says there's still "more to develop and more territory to conquer", and predicts Microsoft will "become one of the biggest friends of open source". In an exclusive interview, former MySQL boss and silicon.com Agenda Setter, Marten Mickos talks to Tim Ferguson about the state of open source, Oracle's plans to buy Sun Microsystems and the value of working with people who are smarter than you. Marten Mickos is probably best known for his time as chief executive of open source database company MySQL, a position he held from 2001 until the beginning of 2009.

From the Gravy dept.:
During the last few months, our team has been working hard to support extensions in Google Chrome's beta channel. Today, we are getting one step closer to this goal; developers can now upload their extensions to Google Chrome's extension gallery. We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch.

You can find all the info to write an extension in our docs. Once your extension is ready for the gallery, you'll need to upload a zip file of your code and an icon that helps users distinguish your extension. You'll also have the option to submit text, screenshots and/or YouTube videos that describe the functionality of your extension. All types of extensions are welcome in the gallery, provided they comply with our Terms of Service.

From the Knews dept.:
The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul.

The advantages of the clean and well-structured codebase have started to show. Despite a relatively limited developer group, there are a large number of improvements over 2.0. During the development of 2.1, it was also announced that KOffice is going to be used in the Nokia n900 smartphones based on Maemo Linux.

Alan Coopersmith on behalf of Sun Microsystems has announced this afternoon that they will be relicensing all of their past and present X server work under the canonical form of the X.Org license in its latest form. This is being done to reduce the number of MIT license variants within the X Server...

The KDE community has modified its product branding and expanded its focus beyond the KDE Linux desktop to support a wider range of open source projects, says eWEEK.. Meanwhile, the community has released Version 2.1 of KDE's KOffice suite, featuring improved OpenDocument support and KWord enhancements.

After talking about NVIDIA's forthcoming 64-bit FreeBSD driver we were alerted to the fact that the first 195.xx public beta driver is now available. Earlier this month we first talked about the NVIDIA Linux 195.xx driver series as Fermi GT 300 support was being worked on, but now a Fermi-less (or at least from their official change-log) driver has arrived...

Here's an NPR article on Phil Agre, who has not been heard from in over a year. "Agre's online influence reaches far and wide - which makes it all the more surprising that he could have gone missing for such a long time without more people noticing. He was the publisher of the Red Rock Eaters News Service, an influential mailing list he started in the mid-1990s that ran for around a decade. A mix of news, Internet policy and politics, RRE served as a model for many of today's political blogs and online newsletters." LWN was certainly influenced by RRE, and your editor still misses it. (Thanks to Jay Ashworth).

Improved power management in the latest firmware revision for Amazon's Kindle ebook reader extends battery life from four to seven days, even with the wireless interface turned on, according to the company. With wireless turned off, battery life remains at two weeks. Another firmware change provides a PDF reader, allowing the reader to display files in the popular format. This means such files can be transferred directly to a Kindle via USB.

Inkscape 0.47 - a massively reworked version of this vector drawing editor, has been released. Beyond improved performance, there's a long list of new features; see the release notes for details. Also released is an updated version of Inkscape: Guide to a vector drawing program, available from your favorite online bookstore or for direct download.

KDE has changed over the past 13 years. The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications. Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications. In the process, KDE's identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere. KDE is no longer software created by people, but people who create software. To be able to communicate this clearly in our messaging, it is necessary to reposition the KDE brand so that it reflects the reality. We therefore also need distinct brands for the products we produce.

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.

I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)

Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.

1. I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
2. I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
3. All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
4. The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
5. The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
6. Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.

Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.

Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.

The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.

But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.

So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.

The war against the black box EULA was on.

The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.

This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.

So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.

The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.

It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.

The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.

There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day.

Opportunity is knocking in the government market for Canonical’s Landscape, a systems management and monitoring tool for Ubuntu systems. Specifically, Autonomic Resources — an integrator that serves the U.S. federal government — is now approved to offer Landscape to government customers running Ubuntu,WorksWithU has learned. Here are some quick details.

Two years ago Ubuntu began supporting LPIA, or the Low-Power Intel Architecture. LPIA is i386, but with different compile-time optimizations. LPIA was in use by the Ubuntu Mobile project with Intel's recent mobile CPUs supporting this lower-power architecture. Tests we carried out earlier this year at Phoronix showed Ubuntu's LPIA-based MID spin can conserve 10%+ power. However, Canonical is now abandoning this Intel architecture.

Any project can reach a crossroads. Sometimes this leads to forks. Although FOSS communities strive to prevent forks, they can be positive.

With the FreeBSD 8.0 release now available, we reached out to NVIDIA to find out the status of their 64-bit BSD display driver, now that this operating system carries the necessary mmap extension support in their 64-bit kernel for their proprietary graphics driver to function. Andy Ritger, who heads the user-space side of NVIDIA's UNIX Graphics Driver team and was previously interviewed by Phoronix, provided a brief update.Ritger doesn't have a firm ETA when a 64-bit BSD display driver will be released, but he hopes soon...

I've been thinking about replacing the hard disk on my production notebook with a solid-state disk (SSD) for quite a while. So when I stumbled upon a good offer on Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD I decided to take the plunge.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul.read more

INSURANCE giant Allianz Australia expects to save more than $1 million by switching from Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Linux for key applications.

PulseAudio 0.9.21 was released yesterday and comes with even more bug fixes than version 0.9.20 which was released just two weeks ago. You can see a list of changes, HERE. Besides bug fixes, PulseAudio 0.9.21 also integrates the device-manager module.

This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java™ Development Tools (JDT), including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

Bringing Windows 7 clients into your Linux network is exactly what the fine Samba server is made for. But every Windows release comes with new interop roadblocks, and Windows 7 is no exception. Charlie Schluting shows how to get past the latest ones.

Qualcomm invited everyone to their Innovation Event 2009 in London on November 22, where they presented the newest out of their research labs and gave a glimpse of where their journey was taking them. Of interest to us were the ARM netbooks and Qualcomm's newest open source team.

QuoteURLText and Copy Plain Text are not the most advanced Firefox extensions out there, but they sure can save you a lot of time if you do a lot of copying and pasting from Web pages to other documents. As any Firefox user knows, the copy operation grabs not only the selected text fragment but also all the formatting.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a Fedora 12 server (x86_64) for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

We decided to break our annual timeline into quarters this year and have the first installment ready. Subscribers can click below to get a look at the significant events in the Linux and free software world from January through March of 2009. In the coming weeks, we will be putting together timelines for the rest of the year, one quarter at a time. With any luck, we'll end up finishing the timeline right about year's end. Stay tuned.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that Chrome OS and Android are likely to merge at some point, say reports. Meanwhile, we sample the response to Chrome OS from across the Googleverse, and explore whether calling the cloud-oriented, Linux-based OS "underwhelming" is a diss or a kiss.

Version 2.1 of the KOffice office suite has been announced. "The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul. The advantages of the clean and well-structured codebase have started to show. Despite a relatively limited developer group, there are a large number of improvements over 2.0. During the development of 2.1, it was also announced that KOffice is going to be used in the Nokia n900 smartphones based on Maemo Linux."

There are many methods to install lamp, but the most simple one is described in this post, Install LAMP with one command in ubuntu9.10 karmic koala

I got this in my Gmail inbox the other day: "Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We're happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product". Since I'm all about making improvements, I clicked the link to accept my invitation to Google Wave. Once I signed in with my handy dandy Google account (OK, so I'm going a little overboard here), Google Wave opened in my Firefox browser.

People seem underwhelmed by Chromium OS, but maybe Google has a bigger plan: how about producing a netbook running Chromium OS, and giving it away? The small hardware costs would be covered by advertising *in the Web apps*. Would you use one?

CentOS has updated C5: cups (denial of service, cross-site scripting).

Fedora has updated asterisk (F11, F10: cross-site ajax requests), snort (F11, F10: denial of service), bugzilla (F12: information leak).

SUSE has updated cups, jetty5, libqt4/dbus-1-qt, opera, puretls/jessie, kdegraphics3-pdf, qemu (various issues).

Ubuntu has updated libvorbis (arbitrary code execution).