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Pardus Future Uncertain, Fork Probable

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:50:02 +0000

Pardus, a TUBITAK sponsored Turkish distribution, has long been respected in Linux circles for its stability, simplicity, and polish. But news coming from a former developer has lead a group of community developers and volunteers to speak of a fork.

In a lengthy explanation Pardus developer Bahadır Kandemir said, “They are not shutting down the project, they are killing it very slowly.” He’s speaking of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and their recent decisions that spell nothing less than the abandonment of this wonderful Linux distribution. Political climates are volatile and evolving by the day in the Middle East and it appears this little project may be yet another casualty. Kandemir explains that many of those in management who cared and supported the project were reassigned or given early retirement. Boards were manned with “non-academic and non-talented people who has nothing to do with science, research and development.” Despite TUBITAK denials, developers have been resigning on a daily bases according to Kandemir. He said that Pardus had about 35 developers last year and now only five remain.

Perhaps there is a shred of good news though. Kandemir mentions plans for a fork, but holds out little hope of success. His opinion seems to be in contrast to a motivated group of users on the Pardus Worldforum. A discussion emerged soon after Kandemir’s letter hit the Pardus developers mailing list and the thread continues to grow. At this time discussions of project home, communication methods, and duties are providing some hope to loyal users.

Pardus 2011 is over a year old and due to be replaced, but no roadmap or plan is in place for the next release. If the worst comes to pass, Pardus as it was will be missed, but many community projects turn out rather well. Perhaps we’ve not seen the last of Pardus after all.

The Top Licenses on Github

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:40:32 +0000

Apparently, Apple has been slowly reducing the number of GPL licensed applications that are bundled with OS X. I’m not surprised by this news, especially considering that FreeBSD is doing the same thing. However, buried in the conversation on Hacker News was an interesting comment, that most, if not all, of the top projects on Github are either BSD or MIT licensed. My curiosity was piqued, and this was too good to pass up.

Github has a handy page which ranks the most popular watched repositories. The projects listed range from the Linux kernel itself to CSS frameworks, and everything in between. Github also has a “Popular Forked” page, which lists the repositories that have been forked the greatest number of times, and an “Interesting” page, which I believe to be a combination of the two. (If I’m wrong about this, please let me know in the comments.) The breakdown of the projects and their associated licenses, as of February 2012, looks like this:

MIT License Ruby on Rails Impress.js Devise Three.js Express Jekyll Chosen Socket.io Paperclip Formtastic Authlogic Raphael Cucumber Cancan Janus Foundation Node.js BackBone CoffeeScript Underscore Symfony Resque Compass will_paginate Sinatra

BSD Style

In the Wake of SOPA, a New Open Letter Urges Changes from the U.S. Congress

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:13:17 +0000

Rarely has the technology community gathered a bigger backlash against the government than it gathered during the U.S. debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). “The Internet and Free Speech will never be the same,” if the legislation goes to law, pronounced Mozilla, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) vehemently opposed it as well. Now, those two organizations are just two of the more than 70 technology-focused organizations to pen an open letter to the U.S. Congress asking that government officials completely reassess the legislative process pertaining to Intellectual Property (IP).

According to the letter, Congress is guilty of “focusing exclusively on areas where some rights holders believe the law is too weak.” The MPAA and RIAA–the powerful organizations behind movies and recordings–are chief proponents of proposed laws such as SOPA, which would grant the government unprecedented web censorship rights.

The letter adds:

“Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective. A wide variety of important concerns have been expressed including views from technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and above all, individual Internet users. The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed door negotiations among a small set of inside the-beltway stakeholders.”

Low-Cost Raspberry Pi Linux Devices to Arrive This Month

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:53:11 +0000

If you’re a fan of Linux and you’re also interested in how low the price point can go for a reasonably high-powered computer, you’ve got to be watching the Raspberry Pi story. As we noted here, the low-cost device–to be available in $25 and $35 versions–runs Linux via an ARM processor and appears to be surprisingly powerful. (That’s the motherboard for it, to the left.)

Among other uses for it, Raspberry Pi may fill the gap that One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) couldn’t quite fill, bringing computing to parts of the world where it has traditionally been unaffordable. Now, the Raspberry Pi team has confirmed that the initial run of $35 devices will happen February 20th. That’s coming right up.

If you aren’t familiar with Raspberry Pi, you can read a Q&A with Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi’s product lead, here. There are also a number of videos and specifications at the Raspberry Pi site.

A new post on the site makes clear that the team is looking to keep prices as low as possible:

Is Virtualization Really Ushering In the Multiple-OS Future?

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:17:37 +0000

Without a doubt, virtualization has been one of the biggest trends in computing in recent years, and open source has been a huge part of the virtualization story. Not only are there lots of top-notch open source hypervisors that let users dabble in more than one operating system at a time, but virtualization has let many users combine open source operating systems with proprietary ones. Through virtualization, it’s easy to run Linux and other operating systems concurrently, but do IT departments want business users doing so? That has become a cause for much debate.

There is an effort on to push open virtualization standards throughout the technology industry, as evidenced by the Open Virtualization Alliance. Backed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Novell, BMC, and Eucalyptus Systems, the alliance is designed to promote an open source virtualization stack built atop the KVM hypervisor.

But not all IT departments want users mixing and matching operating systems, which has resulted in a type of anti-virtualization sentiment. As InfoWorld notes:

“It’s not a matter of whether virtualization is good or bad. The real question is whether IT is looking for a silver-bullet approach to essentially neutralize the point of the consumerization phenomenon, which is to let users use the tools they find most comfortable and effective for them. That’s not what the vendors and receptive IT managers are discussing…The notion trying to gain currency encourages bypassing iOS, Android, Mac OS X, and Linux on a user’s device and forcing them into a Windows-only environment for all corporate use. A common selling point is disallowing all connection between the personal (non-Windows) and business (Windows) contexts, not on extending Windows with native capabilities or vice versa.”

How to Run Android Apps on a PC

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:59:56 +0000

As Android continues to win market share despite being a very young mobile operating system, the number of applications for it is rising too. Many of us have favorite apps, but we use them almost exclusively on smartphones or tablets. Did you know that you can also run Android apps on your desktop computer or laptop? BlueStacks App Player has been available for some time in an alpha version, and is about to go into a beta version, which you can sign up to test. We covered this application once before, when it was very young, in this post. It lets users run Android apps on their computers, although it has some limitations.

It should be noted that BlueStacks App Player is just heading into beta testing at this point. As a download for Windows (there are versions for other operating systems in the works), it comes with a pre-installed set of Android apps and you can add many others, but not every Android app.

Since we last coverd BlueStacks App Player, it won a “Best of CES 2012″ award at the Consumer Electronics Show. So how does BlueStacks achieve running Android apps on a computer? The apps run in a virtualized instance of Android.You can get a feel for how this works in a video here. You can also watch an onstage demo of the platform here.

Interestingly, BlueStacks has been talking about the promise of its Android player platform in enterprises. While not all enterprises view Android as a trusted platform, some do, and BlueStacks could conceivably create a bridge between users’ Android smartphones and their PCs.

Do Firefox Users Want Push Notifications?

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:10:54 +0000

As we’ve reported, Mozilla has been steadily working on automatic update methodologies for Firefox, which would seamlessly deliver new versions of the browser to existing users, as occurs with many other browsers. Some users are not so happy about that scheme, as Mozilla’s rapid release cycle for its browser has brought with it occasional hiccups in brand new versions of Firefox. Now, the company is working on a push notification system for Firefox, which would let sites around the web push messaging to users even when the sites aren’t loaded in the browser. The effort has its merits, but will probably raise some questions as well.

Mozilla developer Jeff Balogh noted in a blog post:

“Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web. We’re making prototypes and designing the API right now and want to share our progress.”

Meet Google’s Tool for Jettisoning Android Malware, Dubbed "Bouncer"

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:53:47 +0000

If you’re an Android user, you’ve no doubt seen the daunting recent reports about spikes in malware found in applications on Android Market. For example, late last year Juniper Networks reported a 472 percent increase in Android malware samples seen since July 2011. The company blamed the rise in malware on “no upfront review process” in Android Market (as opposed to the stringent review process at Apple) and other problems. Now, Google has confirmed that it is scanning applications in Android Market for malware, and is squarely focused on using technology solutions to police the problem.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for Android, said in a blog post:

“Today we’re revealing a service we’ve developed, codenamed Bouncer, which
provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious
software…The service performs a set of analyses on new applications, applications already in Android Market, and developer accounts. Here’s how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google’s cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior. We also analyze new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.”

PCLinuxOS 2012.2 Released

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:35:41 +0000

Today, February 2, is Bill “Texstar” Reynolds’ birthday, but it’s the community who received the present. PCLinuxOS 2012.2 KDE was released today in a full sized version as well as a mini.

This release ships with Kernel 2.6.38 and KDE 4.6.5. It comes packed with lots of your favorite apps like LibreOffice (installer), Firefox, TvTime, VLC, and the GIMP. The appearance hasn’t changed since the last release, but some additional goodies have been added. One of which is the PCLinuxOS Documentation Portal which will take users to the various features of the PCLOS Website or service.

Alfresco Embraces SaaS and the Cloud with Its New CMS Platform

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:09:19 +0000

In a big endorsement of the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, enteprise content management system (CMS) maker Alfresco is embracing cloud- and mobile-based usage of its platform with its new Alfresco 4 release. The open source CMS platform is used by 2,500 enterprises in 55 countries according to the company, and users need to access the content from their mobile devices, share and sync on the go, and more. The new platform is accessible from tablets as well as smartphones, and also allows users to publish straight to social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

According to John Powell, CEO and co-founder of Alfresco, in a statement:

“Never before has the focus of enterprise software been so squarely on empowering users to not just get work done, but to do great work by collaborating anywhere, on any device, with the tools of their choice. Alfresco is the company best positioned to bring enterprise requirements and the power of the cloud together to create real value for both companies and their employees.”