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LXer Feature: 18-Jul-2011

In the LXWR this week we have the 10 best open source apps you never heard of, the freeload factor in FOSS, why Jason Perlow is smarter than an Open Source surrender monkey, IBM donates its Lotus Symphony code to OpenOffice and will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation actually spur it to contribute? Enjoy!

Money. It’s something that most of us don’t have enough of. And what we have, we want to hold on to and keep track of. For many people, an old fashioned spreadsheet is perfect for their needs. The rest of us need a little something more. Not with the features, of say, ,KyMyMoney or GNUCash but something that isn’t as confusing or convoluted as a spreadsheet can be. Presented for your approval: wxBanker, a software that makes it easy to manage your finances. It might not have every bell or whistle, but it does have most of the bells and whistles that you actually need.

While NVIDIA yesterday released a new Linux driver, it was quick to be pointed out in our forums that NVIDIA Optimus Technology still is not officially supported under Linux. But that's not all that's missing from their proprietary driver.

Tired of automated attacks on your systems? Want to beef up security a bit by denying would-be attackers a third or fourth chance? Then you need Fail2ban. Fail2ban watches logs and then bans IP addresses, based on too many password failures, by updating the firewall rules. Specific rules can be defined by the user and multiple log files can be monitored. This weekend, let's get started on improving security with Fail2ban.

The 343 changes made by Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan put him at the top of a list, created by LWN.net, of developers who made the most changes in the current development cycle for Linux 3.0. Along with a number of other "change sets", Microsoft provided a total of 361 changes, putting it in seventh place on the list of companies and groups that contributed code to the Linux kernel. By comparison, independent developers provided 1,085 change sets to Linux 3.0, while Red Hat provided 1,000 and Intel 839.

Asus released a netbook that comes with an unusually large 12.1-inch screen and -- at least in some markets -- Ubuntu Linux. The Eee PC 1215P includes a dual-core Atom N570 processor, 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB of hard disk storage, six hours' battery life, and optional Bluetooth, the company says.

Of all the companies that support OpenOffice, there were only two that didn’t support the LibreOffice fork: Oracle and IBM. I could understand Oracle. While Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, didn’t really care about OpenOffice–after all Oracle essentially gave OpenOffice away to The Apache Foundation–I also know that Ellison wasn’t going to let The Document Foundation, LibreOffice’s parent organization, dictate terms to him. But, I’ve never quite understood why IBM didn’t help create LibreOffice. Be that as it may, IBM will be announcing tomorrow that it’s donating essentially all its IBM Lotus Symphony source code and resources to Apache’s OpenOffice project.

Though netbooks have waned a bit in favor of tablet devices, there's still a lot of demand for netbooks and netbook-friendly Linux distros in certain circles. Whether you're looking for a brand-new netbook or to keep an older device current, there's plenty of options for the Linux crowd. Let's take a look at the top five netbook Linux distros.

We have been focusing a great deal on patent infringement controversies lately, so its time to step back into that pleasant world of free and open source software for a visit. And there is some significant news on that front. First, Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its contributor agreement templates. Version 1.0 includes a rather nifty Agreement Selector tool that generates both individual and entity agreements for your project. Project Harmony does not come down on the side of license-in versus assignment-in; its primary benefit is to assure standardization of language regardless of approach. Check it out.

SAP is joining the OpenJDK project which develops the official open source implementation of Java. SAP's Volker Simonis announced on the OpenJDK mailing list that the company had signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement. This means SAP employees can officially engage in discussions on the OpenJDK mailing lists and contribute patches and enhancements.

Some days, it’s just not fair. You know you’re going to post something that’s going to have the fanboys heads spinning, you don’t want to hurt their precious necks, but true journalistic integrity requires you light a flame and watch it burn. This is one of those days. Apparently, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, just gave a speech Down Under. In it, he compared Linux with Windows and OS X. The phrase you’re all going to enjoy is this one: “I don’t think they’re equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system,” he said. “(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”

Adobe has released a beta of Flash Player 11, touting 64-bit support across Windows, Mac OS, and -- after a year-long hiatus -- Linux. The software includes a new set of low-level APIs for GPU (graphical processing unit) acceleration, H.264/AVC and H/264 compression technologies, cross-platform vector printing, a secure random number generator, according to the company.

Canonical has announced today that their next Ubuntu Developer Summit, for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release, will take place from the 31st of October to the 2nd of November. Like last year's Ubuntu 11.04 summit, this UDS will again be taking place in Orlando, Florida.

Adobe has resuscitated Flash Player for 64-bit Linux, drawing cheers from penguins across the planet. On Wednesday, the company released a beta version of Flash Player 11 for the desktop, and this included a 64-bit Linux beta. In June of last year, Adobe murdered an experimental version of Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux, but it promised the penguin population it would revive the 64-bit Linux player in a future Flash release.

Will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation spur it to contribute to FOSS? Thoughts on Technology blogger Jeff Hoogland hopes so. "At the very least I think it is a sign that Meego will be appearing at some point as an in-car operating system," he said. "Here is to hoping Meego can eventually give the pseudo-Linux Android a run for its money."

As we’ve mentioned several times before, a few of us here at MakeTechEasier are big fans of Gnome 3. Sadly, since the project is still fairly young, it’s not nearly as configurable or feature-rich as its 2.x cousins. At the moment, the standard install provides no quick and obvious way to change many of the settings, so applications like the Gnome Tweak Tool have been created to give users a few more options. Even those tools, however, still leave many desirable options out – such as the ability to manage your workspaces by hand. Initial builds of Gnome Shell showed a linear or grid-based approach that this author, for one, prefers to the current automatic approach. Here’s how to get some of that back.

Along with better support for new chipsets and graphics cores from AMD and Intel, not to mention drivers for Microsoft's Kinect and DVB-T2, Linux 3.0 once again offers a number of workarounds for a wide range of hardware problems.

Many Open Source advocates have turned into Open Source pragmatists. That doesn’t mean we’ve surrendered. We’ve evolved. It came to my surprise last week when a fellow Open Source advocate and DATAMATION contributor, Bruce Byfield, called yours truly and my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes out in his piece Tech Pundits Surrender: The Retreat from Free Software and Open Standards. What set Bruce off? Well, he seems to think that as a group, “Tech Pundits” are collectively giving up on Open Source and Open Standards under the auspices of pragmatism and convenience.

French Linux provider, Mandriva, has announced that it has joined the industry consortium CompatibleOne – a research project working on the development of a free cloud infrastructure using open standards and interoperable open source technologies. Its members include companies such as Bull and Inria.

Google has filed a motion [PDF] asking leave of the court to supplement its invalidity contentions regarding Oracle's patents, invalidity contentions it claims "it has now determined are among its strongest in the case". It has found prior art, in one instance going all the way back to Multics..