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LXer Feature: 31-Oct-2010

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!

With the formation of the Document Foundation (TDF), we saw the arrival of another office suite based on OpenOffice -- it's called Libre Office. Recently there was some conflict between TDF and OpenOffice.org/Oracle teams. We approached TDF to understand the current situation and the future of Libre Office. Here is an interview with Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation.

An analysis of the most critical part of the Android smartphone operating system has turned up programming errors, some of which could allow hackers or malicious applications to access users’ e-mail or other sensitive information. The study examined the publicly disclosed version of the Android kernel – heart of Google’s open-source software for phones – that shipped inside the HTC Droid Incredible phones. But the study says it is likely other Android phones have the same programming flaws.

2011 is the Year of the Linux Desktop Hah! Not really. I’ve been reading two posts, the first by Robert Strohmeyer, the second by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Both raise arguments about Linux on the Desktop and both point to mobile computing as being the future. Ever since Android has come out I have assumed the growth path of Linux (and the ultimate strategy of Google) will be Android on phones -> Android on desktops. My take on the Netbook episode is that, where customers returned Linux netbooks they returned them because they were unfamiliar. With Android now in everyone’s pocket they won’t bat an eyelid at Android powered tablets (which I doubt were in Google’s game plan, but given that Android is open, others are now able to fill that void), then Android netbooks and laptops and finally desktops. With penetration of Android will come mobile developers and with them will come a large application suite. Those applications will automatically run on an Android desktop.

Well, here's some interesting weekend news: there's a polarized discussion taking place right now among core KDE developers about merging the KDE libraries into upstream Qt. Cornelius Schumacher, a long-time German KDE developer and currently the KDE e.V. president, has come out yesterday saying, "Let's merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let's put all KDE libraries, support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in Qt, and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both, the wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as the simplicity and portability of the Qt platform."

Do you remember SplashTop? It's the instant-on Linux environment that was originally embedded into select ASUS motherboards three years ago and from there worked its way to other motherboards and then onto notebooks and other devices from a variety of vendors. We effectively launched SplashTop for DeviceVM, the company behind this instant-on Linux distribution, when we got our hands on SplashTop early and were the first in the world to provide a detailed analysis of SplashTop. It was one of our most popular articles that year and of over the past six and a half years that Phoronix has been around.

While bad Wi-Fi security is my major Firesheep worry, I know it’s already a major pain in the ass for everyone. Even as I wrote this, I see my fellow ZDNet blogger Ed Bott had his Twitter account hijacked by someone else in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference press room. Fortunately, it was a friend so it all came out well. Since it wasn’t you that might strike you as funny. Just wait until it happens to you though and someone changes your Twitter or Facebook password on you. You won’t be laughing then.

Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.

Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.

So, my niece was having a few problems with her laptop and I bought her a new one. The eMachine e527 was on sale at the local MicroCenter for 279.99 and seemed to be a good fit for my accident prone niece. I wasn't sure whether to leave Windows on it, put Linux on it, or put OSX on it. After about 30 minutes, it was a hackintosh and running nicely. Here is what you do.

German software giant SAP conceded Thursday that it allowed or even contributed to a subsidiary's effort to pirate software from archrival Oracle, while SAP lawyers renewed their complaint to a judge that Oracle is turning the case into a "sideshow" and "media circus." Redwood City-based Oracle hailed the concession as a significant development, as both sides gear up for a civil trial next week in Oakland federal court. SAP said it was attempting to narrow the focus of the trial, but Oracle attorneys said they will oppose SAP's move to limit testimony about SAP executives' role in the case.

For whatever reason, flames are neat looking. I’ll leave it to psychologists to explain exactly why that is. All I know is that things on fire usually look cooler than things not on fire. To me, that also includes my wallpaper. As regular readers may know, I like to create my own abstract wallpapers and I’m a fan of the Gimp. Today we’re going to use Gimp to create flame wallpaper for your desktop. This process will work on any system that can run Gimp (Windows, Linux, OSX) without any additional plugins or textures.

Earlier this week I reviewed the Antec 300 case that houses my new home fileserver. Now it's time to talk about what's inside. It's rather minimalistic right now, running headless and using a single 2-terabyte SATA hard drive. There are three desktop PCs and one laptop that will backup to this machine. I don't need a big RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) array, though one of these days I'll move up to a RAID 1 array, using Linux software RAID. Nice simple mirroring with no parity or striping complications. This doesn't need to be complicated because all I want are plain, easily-recoverable copies of the data on all of my home computers.

October 28, 2010 -- BOSTON, Mass. -- The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work. Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total. This is the second accessibility grant that GNOME has received from Mozilla in the 2010 calendar year.

The results of the Eclipse Community Survey 2010 are now available. Thank you to everyone, all 1696 people, that took the time to give us your feedback. A challenge for lots of open source communities is understanding the dynamics in the community, so these results provide a useful data point.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Brussels to particpate in the 4th ODF Plugfest. I planned on writing up a nice long post about it. But right when I started to draft this blog post, I came across an excellent article in LWN.net by Koen Vervloesem (Twitter @koenvervloesem): ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable. Since his article is far better than what I would have written, I recommend that you go and read that article first, and then come back here for what meager additional scraps of insight I can add. . - Rob Weir

Oracle has updated its patent infringement suit against Google. Now the enterprise software corporation has point-blank accused the ad broker of directly copying its Java code, according to reports. According to InfoWorld, the originally vague suit now includes specific examples of code that Oracle claims Google had filched to use in Android, with examples thoughtfully attached. These include class libraries and documentation.

You've been using GIMP for cleaning up your photos -- but now you have a picture of a kitten or a bird or your new smartphone that you want to paste into another picture. It's one of the most common questions the GIMP community fields -- how do you take one part of a photo and make it ready to paste somewhere else? The answer is, "It depends." There are lots of different methods. Here are four of the most useful I've found.

On October 10, Canonical released its latest installment of Ubuntu, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”. Like previous iterations, Maverick also includes variations from the standard Ubuntu Gnome interface. Kubuntu is the KDE variation of Ubuntu, and last week, I decided to upgrade from 10.04 and give 10.10 a try.

A quick search of the CVE database turns up 80 CVE numbers related to kernel vulnerabilities so far this year. At one recent conference or another, while talking with a prominent kernel developer, your editor confessed that he found that number to be discouragingly high. In an era where there is clearly an increasing level of commercial, criminal, and governmental interest in exploiting security holes, it would be hard to be doing enough to avoid the creation of vulnerabilities. But, your editor wondered, could we be doing more than we are? The response your editor got was, in essence, that the bulk of the holes being disclosed were ancient vulnerabilities which were being discovered by new static analysis tools. In other words, we are fixing security problems faster than we are creating them.