The Top 9 Linux Stories in 2009

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

Wrap your head around this: In a couple of hours, the 90’s will be 20 years ago! Yup, its scary I know. But hey think of it this way: in 1990 we didn’t even have Linux, and in 2000 Linux looks like a crippled OS compared to today’s Linux. So its all good.

Here I compiled a quick and dirty list of the top 9 Linux stories in 2009. Did I miss any? Please tell us in the comments

9-It’s time to party like it’s 1234567890

On February 13, 2009 at exactly 23:31:30 (UTC), the decimal representation of Unix time was equal to ‘1234567890′. Parties and other celebrations were held around the world, among various technical subcultures, to celebrate the 1234567890 day. Somebody even created a website to chronicle 1234567890 day, Geeks partied, and even Google joined in the action!

8-Microsoft stuns Linux world, submits source code for kernel

In July, Microsoft annoucned that it released 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel:

The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

However, it was just too good to be true. Only a mere days after Microsoft’s announcement, it was discovered that the only reason MS released it because of a GPL violation.

7-Microsoft ‘indoctrinates’ Best Buy workers with anti-Linux lies

In an effort to thwart Linux sales on netbooks, Microsoft has started a training program at Best Buy to “educate” their “experts” on Linux. And true to their fashion, MS resorted to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and straight out LIES! However, Microsoft still maintains that Linux is not a threat to their market, they are just spending all this money to “help” people make an educated decision. Funny thing, is that they ended up promoting Linux.. And true to our fashion, The Linuxologist debunked. Here are some scans of their expert program:

6-Linux Kernel turns 15

On March 13 1994, the first stable Linux kernel was released. Little did Linus know that his little project will take upon the world!

5-Chrome OS

Announced on July, Chrome OS is set to have a publicly available stable release during the second half of 2010. The operating system is based on Linux and will run only on specifically designed hardware. The user interface takes a minimalist approach, resembling that of the Chrome web browser. Because the browser will be the only application residing on the device, Google Chrome OS is aimed at users who spend most of their computer time on the Internet.

4- Microsoft Patents Sudo

You know that little command you type to make all the magic work, “sudo?” Well yeah, Microsoft tried to patent it! I know, I know, some argue that its not really sudo and that is something different. But that is no the point. The point is that this illustrates how silly software patents are and we should all together eliminate it from our lawbooks. Amen to that!

3-Mark Shuttlworth Stepping Down as Ubuntu CEO

On 17 December 2009 Mark announced that, effective March of 2010, he would step down as CEO of Canonical to focus energy on product design, partnership and customers. Jane Silber, COO at Canonical since 2004, will take on the job of CEO at Canonical.

2-Mysql vs. Oracle

In April, Oracle Corporation entered into an agreement to purchase Sun Microsystems, current owners of the MySQL intellectual property. Sun’s board of directors unanimously approved the deal, it was also approved by Sun’s shareholders, and by the U.S. government in August.However, this raised serious concerns because Oracle is essentially a database company. In Europe the merge is under scrutiny by EU antitrust regulators, whose main concerns are on conflict of interests with existing database software by Oracle. Michael Widenius, father of MySQL, launched a petition to pledge EU Commission to stop the deal.

1-Android Taking The World by Storm

2009 will be looked at as the year that Android OS really took off. The first Android phone was released in October 2008, the G1, wasn’t really a big hit. A few of the early adopters, including me, picked it up. However, in 2009, things really boomed. More than a dozen devices were announced/released, covering both mid and high ends of the smartphone market. Most notably, the Motroloa Droid, was lauded by many analysts and was put right up there with the iPhone. By November 23rd, Android accounted for at least 20% share of the US smartphone market. Not a bad feat in one year.

Linux Foundation Announces A Holiday Membership Program

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

Today the Linux Foundation announced a new holiday promotion.  For every new individual member who joins ($99/year), the Linux Foundation will also give a free membership to a student.

By joining the Linux Foundation, members help support the work of Linus Torvalds, as well as programs that promote and protect Linux.  Members have access to exclusive benefits, including a Linux.com email address (ex: joe@linux.com); a Linux Foundation t-shirt; employee purchase pricing at Dell, HP, and Lenovo with savings up to 40% on purchases of hardware and accessories; 35% off O’Reilly books and e-books; a variety of deep discounts to attend events or subscribe to industry publications; and the ability to run for a Linux Foundation board seat, among others.  With all these perks, the membership can quickly pay for itself. Here is the full press release:

SAN FRANCISCO, December 9, 2009 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that for every new individual member who joins the organization between today and January 31, 2010, the Linux Foundation will give a free membership to a student for one year.

New members can elect to sponsor a student on the Linux Foundation wait list or can request the membership be given to a friend or family member with a valid student ID. Students who are interested in obtaining a sponsored membership can sign up at the Linux Foundation website and will be sponsored on a first-come, first-served basis. Proof of student status must be provided. Details can be found at the website:www.linuxfoundation.org/about/join/individual/get-one-give-one-promotion

“Individual members are the heartbeat of the Linux Foundation, and students bring to the table new ideas and energy required to advance Linux into a new decade,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. “New members who join during our holiday program will get the additional benefit of contributing to the advancement of Linux by bringing the next-generation of architects, maintainers and experts into the community.”

Members have access to exclusive benefits, including a Linux.com email address (ex: joe@linux.com); a Linux Foundation t-shirt; employee purchase pricing at Dell, HP, and Lenovo with savings up to 40% on purchases of hardware and accessories; 35% off O’Reilly books and e-books; a variety of deep discounts to attend events or subscribe to industry publications; and the ability to run for a Linux Foundation board seat, among others.

Both corporate and individual members are helping the organization that employs Linus Torvalds and supporting programs that promote and protect Linux. The annual membership fee for individuals is U.S. $99. Students receive all the same benefits as individual members.

Slitaz Linux: Zero to Distro in 30 MB!

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

As a small (30 MB), quick-to-boot distro, SliTaz is entering a field well-served by the likes of DSL and Puppy Linux. When going up against such heavyweights, SliTaz must offer something truly remarkable to distinguish itself. This brief review of the LiveCD version demonstrates where SliTaz has exceeded expectations – and a few places it could use some polishing.

Boot Process

The first screen you’ll encounter is in French but it boots in English by default.
Before completely booting, you’ll be asked about your locale configuration. Select what’s appropriate. For example, I chose ‘us’ for the Default keymap.

Your screen’s resolution is not auto-detected and you have to choose from a few low-quality options (1024×768, 800×600 and 640×480). This works if you are evaluating SliTaz as a rescue distro or for older or less powerful hardware.

First Impressions

While the interface doesn’t have the style and flash that is more commonly associated with Linux distros today, it was not so rough that I did not know what to do. No one will be won over by the looks of the Openbox-based GUI alone. This has been my first time with Openbox, “a standards compliant light-weight extensible window manager”.

Hardware Support

One of the things that keeps me in love with Linux is the excellent hardware support provided by most distros. SliTaz does not have the best hardware support. My wireless USB mouse, Lexar JD Firefly USB key, SkullCandy headphones and wired NIC were all recognized and functioned properly. My integrated webcam, USB webcam, SD card and wireless NIC were not recognized. SliTaz offers WPA_Supplicant for those who are interested in taking up that fight. That being said, better hardware support is on the short list of things to work on to make Slitaz better for the next release.

Actual Size

Like any tiny distro, SliTaz is measured at its slimmest. The ISO is about 29.1 MB. Once booted, the root filesystem used approximately 138.4 MB. By comparison, DSL’s ISO is about 50 MB and booted the root filesystem expands to about double the size of the ISO.

Applications

Ubuntu’s ISO size hovers around 690 MB. In order to make a fully functional, GUI distro, there are going to be a lot of packages available in Ubuntu that SliTaz does not offer. That being said, it looks like a lot of thought went into selecting which packages made the cut. GIMP is noticeably absent, in favor of mtPaint 3.30 which is very basic but gets the job done with an intuitive interface, quicker load time and snappier response.

SliTaz includes some home-cooked graphical clients for different network utilities like rsync and SCP.

The “mail client” provided is Ghost In The Mail which, according to its SourceForge page, hasn’t had any news since February of 2006. I was able to send mail using it but receiving mail is another story. Users will need to check mail using webmail or telnet.

NoteCase notes manager is another one of the applications that made the cut but isn’t quite grown-up. Simply creating a node in order to start taking notes was a chore. (Hint: Right-click in the left pane to get started.)

SliTaz is surprisingly web-aware. The ‘Multimedia’ menu has an entry for Jamendo Music which opens http://www.jamendo.com in a web browser. The ‘Office’ menu has an entry for Wikipedia Encyclopedia which opens http://www.wikipedia.org in a web browser. There are a number of websites marked as favorites in the web browser. Among these are: Zoho Office, Meebo Messaging, Digg and Facebook.

I enjoyed the task manager application that allows you to manage processes, kill, term or even nice them. Again, this is not for the faint of heart but the faint of heart should let sleeping dogs lie and abide by a “look but don’t touch” policy when it comes to things like task managers.

Improvements

SliTaz left some things out or incomplete, by my estimation. For example, opening ‘X defaults behavior’ from the Preferences menu opens your .Xdefaults file in Leafpad text editor. While the interface isn’t everything, it counts. SliTaz reminds me of using Linux years ago, before it was widely used by less technical or non-technical people on their desktops. The screen resolution offerings were abysmal. 1024×768 is very irritating on a widescreen 17″ laptop. The ‘Grab Screenshot’ utility immediately takes a screenshot and pastes it into a new document in mtPaint for you, making it impossible to take a screenshot of a menu or other widget that requires the focus of the mouse. I only evaluated the LiveCD version of the distro but once installed on a desktop, I am sure that some of these issues could be worked out.

Opinion

SliTaz has potential and the active community required to take things to the next step. SliTaz isn’t fancy but it provides a wonderful environment to log in and accomplish most tasks. SliTaz (Simle Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone) is definitely the distro I will think about next time I need something for older hardware or a small rescue utility. SliTaz simply does not have what it takes, though, to be my new desktop Linux of choice. Ubuntu and Slackware will continue to own that title. Fortunately, none of what I see as necessary improvements impact the usability of the distro. Keeping track of SliTaz (http://forum.slitaz.org) is easy and I really look forward to hearing more as time goes on.

7 Instances of KDE Appearances On The Silver Screen

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

I don’t know about you, but when ever a computer screen appears in a movie or series I instantly focus on the interface, trying to glean what they have installed on the device. Even better, when possible, I pause and try to analyze and read the damn thing. We dugg up 7 instances of KDE appearances on the silver screen. Two of which are very recent: “The Big Bang Theory” and “Lie To Me”

Did we miss any? Are there any other GNOME or Linux appearances out there? Please tell us in the comments.

1-The Big Bang Theory

If KDE were to appear on any show, then where better than KDE’s geekastic show “The Big Bang Theory?” In the latest episode “The Vengeance Formulation,” Leonard is proudly wearing a Konqueror shirt.

2-Lie To Me

Somebody over at Fox seems to be a KDE developer by night. In the latest episode of “Lie To Me,” the Lightman Group, a group that aids law enforcement in their investigations, run KDE on one of their machines. Not only that, but Kmail also appears with folders labeled: KDE Release Team, KDE Commits, KDE Plasma, and KDE Core Devel!

3-House MD

KDE4’s Oxygen icons appeared in an x-ray shot on House MD (click to enlarge)

4-Dexter

A KDE 3 desktop in a 2006 episode of Dexter

5-24

It seems that in the aim to improve security, CTU (the Counter Terrorist Unit) have switched operating system from MacOS. This can be seen in this shot from episode one:

Jonathan Riddell,  who first noticed this, asks an interesting question:

Interestingly, although KDE 3 has been out since mid-2002, the screenshot is of a 3-year-old KDE 1.x desktop. These older icons are made available under a public domain license. If a GPL’d set of icons had been used, would we now be legally able to modify, sell and distribute the episode under the terms of the GPL over the internet?

6-Alias

7-Lord of The Rings

To the surprise of many, KDE turns up unexpectedly on the extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Linux Could Even Look Like Windows If It Wanted To

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

I know, I know, why would you want to do that? Well maybe so you can trick your mother into thinking she’s on Windows and save yourself the obligatory bi-yearly tune-up. Or maybe you want to ease your friend into a Linux conversion. Or maybe just because “why not?”

In any case, I firmly believe that most people are afraid of Linux because they just don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. Linux on the desktop is perfectly capable of doing everyday tasks, and it does it more efficiently and securely. I know I have been using Linux exclusively for years.

A young Linux enthusiast that goes by the name PhrankDaChicken has created a script that will fully theme your Ubuntu desktop into an XP one.

Just download the tar.gz file, Right-click it and select “Extract Here”, then run the “InstallXpGnome.sh” by double-clicking it and choosing “Run”!

Wanna revert back? No problem! Just run the Restore_Settings.sh script in the restore folder.

Stay tuned for the reverse Howto: Theming XP to look like Ubuntu. And don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on Twitter!

UbuntuSun: Proposed Lucid Lynx Theme Available For Download

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

UbuntuSun is the proposed theme for Ubuntu’s upcoming release 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, which is expected to be released on the 29th of April 2010. The idea behind UbuntuSun is to bridge the gap between people’s dark/light preferences.

As some people like dark themes and some people like bright themes, why not combine them into one set of matching themes with different shades? This is an idea for a Metacity theme that is based on the idea of having the sun shine into your windows. Could there be a better leitmotiv for the window design of a lucid release? The theme could be combined with any GTK theme if they are modified to have flat menu and tool bars.

Users will be able to choose from three different moods that represents the three different positions of the sun: Dawn, Day and Dusk.

Luckily, ingolemo over @ gnome-look.org took it upon himself to make these mock-ups real. So now you can use it on your working Ubuntu installation. Unfortunately Dusk didn’t turn out as awesome as the mockup, but Dawn and Day are quite impressive. Hopefully ingolemo, will update the themes and continually fine-tune them.

Download the themes from here.

Proof That Linux Geeks Are Smooth With The Ladies

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

This blog hasn’t been neglected for quite some time, and been feeling really guilty about it. So lets kick off  our emergence with some humor:

Here is the full line in case you want to try it in your terminal:

who girl; look; talk; date; strip; touch; unzip; finger; head; mount; uptime; fsck; more; more; yes; yes; more; umount; make clean; sleep

IBM and Ubuntu Going Head To Head Against Windows 7?

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

This last September, IBM and Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu- teamed up to bring Linux-powered netbooks to African markets. Commentators wondered, and rightly so, why Africa?

Well wonder no more! The deal isn’t exclusively African no more. IBM and Canonical are bringing Linux-powered netbooks stateside. The idea is to have IBM’s Client For Smart Work on top of a Linux OS.

With Microsoft’s Windows 7 just around the corner, the timing for such announcement couldn’t have been more perfect. Canonical and IBM claim that migrating to Windows 7 would cost up to $2000 per computer, with hardware upgrades contributing to most of the cost.

“If a company is a ‘Windows shop,’ at some point it will need to evaluate the significant costs of migrating its base to Microsoft’s next desktop and bolstering its defenses against virus and other attacks,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus in a statement. “American businesses have asked for a compelling alternative and today we are delivering IBM Client for Smart Work in the U.S.”

I really wish that the IBM/Canonical team pull would pull an Apple, who announced iMacs, Macbooks, and Mac Minis literally from thin air, or at least see the deal come to fruition within a couple of weeks.

Update: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computerworld notes that these are targeted for businesses and aren’t really a desktop replacement for Windows. He also breaks down the cloud computing pricing:

Option A: A Starting Point

$3 LotusLive iNotes per user/month.

E-Mail, calendaring

TOTAL:$ 36 per user per year.

Option B: Add Social software capabilities to Option A

$9.75 LotusLive Connections per user/month

Dashboard, file sharing, personal profile networking, contact management, groups, project management, instant messaging.

TOTAL: $ 153 per user/year.

Option C: A Typical Solution

$74.50 Lotus Notes/iNotes

E-Mail, calendar, todo, contacts), Lotus Sametime entry (Instant messaging, chat, presence awareness), Lotus Quickr entry (file sharing)

TOTAL:$74.50 per user first year; $25.75 per user each additional year for the IBM Lotus software

Option D: Add virtual desktop capabilities

$49 per user first year. $10/user/year for subsequent years.

Supports Windows and Linux guests.

Howto: Download Tons of GNOME-Specific Wallpapers With One Command

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

Gnome-look.org has tons of wallpapers to decorate your favorite desktop. However the website isn’t really friendly to download them all. You have to go through a long list of wallpapers, click through each and download the wallpaper from the wallpaper page. Luckily, with the power of the command terminal and ftp you can get tons of wallpapers with a single command!

First you need to create a directory in your home directory, lets call it Wallpapers
mkdir ~/Wallpapers

Now you need to connect to gnome.org ftp servers
ftp ftp.gnome.org
Next you will be asked to enter a username and password. “anonymous” will be your username and just press enter when prompted for the password.
Now lets navigate to the wallpapers on their servers
cd /pub/GNOME/teams/art.gnome.org/backgrounds
You will also need to turn prompting off, you don’t want it bugging you asking you if you want to download each single file
prompt off
Now lets download all 1280×1024 (assuming thats your resolution)
mget *1280x1024.jpg

Great huh? Now why don’t you rotate your wallpapers? Here check our 3 Great Ways To Rotate Your Linux Desktop article.

Will The Fake Linus Torvalds Please Stand Up

Post from: The Linuxologist A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source.

Inspired by the popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, The Linux Foundation invited 4 prominent Linux industry leaders to guest tweet as Linus Torvalds. Users are invited to vote for their favorite fake Linus. The winner and all 4 fake Linus Trovalds will be revealed at LinuxCon 2009.

They also made a hilarious promotion video parodying Eminem’s “Please Stand Up” video:

Chuck Norris dubs Linus a hero. He can divide by zero. He can do an infinite loop in a milli-sec, and round-house Chuck Norris in the neck! The code Linus writes is always bug free!

To see the Fake Linus tweets just search for hashtags #FLT1 #FLT2 #FLT3 #FLT4. They will be tweeting from The Linux Foundation’s twitter account.

For more information on visit The Linux Foundation.