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We’re starting off 2012 by releasing MPL 2.0, the updated version of the Mozilla Public License. Here are the details about MPL 2.0. The MPL was created as part of the launch of the Mozilla project in 1998, and was updated once in 1999. The MPL is used by the Mozilla project for much of its code, including Firefox and Thunderbird. It is also used by other organizations and individuals. Version 2.0 is similar in spirit to the previous versions, but shorter, better, and more compatible with other Free Software and Open Source Licenses. We appreciate the help of the Free Software Foundation for GPL compatibility and the Open Source Initiative for assistance with compatibility and their ultimate certification of the MPL as meeting free software and open source standards. The MPL 1.1 versions had one expert who had been involved in every word and every decision. Even today, more than a decade later, I can still bring to mind particular phrases or section references along with the rationale behind them. The MPL 2.0 is a vast improvement here as well. It has 5 peers now, instead of just one. I also want to call out the stellar work of Luis Villa, supported by Heather Meeker. Luis started the MPL 2.0 revision process as a new lawyer just out of law school, but with a long and deep background in free/open source software. Harvey and I believed that his software experience and his motivation would make up for his status as a young lawyer. We have been more than vindicated — Luis began with project management, and has come to own much of the content over time. The MPL 2.0 will be adopted by the Mozilla project; this decision was proposed, reviewed and decided as part of the beta and Release Candidate process over the fall of 2011. The actual update process with be managed by Gervase Markham, who managed the update from the MPL only to the MPL tri-license many years ago. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the process. It’s an honor to work with so many great people. The 2.6.32.52 stable kernel is available. “It contains a single bugfix for resume issues that were reported by a lot of people. If you didn’t have this problem, no need to upgrade.” Well 2012 has arrived at last, and not a moment too soon! Not only can we finally dispense with all the holiday festivities, but we can also say goodbye to a year that was far too tempestuous for comfort. Here’s hoping that 2012 will be a lot less exciting here in the technology world! Of course, one last obligation still to be fulfilled on this cusp of the new year is the making of resolutions. Linux Girl’s is to get up close and personal with more of the distros out there, beyond just Ubuntu and Mint; she’s also hoping to dust off and photograph her world-class collection of plastic toy penguins. The system is a remaster of Linux Mint 12 – codenamed “Lisa” (From freedom came elegance), released on 26 November 2011. The original system includes the Desktop Environments Gnome 3.2, Gnome Classic (Gnome 2.32) and Mate (a fork of the venerable GNOME 2 Desktop Environment). In DebEX-Mint 12 Xmas Edition, I have installed KDE 4.7.3 (latest stable version), as an alternative, so that everyone on the spot (during live operation) can compare the different Desktop Environments. I have replaced the original kernel 3.0.0-12-generic (the same kernel as in Ubuntu 11.10) with “my” kernel 3.1.4-exton-xmas-custom. Kernel 3.1.4 is the latest available stable kernel, which can be downloaded from kernel.org. The system language is English. Why has the kernel been replaced? Program content etc Installation to hard disk USB installation INSTRUCTIONS It might also be worth to follow a forum thread at linuxmint com.
DOWNLOAD DebEX-Mint 12 Xmas can also be downloaded from Sourceforge.net – Fast, secure and free downloads from the largest Open Source applications and software directory. md5sum for DebEX-Mint 12 Xmas ISO which is of 1460 MB.
Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below. A special thanks to the Gentoo Infrastructure Team. Their hard work behind the scenes provide the resources, services and technology necessary to support the Gentoo Linux project.
The LiveDVD is available in two flavors: a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64 multi lib version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-11.2 version will work on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64. If your CPU architecture is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64, boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64-bit kernel and install a customized 64-bit user land while using the provided 32-bit user land. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-11.2 version is for x86_64 only. If you are ready to check it out, let our bouncer direct you to the closest x86 image or amd64 image file. If you would prefer to take it easy on the bandwidth and help the community, torrents are also provided. If you need support or have any questions, please visit the discussion thread on our forum. After almost 4 years of intensive work, the Scribus Team (www.scribus.net) has released the new stable version 1.4.0 of the Open Source desktop publishing program Scribus. Given this is the first major stable release in some time, this document outlines improvements over the last number of versions, rather than since just the last one. The idea is to form a general comparison between this and the last stable release. In summary, more than 2000 feature requests and bugs have been resolved since the development of this new version started.
Major changes and improvements in comparison to the last stable version 1.3.3.14 are:
Now that Scribus 1.4.0 has been released, the Scribus Team will focus on stabilizing the 1.5 development branch, which will comprise amazing new features like support for PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-4 and PDF/E, Mesh Gradients, native PDF import, XAR import, a completely rewritten table implementation, a rewritten text system, and much more. The 1.4.x version is now in stable/maintenance mode, which means few features will be backported from the 1.5 development branch. In general, only bugs will be fixed in subsequent 1.4.x versions, along with new content, like new translations, new templates, or additional color palettes. Important InformationIf you are working with a team, try to make sure that all team members use the same Scribus version – this will avoid many headaches and extra work. Users should be warned that 1.3.3.x cannot open 1.4.0 files. The Scribus Team recommends that all distributions package Scribus 1.4.0 as “Scribus” (and replace the outdated Scribus 1.3.3.14). The 1.4.x branch will now be developed in the Version14x branch of our Subversion repository, leaving the Version135 one behind. This also fixes the version numbering issues of the past, with just two main versions, 1.4.x and 1.5.x The Scribus Team will continue to implement new features and improvements in the development branch 1.5.x. We recommend the additional packaging of 1.5 only if it is marked as a development version and can be installed alongside an existing Scribus 1.4.0 (for example as scribus-ng). The English online help has been mostly updated to match the new features. Translations have temporarily disabled, since they need to be synchronised with the English version once the update is complete. Further updates will be included with subsequent 1.4 releases. Here are 13 of the best, oddest and most useful distributions that Linux has to offer, and why on Earth you’d want to use them. One distro that’s never going to trouble the top of the Distrowatch rankings chart is Red Star OS. This is the Linux distribution that was developed/is being developed as the officially sanctioned operating system of North Korea, apparently at the behest of Kim Jong-Il, the country’s leader. It’s based on the familiar KDE 3.x, but with added touches including the Woodpecker antivirus software and the Pyongyang Fortress firewall. Familiar apps have been renamed too: there’s a notebook app called My Comrade, and Firefox is called My Country (perhaps fittingly, as North Korea has its own internet). We searched for ‘Democracy’ in the default search engine, but nothing came up… The Dreamlinux developers proudly announced yesterday, January 1st, the immediate availability for download of the Dreamlinux 5.0 operating system. With a Mac OS X-like user interface, the Debian Wheezy powered distro features Linux kernel 3.1, Xfce 4.8, updated installed, safe software updates through dist-upgrade, an exclusive boot system for faster startups, and 100% Debian Testing compatibility. “Embedding Dreamlinux 5 to a flash memory device can be made in three ways: as a read-only image, just like the DVD one, making it ideal for simply boot and install Dreamlinux on internal or external hard disks; as a semi-persistent image, being added to any regular vfat formatted flash memory device, without interfering with the existing files and data; or as the more exciting full-persistent-storage mode!” Kazam Screencaster is a small program used for screen recording. It was mainly written by Andrew Higginson, you can read his initial blog post about it to get more background info. After the release of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) there were no updates and and new releases and initial release will fail to install on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). I’ve dug into the sources a little and fixed few minor issues and made everything installable on Ubuntu 11.10. Later, I’ve exchanged couple of emails with Andrew and offered my help. So, I’ll release an official version of Kazam in mid January and continue to work on it. What has changed?There were many isses with ffmpeg from audio recording device selection to codec nightmares. What to install, where to get it? Compiling my own codecs?! Seriously? Truth be told, ffmpeg and H264 are a minor nightmare on Ubuntu there are problems with legal restrictions and there are problems with continuously changing parameters for x264 and ffmpeg, beside that, ffmpeg has API that could be used for accessing it. The first thing to go was ffmpeg support, then I decided to drop H264 encoding too. I sacrificed some quality and CPU power for ease of use. Ffmpeg is still there, just disabled and waiting for better times in one of next releases I’ll enable it for those users that have necessary support libraries installed and I’ll provide a short guide on how to install them.
Pulseaudio supportThere as no real support for selecting audio devices and which input to use for recording sound. Right now the default pulse audio input was used and user had to change the default in order to use different input. To make things worse, Ubuntu sound settings don’t list monitor devices as input devices and recording application sound was close to impossible for most of the users. After a lot of digging I managed to whip up python support for pulseaudio and extracted list of all audio devices that can be used for recording.
 Kazam Screencaster – Audio selectionUser interface changesIn Ubuntu 11.10 I found menu bar icons too subtle and hard to read. I changed them just tiny little bit and I added colors to record and pause indicator. Before I got rid of ffmpeg I also added one combo box for selecting back-end, currently it doesn’t do a thing.
 Kazam Screencaster – Combobox too long?Is something broken?Most likely it is. I didn’t even try to edit any of recorded videos. I will do that at some other time. Those parts of code are still as they used to be and rely heavily on ffmpeg. If you don’t have ffmpeg installed Kazam will break if you try to edit recorded captures. There’s also multiple screen support. In my configuration it works, two screens side by side. If you have more than one screen not side by side or you have multiple screens then your mileage my vary. Gstreamer is very precise when it comes to specifying what part of the desktop to record. How to install?Update (01/01/2012): Kazam Team PPA from the unstable series is already available, info below. Source code and PPA build for Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot is available in my personal PPA. Official PPA will be available after some more polishing and few minor changes, most likely in January 2012. Source code is available in Launchpad and there is an official unstable PPA available. Version number was bumped to 0.13. $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/unstable-series $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install kazam All the input is greatly appreciated! LiMux, a project to convert local government institutions to Linux and open source software in Munich, has exceeded initial expectations. The project has done slightly better than projections of 8,500 and now boasts 9,000 Linux migrated workstations. The progress and evolution of this project that began in 2003 is well worth examination. LiMux is the name of both the migration project and a specialized Linux distribution. The LiMux distro, which is based on Ubuntu, is certified by the German government for use in both government institutions and private businesses. I’ve long been an advocate of this approach, and I wish that more was being done in the UK and the US to ratify a standard national Linux distro. When making your custom scripts or software available to someone else, it’s a good idea to make that content as easy to extract and install as possible. You could just create a compressed archive, but then the end user has to manually extract the archive and decide where to place the files. Another option is creating packages (.deb, .rpm, etc) for the user to install, but then you’re more locked into a specific distribution. A solution that I like to use is to create a self-extracting archive file with the makeself.sh script. This type of archive can be treated as a shell script and will extract itself, running a scripted set of installation tasks when it’s executed. The reason this works is that the archive is essentially a binary payload with a script stub at the beginning. This stub handles the archive verification and extraction process and then runs any predefined commands via a script specified at the time the archive is created. This model offers you a lot of flexibility, and can be used not only for installing scripts and software but also for things like documentation. As Linux becomes more firmly entrenched in businesses, and as cloud computing advances in general, Linux and the cloud are set to converge faster than ever. In fact, some are looking at 2012 as the year that Linux begins to dominate in the cloud. That’s why a new post out from Mary Jo Foley is significant. Foley reports (based on input from contacts who ask not to be identified) that “Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there.”
Introducing Cinnamon With Gnome 2 no longer an option we lost one of the most important upstream components our Linux Mint desktop was based on. Our entire focus shifted from innovating on the desktop, to patching existing alternatives such as Gnome Shell. We used MATE and MGSE to provide an easier transition away from Gnome 2, but without being able to truly offer an alternative that was better than Gnome 2. Both MATE and Gnome Shell are promising projects but MATE’s ultimate goal is to replicate Gnome 2 using GTK+ and Gnome Shell doesn’t provide what we need in a desktop and is going in a direction we do not want to follow. So for these reasons we’re designing a new desktop called Cinnamon, which leverages new technology and implements our vision.
If you like Linux Mint you’ll probably like Cinnamon. Both projects share the same philosophy and the same vision of what a desktop should be. In this vision, the computer works for you and makes it easy for you to be productive. Things aren’t hidden away but easy to access. With easy to use interfaces, a familiar layout, advanced technologies and principles you’ve already got to to use in Linux Mint, you’ll quickly find yourself at home. Configuration is also something important in Cinnamon as one of its fundamental goals is to make you feel at home… thus giving you the ability to change the way the desktop works, looks and behave.
Under the hood Cinnamon is forked from Gnome Shell and based on Mutter and Gnome 3. It’s already available for Linux Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1 and Arch Linux and will soon make its way (along with MGSE and MATE) to LMDE when Gnome 3.2 enters Debian Testing. The latest release, Cinnamon 1.1.3, brings stability and improvements to what has already become our favorite desktop. Going forward, Cinnamon will gain themes, extensions and a control center. It will likely replace Gnome Shell / MGSE as the main desktop in Linux Mint, and we will continue to support MATE (which goal and technology are different but which is also getting better and better by the day). A few cool things already in Cinnamon
Installing Cinnamon You can install Cinnamon alongside other desktops (including MATE and Gnome Shell/MGSE). Install the package “cinnamon-session“, log out and choose the “Cinnamon” session at the login screen. More information about Cinnamon
At first glance, Zentyal seems to be making all the right moves — raising more than $1 million to promote Linux into the small business server market. Zentyal is building a partner network for VARs — striving to counter Microsoft Small Business Server along the way. But The VAR Guy wonders: Can Zentyal really succeed in the SMB server software market — where so many other Linux distributions have failed? Further complicating matters: Can Zentyal’s small business server software thrive when so many SMB customers are shifting their server budgets to cloud services? Let’s start with some upbeat anecdotes. Zentyal raised $1 million in Series A venture capital from Open Ocean Capital in December 2011. Open Ocean Capital previously backed MySQL, the wildly popular open source database that Oracle ultimately acquired when it purchased Sun Microsystems. If your computer is so old that it was last spotted in the wild roaming with the dinosaurs before they were flamed by an extinction-level event, then (like me) you just might just be grateful for Unity (2D) to extend the lifetime of your machine. Since the doctors switched off the life support on my best, though ageing laptop (private funeral only, no flowers, donations in lieu) I’ve had to switch the hard drive into my second best machine. The problem is that it’s even older, at seven or eight years (probably about sixty eight in dog years). The spec’ is miserable: slow single core processor, USB 1.0 ports, less than 700MBs of SDRAM and although it does support OpenGL there’s not really enough horsepower under the hood to be really properly usable. My graphics card is not sub prime but everything else is. Therefore, “insufficient” for Unity-3D, the shell for Gnome slated for the imminent release with Ubuntu 11.04, codename Natty Narwhal and now the default desktop on Oneiric Ocelot (11.10). Dead end? No. Unity-2D to the rescue. Perhaps. The BackBox team is proud to announce the release 2.01 of BackBox Linux.The new release include features such as Ubuntu 11.04, Linux Kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0. The ISO images (32bit & 64bit) can be downloaded from the following location: http://www.backbox.org/downloads What’s new
System requirements
This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Reviews: An enlightening experience – Bodhi Linux 1.3.0 News: Bodhi release plans, Deepin Software Centre, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon, Pardus “restructuring”, end of LinEx, SELinux tips, overview of Clonezilla Statistics: Page Hit Ranking in 2010 and 2011 Questions and answers: Creating ISO images Released…. == PostgreSQL Weekly News – January 01 2012 == Happy New Year from the PostgreSQL Weekly News! == PostgreSQL Product News == AnyDAC for Delphi v 5.0.5 released. psqlODBC 09.01.0100 released. == PostgreSQL Local == The fifth annual “Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day” conference, The Call for Papers for is open for FLOSS UK, which will be held in == PostgreSQL in the News == Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/ PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time. Small changelog, as usual for 2.5 most work done by gruntster : *Restored AC3 and MP2 encoding (regression introduced 2.5.5) *Added support for latest x264 core *Better compatibility with some FLV files *Updated the FFmpeg libraries (version 0.9) *Drag-and-drop no longer blocks source application for Qt interface *Resolved Windows XP 32-bit stability issues (regression introduced 2.5.5) *Windows 7 taskbar now displays encoding progress *Improved crash reporting on Windows especially Win64 *Compilation fixes for OS X Snow Leopard and Lion (thanks to nibbles) *Various minor fixes and enhancements | |||||||||
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