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LXer Feature: 26-Feb-2012
The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading enjoyment.
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Is Windows 8 a Linux Copycat?: "M$ does what it always has done, and that is borrow other people's ideas for software," asserted blogger Robert Pogson. "There's nothing wrong with that -- it is normal in the world of software ... ." What's wrong is when "M$ calls it innovating and applies for software patents on other people's ideas and sues people over them. ... May M$ rot in Hell for that."
From open source to sourcing openly: One of the talks at this year's linux.conf.au that really seems to have struck a chord with people is the keynote by Karen Sandler, the current executive director of the GNOME Foundation. That's probably in part because it came from the heart – literally, in the sense that she spoke about her own heart condition, and issues that implanting a pacemaker device raised. These were principally to do with the fact that the software running the devices was closed source.
How to Kickstart an Open Source Music Revolution with CASH Music: On February 10, 2012, CASH Music launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than 70% of their $30,000 goal in about 24 hours. What is CASH Music? And why does it already have vocal support from musicians, Firefox, and even Neil Gaiman? Jesse von Doom, Co-Executive Director of CASH Music, explains the inspiration behind the project and the big role Linux plays in it.
Flash Player For Linux Will Be Supported On Chrome Only, What about Firefox, Opera?: In a blog post today, Adobe made an announcement that it is working with Google to bring Flash Player to Linux users via Google Chrome's Pepper plugin API. After, version 11.2 is released later this year, standalone installers won't be provided for Linux. Other browsers that are not using Pepper API (Firefox, Opera etc) will have to stick with 11.2. However, Adobe has promised to provide security updates to these browsers for 5 years.
How To Securely Destroy/Wipe Data On Hard Drives With shred: Sometimes you need to destroy or wipe data from hard drives (for example, before you sell your old hard drives on eBay) so that nobody else can access them. Simply deleting data (e.g. with rm) is not enough because that just removes the file system pointer, but not the data, so it can easily be undeleted with recovery software. Even zero'ing out your hard drive might not be enough. Here's where shred comes into play - shred can overwrite the files and partitions repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
Linux Mint – the taste of success: Linux User sits down with Mint creator Clement Lefebvre to get a measure of the past, present and future of one of the biggest success stories in Linux distro history…
Pardus Kurumsal 2 for the Second Time: A few days ago, I experienced a motherboard failure. This gave me ample opportunity to do a fresh Linux installation. The first disk on hand was Pardus Kurumsal 2 for AMD64. I thought it would be interesting to give the distribution another spin.
Terrible Linux: I don't like the changes going on in Linux Desktop land. Unity, KDE4, Gnome shell, they're all fine pieces of software, but just not for me. Thats why I created a debian remaster, called Terrible. With a taskbar, window buttons, a shutdown button, the Xfce desktop and a IMHO nice theme and usable software.
Why Linux Is a Model Citizen of Quality Code: Coverity's 2011 Open Source Integrity Report gives kudos to Linux for its high-quality code. Coverity, a development testing product provider, has been kicking the code tires on open source projects since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security initiated the project in 2006. Now Coverity owns and manages the Scan program, which is the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source code integrity in the world. The latest integrity report doesn't call Linux "perfect," but "model citizen of good quality" is pretty darn close. With the Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report, Coverity started releasing details on specific open source projects. The Android kernel 2.6.32 (Froyo) got called out for having 359 software defects, with 25% of them considered high risk with potential security and stability problems.
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