Linux Road

Stefan Lippers-Hollmann has announced the release of aptosid 2010-03, a Linux distribution that is based on based on Debian's unstable branch. aptosid 2010-03 uses that latest Linux kernel with support for newer hardware.

aptosid 2010-03 features improved KMS support for ATi Radeon and Intel graphics cards and performance improvements for Intel Westmere graphics chipsets. Wlan support has been consolidated, with rt2x00 now supporting RaLink rt28x0/ rt30xx/ rt35xx officially, as well as ath9k_htc gaining support for Atheros AR7010 USB wlan chipsets and minstrel_ht providing a generic 802.11n/ HT rate control algorithm.

New Features

• Debian sid, as of 2010-12-26.
• kernel 2.6.36.2 (smp, hard preemption).
• X.org 7.5 (xserver-xorg-core 1.7.7).
• enable KMS support for ATi and Intel based graphics chipsets.
• DRI (3d) support for ATi Radeon chipsets up to r7xx (refer to non-free sources and Drivers).
• KDE 4.4.5 (en + de).
• Iceweasel 3.5.16
• new, SVG based, art theme created by the aptosid art team.
• offline manual for en + de directly on the disc, online manuals for more languages online at http://manual.aptosid.com/ and available via apt; a big thank you goes to the documentation and translation teams!
  Please note that the offline manual is only available on the running live CD or the installed system.
• many changes for the manual.
• ath5k support for 54/ "108" MBit/s Atheros wlan cards (AR2425, AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, AR5213 and AR5414).
• ath9k support for 802.11n Atheros wlan cards (AR5418+AR5133, AR5416+AR5133, AR5416+AR2133, AR9160, AR9280, AR9281 and AR9285).
• ath9k_htc support for 802.11n Atheros USB wlan cards (AR7010/ AR9271).
• ar9170usb support for 802.11n Atheros USB wlan cards (AR9170 "otus").
• b43/ b43legacy support for Broadcom wlan cards.
  OpenFWWF 5.2 opensource firmware for the following Broadcom AirForce 802.11b/g wireless cards:
  • BCM4306
  • BCM4311 revision 1
  • BCM4318
  • BCM4320
  experimental support for LP-PHY, non-free firmware images (firmware-b43-lpphy-installer) required.
• iwl3945 support (Intel Pro Wireless 3945 chipsets).
• iwlagn support for IPW 4965 and the IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n part of the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 1000/ 5xxxAGN/ 6000/ 6050 family.
• iwmc3200wifi support for Intel Wireless Multicomm 802.11.
• rt2x00 support for RaLink rt2400, rt2500, rt2570, rt61 and rt73 802.11b/g cards.
• support for RaLink rt2770, rt2870 and rt3070 802.11b/g/n USB cards through rt2x00.
• support for RealTek RTL8180L and RTL8185 PCI/ cardbus wlan cards.
• support for RealTek RTL8187 and RTL8187B USB wlan cards.
• memtest86+.
• OpenJDK 6 as part of the kde-full variant.
• support kvm (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for kde-full; kvm depends on hardware virtualisation support (AMD pacifica virtualisation extensions "svm" or Intel IVT (vanderpool) virtualisation extensions "vmx")
• access point support for many mac80211 based wlan cards through nl80211 and hostapd (optional).
• client support for network booting over PXE/ NBD.
• the CFQ I/O scheduler regression has been fixed and dpkg performance improved.
• the installer has been fixed to no longer truncate sources.list entries when adding non-free sources.
• Ceni has switched to completely wpasupplicant based scanning and configuration, employing nl80211 if supported.
• rework block device/ file system detectiong.

System Requirements

amd64:

• CPU requirements:
  • AMD64
  • Intel Core2
  • Intel Atom Series (2xx/ 3xx, N4xx/ D4xx/ D5xx; the N2xx series does not support EM64T)
  • VIA Nano
  • any x86-64/ EM64T capable CPU
  newer 64 bit capable AMD Sempron and Intel Pentium 4 CPUs (watch for the "lm" flag in /proc/cpuinfo or use infobash -v3).
• RAM requirements:
  • KDE: ≥512 MB RAM (≥768 MB RAM recommended), ≥1 GB RAM for liveapt.
  • XFCE: ≥256 MB RAM.
• VGA graphics card capable of at least 640x480 pixel resolution.
• optical disk drive or USB media.
• ≥3 GB HDD space, ≥10 GB recommended.

i686:

• CPU requirements:
  • Intel Pentium pro/ Pentium II
  • AMD K7 Athlon (not K5/ K6)
  • Intel Atom Series (Z5xx/ Z6xx, N2xx)
  • VIA C3-2 (Nehemiah, not C3 Samuel or Ezra)/ C7
  • any x86-64/ EM64T capable CPU or newer
  the full i686 command set is required.
• RAM requirements:
  • KDE: ≥384 MB RAM (≥768 MB RAM recommended), ≥1 GB RAM for liveapt.
  • XFCE: ≥192 MB RAM.
• VGA graphics card capable of at least 640x480 pixel resolution.
• optical disk drive or USB media.
• ≥3 GB HDD space, ≥10 GB recommended.

Download

To download aptosid 2010-03, visit: Official Download Page

Note

This distribution is for experimental purposes only. So, use it at your own risk

Source

This press release is extracted from the official release announcement, that can be found here: Official release announcement

Ubuntu 11.04 promises to bring many changes to Ubuntu Distro. Default applications have undergone a lot of changes recently and this trend continues. Banshee is the next major application that is set to replace the current default music player Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox replacement is subjected to the size of Banshee so that it can fit in the CD along side other applications.

Other major changes to default applications are:

• Shotwell, Evolution, Totem will remain as default applications
• Thunderbird was considered to be a potential alternative to evolution as default mail client but dropped from this cycle because of issues regarding calendar, contact, integration with appmenu and messaging menu
• Firefox 4 instead of Chromium as default web browser as Chromium needs better integration with    desktop and some security issues. 
• Oneconf integration
• Gnome Dictionary has been dropped.
• LibreOffice if it is ready for Ubuntu 11.04

Ricardo López announced the release of Asturix 3. Asturix is an Ubuntu-based distribution that tends to focus on ease of use and a full support for social networking. Asturix allows you to legally download music via Jamendo.

Feature List

The official feature list, posted on Asturix 3's official web site lists the following features:

• Elegant and proffessional interface, combined with an amazing design easy of use
• Total integration of social and microblogging networks as Twitter, Facebook or Identi.ca
• Asturix Bridge lets you to add, remove and execute web applications as native applications
• Face login. Write your password to login now is from the past
• Libre and free music thanks to Jamendo, and it is legal!

Download

To Download Asturix 3 follow the following link: http://asturix.com/download

Donate

If you like the project and are able to help the project financially then you are requested to donate something to the project. To donate follow the following link: Donate

Screenshots

Canonical has decided to change the interface of the next release of Ubuntu (Natty Narwhal 11.04) from GNOME to Unity. Unity is an open source project that focuses on simplified interface and three dimensional displays.

Canonical has to make this decision because the views of developers at Canonical were starting to diverge from the views of the GNOME team. Canonical had different ideas about how a desktop interface should look and operate, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

"We were part of the GNOME shell design discussion, we put forward our views and they were not embraced by designers," Shuttleworth said during a press briefing. "We took a divergent view from the GNOME shell folks on key design issues, for example how application menus should appear on the system, how one should search to find applications, [and] how one's favorite applications should be presented."

Ubuntu's next release Natty Narwhal (11.04) is set to be launched in April 2011. Natty Narwhal (11.04) will have Unity shell that will support three dimensional interface. Shuttleworth announced on Monday, at the company's Ubuntu Developer Summit, being held this week in Orlando, Florida. For previous desktop versions of the software, Gnome was the default shell.

Canonical and the developers of GNOME, an open source project led by the GNOME Foundation, have had an increasingly disharmonious relationship over the past year due, in part, to these design issues.

Because Canonical was already developing Unity for netbooks for OEM (original equipment manufacturer) customers, "We went ahead and did the engineering" for a general desktop interface for the next release, Shuttleworth said. "Essentially, it is a very different product from the GNOME shell, and has a very different way of organizing things," he said.

Even though Canonical will switch from GNOME in the next release of Ubuntu, but according to Mr. Shuttleworth users will have little problem. Shuttleworth has also promised that all GNOME application will run without any modifications.

"We have no plans for proprietary extensions to Unity whatsoever," Shuttleworth said.

Andrew Gillis has announced the release of VortexBox 1.5, a Fedora based distribution that is powerful enough to turn a computer into an easy-to-use music server or a jukebox. Andrew Gillis quoted on the official VortexBox site's release announcement,

"We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.5. As always our goal it to make VortexBox work with any media player. The recent release of iTunes 10 does not work work with the old VortexBox DAAP server. We took this opportunity to replace the DAAP server in VortexBox with a better one. The new DAAP server not only works with iTunes 10 but it can server FLAC files to iTunes by encoding them as WAV files inline. This reduces the need to keep a mirror of your music files in mp3 format.

We also updated the the latest squeezebox server and added a control panel to control the services on VortexBox. Thanks to everybody who helped with features and bug fixes for this release."

VortexBox is known for it's quick installation, the ease of use that it provides, and the low system requirements. VortexBox can convert any PC into a music machine. Some of the major features of VortexBox includes easily ripping CDs to mp3, FLAC, and other major formats also it can load CD covers, ID3 tags and other details about the songs. VortexBox can also serve as a music server to play music files over the network.

Features

Some of the major features listed on VortexBox's official about page are,

• Converts an old PC to a CD ripper / jukebox / NAS in 15 minutes.
• Easy to customize VortexBox as it is based on well-trusted Fedora.
• Automatically tags all files from online music database.
• Automatically downloads the cover art.
• Automatic sharing of file to SMB (Microsoft) file shares.
• Automatic re-indexing Squeezebox Server after every CD is ripped.
• AppleTalk – for OSX or Bonjour for Windows.
• DAAP – Automatically shares all MP3s for streaming to iTunes and Roku Soundbridge.
• NFS – For Linux boxes and almost anything else, Solaris etc.
• DLNA support – Play music and video DLNA enabled players, XBOX 360,PS3, Windows 7 etc.
• Easy installation of mplayer for AlienBBC support.
• Good support for Sonos.
• Works well as a back end server for XBMC (XBOX Media Center) running on XBOX, Windows, OSX, AppleTV, or Linux.

To download the latest VortexBox 1.5, please visit the official download page (http://vortexbox.org/downloads/)

The final version of Parsix GNU/Linux 3.6 aka Vinnie is released and available for download. Parsix is a Persian based Linux distribution, it is derived from KANOTIX and is based on Debian. The final version was announced earlier this morning on the distribution's official website.

Major Changes in Parsix 3.6 Vinnie

• New artwork, based on "Horsehead Nebula" background, Serenity GTK-2 theme engine by Jean-Paul Bizet, Foresight GTK-2 theme engine∞ by Og Maciel, Tropical sound theme by Tom Haste, and GNOME Colors - Dust icon theme by Victor C.
• Updated Adobe flash player to 10.0.45.2 (both 32 and 64 bit editions)
• New experimental USB installer system. For more information, please see 'man parsix-iso2usb?'

Updated Packages

• Linux 2.6.32.20
• GNOME 2.30.2
• Xserver-xorg 1.7.7
• GNU Iceweasel 3.5.11
• OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
• Glibc 2.11.2
• SquashFS?+Lzma 4.0
• GParted 0.6.2
• Empathy 2.30.1.1
• GIMP 2.6.8
• CompizFusion? 0.8.4
• Synaptic 0.63.1
• VirtualBox?-OSE 3.2.6
• Exaile 0.3.0.2
• VLC 1.0.6
• xFarDic? 0.11.7

To download Parsix visit the official website. To read the complete release announcement and notes see the official page.

Stephen Ewen has announced via the UberStudent's Official website the release of UberStudent-LXDE 1.0, a Linux distribution designed for academic users, keeping in view the low spec machines. This lightweight distribution fulfills all the requirements of a typical academic user using a low-spec machine. Even though the distribution is well designed but if a good enough machine is available then one should go for the complete version.

UberStudent has been one of the finest distribution designed to help learners and students. UberStudent-LXDE 1.0 is designed around a "core skills" approach, which centers on research and writing, study, and self-management skills, essentials required of all successful college students regardless of their major. It does this by providing some of the best cloud computing applications available across each application category, efforts have been made to make sure the core productivity is not dependent upon an Internet connection, according to the developers themselves.

Even though the this lightweight version cannot match the power of the full version still it is worth mentioning that it is still useful and for people with low-spec machines it is like a blessing.

For more details on UberStudent visit the official website to give UberStudent a try visit get UberStudent.

Robbie Williamson has announced the availability of the beta release of Ubuntu 10.10, code name "Maverick Meerkat". The Maverick Meerkat Beta is the beta release of Ubuntu 10.10, bringing with it new features for the next version of Ubuntu. The final and stable version of Ubuntu 10.10 will be released on October 10, 2010.

New features in Maverick

• Updated Packages

• All Ubuntu versions that are released, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are updated in it. Many of these packages used to come from an automatic sync from Debian's Unstable branch, but according to the Ubuntu website this sync has stopped now. So, one would expect few changes to that.

• GNOME base platform updated to version 2.31

• The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This particularly includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

• Evolution updated to the 2.30 version

• Evolution was updated to the 2.30 version, which operates much faster compared to the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

• F-Spot out, Shotwell in

• Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

• Gwibber Improved

• Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter's authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance.

• Better Sound Indicator

• The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

• Ubuntu Software Center, improved look and feel

• The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new "Featured" and "What's New" views for showcasing applications, an improved package description view, and a "For Purchase" software category has been added. You can also now easily access your package installation history too.

• Changes to Ubuntu One

• Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Note: For a list of all packages being accepted for 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, please subscribe to maverick-changes:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/maverick-changes

News Source

At the time of the announcement of Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 AKA Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu Community Manager and Linux New Media contributor Jono Bacon announced the 11.04 Ubuntu Developer Summit. The summit, takes place in Orlando Florida, October 25-29 at the Caribe Royal.

The entire Canonical development team will be there for the event. The discussion and debates will be about the design of the design of the next Ubuntu.

"UDS is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu.UDS is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu," said Bacon in his announcement.

Bacon's announcement went on to community sponsorships for members of the community who want to attend and could contribute "real insight and expertise," but are unable to fit the travel bills themselves. The application for sponsorship can be found at http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/sponsorship/. The deadline is September 8.

or more information on the summit including schedule, visit http://uds.ubuntu.com/.

In the view of the industry's increasing call for cloud interoperability, one of the more famous open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as a potential standard for cloud interoperability, the company reported this Wednesday.

"We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one particular vendor, including Red Hat. If you want true interoperability and true portability, you need a third-party governance structure," said Red Hat cloud product manager Bryan Che during a webcast outlining the company's cloud-computing road map.

Lack of interoperability among different cloud providers is one of the major concerns that prevent enterprises from adopting cloud computing, noted Gary Chen, an IDC research manager covering enterprise virtualization software, during a presentation that accompanied Red Hat's announcement.

Other than Red Hat there a lot of other cloud vendors that are making efforts to tackle this problem. In July, Rackspace and U.S. government space agency NASA launched an open-source collection of cloud enabling software called OpenStack. And earlier this week, Eucalyptus Systems released version 2.0 of its cloud platform, which uses the AWS (Amazon Web Services) API. The company argues that, due to its popularity, AWS has become a de facto standard.

Red Hat launched Deltacloud in September 2009 as a set of open-source APIs (application programming interfaces) that could be used to move cloud-based workloads among different IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) providers, such as Amazon and Rackspace.

In order to move workloads among different cloud providers, customers need "an architecture that is compatible, and a stack that is compatible with what they are running on the inside," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president for products and technologies.

To encourage external contributions to Deltacloud, Red Hat relinquished the Deltacloud code base to the Apache Incubator, a repository for programs that may eventually be overseen by the Apache Foundation. The company also started a site, called APIwanted.org, where external parties can submit suggestions for additional APIs and other desired functionality for Deltacloud.

In addition to Red Hat other companies are also taking pary in the development of Deltacloud, or are using it in one way or another. These companies include include Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ingres and Intel, the company asserted.

Red Hat also said Wednesday that it would be assembling a Platform-as-a-Service package built around its JBoss middleware software stack.

The availability of first alpha release of Fedora 14 "Laughin" has been announced by Dennis Gilmore (see the release announcement). The final release of much awaited Fedora 14 is due in September this year, and this is the first chance for the users to see how the upcoming release of Fedora will be like. The main goal of an alpha release is to find and fix bugs, the alpha version is designed in such a way as to help the Fedora team to identify bugs.

Name

The release announcement also gives some details on how the name was chosen for Fedora 14 as quoted,

Fedora 14 is named in honor of distinguished physicist Robert B. Laughlin, whose fields of research have included, among other things, the topic of emergence. Emergence is the process by which a group of individual components interact to produce a system that is more complex than the sum of its parts - a perfect description of an open source community.

Accepted Features

• Boost 1.44
• D Programming
• EC2
• Eclipse Helios
• Erlang R14
• Gdb Index
• GNUstep
• ipmiutil
• libjpeg-turbo
• KDE 4.5
• MeeGo 1.0
• Memory Debugging Tools
• NetBeans 6.9
• Open SCAP
• Perl 5.12
• Python 2.7
• Rakudo Star
• Spice
• Sugar 0.90
• systemd

For full details on Fedora 14's accepted features visit the official page.

Major Features

The release notes page also highlights some of the major features of Fedora 14, some of them are listed below.

• Fedora 14 plans to introduce systemd, a smarter, more efficient way of starting up and managing background daemons and services. It is a drop-in replacement for sysvinit and upstart, maintaining compatibility with SysV and LSB init scripts.
• Fedora 14 will come loaded with Linux Kernel 2.6.35.
• Spice will be used for Desktop Virtualization.
• The replacement of libjpeg with libjpeg-turbo is also a part of Fedora 14 and is supposed to improve speed in applications that handle JPEG format, including photo managers, video editors and PDF readers.
• Introduction of a system programming language D, as well as updates to Python, Erlang, and Perl.
• Improved gdb will provide a simpler, more faster debuging.
• NetBeans 6.9, and Eclipse 'Helios', some tools for developers C++ libraries are also upgraded to 1.44.0.
• Inclusion of KDE Plasma Desktop 4.5.0
• The latest release of Sugar features major usability improvements for the first login screen and the control panel, as well as support for 3G networks.
• MeeGo™ Netbook UX 1.0 is also a part of Fedora 14 to enhance the notebook experience.
• Fedora 14 introduces an open source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), allowing users to automatically scan their system to check whether it complies with a defined security configuration.
• From Fedora 14 onward images for EC2 will be provided for each new release, allowing users of Amazon's on-demand cloud computing platform to use the latest Fedora.
• Fedora 14 comes with Rakudo Perl, an implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine.
• Support for the increasingly popular R statistical programming language continues to broaden in Fedora 14 for more powerfull data analysis.

For full details on Fedora 14 features visit the official page.