This week marks the real start to the development cycle for Ubuntu’s 9.10 release called Karmic Koala. The Ubuntu Developer’s Summit is being held in Barcelona this year, and is now in full swing. A lot of interesting blueprints have been uploaded to Canonical’s Launchpad service. Let’s see what kind of topics the Ubuntu folks are discussing for this release.
Posts Tagged ‘Linux’
Karmic Koala Blueprints
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One of President Obama’s strong points during his campaign was the use of technology to reach millions of people and deliver a message. Part of that message was increasing the use of modern technology in government, and advocating modern technology in certain private sector industry that require government oversight. One such sector is energy, with the Obama Administration calling for the energy industry to green up the grid using 21st century technology. Another industry is the medical industry.
GNOME 2.26 was released a few months ago, bringing some small changes and overage polish to the venerable GNU/Linux desktop environment. In six months time, GNOME 2.28 will be released which will bring yet some more polish a few more changes. One year from now comes GNOME 2.30. This release should be a bit different than the other releases before it. GNOME 2.30 will renumbered to GNOME 3.0. That’s right, what would be the 15th release (only even numbered releases count, here.) of the GNOME 2.x line will indeed be the start of the GNOME 3.x regime.
But with GNOME 3.0 is supposed to come GTK+ 3.0. GTK+ is the toolkit upon which GNOME and its applications are written. It standardizes the look and feel of the desktop using widgets for things like title bars, buttons, text fields, and pretty much everything making up the user interface. For the folks that develop GTK+, branding it as a 3.0 release will mean taking a huge step forward. Unfortunately, for both the folks that develop GTK+ and the folks that develop GNOME, baby steps are usually the norm. Its no wonder they picked little gnome feet for the logo.
Thoughts on Jaunty Jackalope
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On Monday September 8th 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the lead Ubuntero behind one of the most popular Linux distributions yet introduced some goals for the April 2009 release titled Jaunty Jackalope. Shuttleworth summed up two big points: faster boot time and cloud computing with ‘weblications.’
64-bit Linux, is it time?
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Recently there hasn’t been much talk about 64-bit Linux on the desktop. Most technical articles have been dated sporadically since the release of the Athlon64/Opteron CPUs in 2003. And while Linux was one of the first operating systems to take full advantage of the AMD64 and later EM64T extensions to the x86 architecture, no one has really truly adopted them for standard use because of some technology still being 32-bit only.
Linux and Closed Source: Skype
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In the first edition of Linux and Closed Source, I discussed nVidia’s closed source drivers. This edition will focus on the Voice-Over-IP application Skype. Skype was initially released in August of 2003, and in the 5 years since then it has becoming the most used VOIP software on any platform with over 300 million users worldwide. Telephones have even been built around the Skype technology, and eBay thought so much about the technology that they purchased it in 2005. Skype is closed source.
Linux and Closed Source: nVidia
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nVidia has always felt a need to keep their drivers closed source, providing binary driver packages for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and BSD. This article focuses on the rationale and possible solutions to this “problem” in the case of Linux.
Adobe and Linux
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Recently, John C. Dvorak, columnist with MarketWatch posed an interesting challenge: Adobe could fend off Microsoft by embracing Linux. Well, first off, his rationale behind his was moreso a response to Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Microsoft is attempting to build a replacement for Adobe’s venerable Flash player, a technology thousands upon thousands of websites use to serve dynamic animation and information. Dvorak then made the statement that Adobe should port their CS Suite to Linux.
Online Ubuntu Services
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Overview:
Provide the following services to Ubuntu users via a SSO method such as OpenID:
Hardware Submission
Configuration Settings per application
Bookmarks (Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, etc)
Bug Submissions
Brainstorm Ideas
Malware
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ArsTechnica posted an article about malware. It described how hackers and malware companies have altered their delivery and execution of malware over the course of the last few years. It also went into some of economic aspects of malware distribution and the reason its still a popular choice for hackers.
I’d like to discuss the topmost reason malware still exhibits a problem for both home and corporate users. Microsoft Windows. Secure Computing has some statistics about malware, collected during specified date ranges. The report dated 8/01/07 to 8/31/07 shows some interesting figures. Ninety-seven percent of the new malware found is in the form of Windows Executable code. From my point of view, two things are causing this. And I will explain both. Read more »
