Linux News for Feb 28, 2011

• Atom E6xx PC is claimed to be world's smallest (Feb 28, 2011, 23:33)
  LinuxDevices: "Toradex announced a Linux-based single board computer (SBC) with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom E6xx, and also debuted a PC based on it that's claimed to be "the world's smallest.""


• Use Zenity to GUI-Up Scripts (Feb 28, 2011, 23:03)
  ServerWatch: "Some people just aren't comfortable with the command line. If you're writing scripts for those people, you want to take a look at Zenity, a GNOME utility that provides simple GUI dialogs from a shell script."


• Things overheard on the WiFi from my Android smartphone (Feb 28, 2011, 22:33)
  Freedom to Tinker: "Today in my undergraduate security class, we set up a sniffer so we could run Wireshark and Mallory to listen in on my Android smartphone. This blog piece summarizes what we found"


• Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source (Feb 28, 2011, 22:03)
  LWN.net: "while the cross-distribution cooperation on the 2.6.32 kernel has been a great thing, Red Hat is making things harder by shipping its RHEL 6 kernel source as one big tarball, without breaking out the patches."


• BlackBerry's Android? (Feb 28, 2011, 21:33)
  ZDNet: "Now, there's a rumor that RIM may well add support for Android applications to its BlackBerry line on top of its forthcoming QNX operating system."


• On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web (Feb 28, 2011, 21:03)
  PoemShape: "My first love wasn't poetry but computers. My first substantial work was not a poem, fable or story, but a piece of software written on the Apple IIe. Presently, my primary OS is Ubuntu..."


• How to Install VLC-Shares In Ubuntu And Stream Videos to Android (Feb 28, 2011, 20:33)
  MakeTechEasier: "VLC, without a doubt, is the best media player around. Not only is it able to play almost any file format, it is also able to stream audio/video from the Web and transcode on the fly."


• How to properly redirect the output of command executed with sudo. (Feb 28, 2011, 20:03)
  Pétur Ingi Egilsson: "We are faced with a problem when trying to redirect with sudo, as the second part of the command is not executed with root privileges."


• Jono Bacon Defends Ubuntu: An Insider's Perspective (Feb 28, 2011, 19:33)
  Datamation: "Last week, in "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" I presented one view of Ubuntu and its relationship with other parts of the free and open source software (FOSS) community."


• Arch�s Dirty Little Not-So-Secret (Feb 28, 2011, 19:03)
  IgnorantGuru's Blog: "A reader of my blog recently made a comment about Arch's lack of package signing, and this got me looking into the issue more carefully. What I found has left me deeply concerned with a number of aspects of Arch."


• Let us access the databases in the Easy Driver way ! (Feb 28, 2011, 18:33)
  Linuxaria: "Easy Driver is a project to access the databases, it is Free and Open Source. It is formed of a Java library and a code generator."


• Python4Kids: New Tutorial - A Big Jar of Pickles (Feb 28, 2011, 18:03)
  Python Tutorials for Kids: "In the last tutorial we learned how to pickle our objects. Pickling is a way of storing the object (on the computer's file system) so that it can be used later."


• 5 Best Linux Distribution With No Proprietary Components (Feb 28, 2011, 17:33)
  nixCraft: "In this post I will list five best Linux distribution that meets the FSF's strict guidelines and contains no proprietary components such as firmware and drivers."


• Exercise #6: Set Variables in Scripts (Feb 28, 2011, 17:03)
  Bashshell: "When you need to set variables, you can do that in the BEGIN section of an awk script. Here the variable firstuser is set to 1000. The BEGIN section sets that variable and it is then used later in the script."


• Why a Linux Aficionado Uses an iPhone (Feb 28, 2011, 16:33)
  Datamation: "Although I'm a diehard Linux advocate, I happen to be a reasonably happy owner of an iPhone 4. You didn't just misread this, I actually prefer using the iPhone over countless Android phones I've tried in the past."


• Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases (Feb 28, 2011, 16:03)
  Electronic Frontier Foundation: "These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed "John Does" in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants."


• McNealy: Sun could have won out over Linux (Feb 28, 2011, 15:33)
  Infoworld: "Sun Microsystems' mishandling of Solaris on the Intel platform left an opening for Linux to become established, when the company's Solaris OS could have won out instead"


• Why I believe Microsoft will buy Nokia (Feb 28, 2011, 15:03)
  Mobile Open Source: "I have been pretty lucky in January to predict that Nokia would pick Windows 7 as its new OS. I even won a beer in a bet with the Honorary Consul to Finland in Silicon Valley, clear sign the Finns were not expecting it at all..."


• Instant Vintage Photo Effects with the FIL Script for GIMP (Feb 28, 2011, 14:33)
  Scribbles and Snaps: "You can emulate different vintage photo effects in GIMP, but usually this is a rather laborious and time-consuming process that requires some editing chops. Fortunately, the Film Imitation Lab (FIL) script lets you turn plain snaps into eye-popping vintage photos with a minimum of effort."


• London Stock Exchange calls software crisis meeting with furious market data vendors (Feb 28, 2011, 14:03)
  Computerworld UK: "The London Stock Exchange has called an urgent meeting next week with price data vendors, in an attempt to solve the serious market stock price irregularities appearing on traders' screens since the exchange launched its new trading software."


• Work with Photo Metadata in digiKam (Feb 28, 2011, 11:03)
  Scribbles and Snaps: "Inside each digital photo hides metadata in the EXIF, IPTC, or XMP formats, and digiKam provides tools for viewing and editing this useful information."


• Datalight Releases First Full-featured File System for Embedded Linux (Feb 28, 2011, 07:03)
  Techwhack press release: "Datalight announced today that it has released Reliance Nitro 2.0, the first full-featured file system for embedded Linux."


• Weekend Project: Harvest Microformats for Fun and Profit (Feb 28, 2011, 03:03)
  Linux.com: "Microformats are a way to slip computer-readable information into HTML, so it's "semantically" marked-up, not just visually marked up. With hCalendar, for example, when you advertise a big event on your Web page, it's not only human-readable, but the browser can notice that it's a calendar event..."