Reehan's Blog

Packages for the release of Amarok 2.4.1 are available for Kubuntu 11.04 and oneiric.

Bugs in packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

Users of 11.04 can install it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

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Sony Ericsson has upgraded its Xperia Mini and slider keyboard-equipped Xperia Mini Pro phones with faster 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, larger three-inch screens, and Android 2.3. Claimed to be the smallest smartphones available that can play and record 720p video, the phones include all the wireless features of a big-screen phone, plus a five-megapixel camera and new Facebook integration features....

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While a number of Linux distributions are already shipping "GRUB2", version 2.0 of the GRUB boot-loader has in fact not been officially released. The proper GNU GRUB 2.0 release though is slowly nearing and yesterday marked the release of GRUB 1.99...

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If you happen to work each day around other computer users, you've probably noticed that more and more of them have dual-monitor setups on their desktops. A closer analysis of this phenomenon reveals that certain kinds of users benefit most from having two monitors instead of one. Working with that idea, Computeworld has an interesting analysis posted on whether developers benefit disproportionately from dual monitors. In my experience, developers can definitely benefit from this setup, but so can open source enthusiasts who work in more than one desktop environment, and open source users who favor both of the leading open source browsers: Firefox and Google Chrome. Here is why you should investigate a two-monitor lashup if you haven't already.

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Andi Kleen has announced the release of 2.6.35.13. The announcement has a long list of fixes throughout the tree. "This release contains security fixes and all 2.6.35 users are encouraged to update."

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Netflix for Android is here... finally. It's been a long time coming and we're thrilled to be able to bring our instant queue with us wherever we go. Though technically only approved for a handful of HTC phones and the Samsung Nexus S, we were able to successfully get it up and running on at least one unsanctioned device -- the Droid X (sporting a leaked copy of Gingerbread). So what's Netflix like on Google's mobile OS? Well, it's a heck of a lot like the iPhone app. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart if it weren't for the tabs being moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Still, we figured it was worth giving a solid once over and, as usual, you can find our impressions after the break.

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Paul Sherman has announced the release of Absolute Linux 13.2.2, a lightweight, Slackware-based desktop distribution featuring the IceWM window manager: "Absolute Linux 13.2.2 released. Use of HAL has been dropped for newer ConsoleKit and udisks, as well as LXDE's newer version of PCManFM. Code changes for the Absolute....

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Anthony Nordquist has announced the release of SalineOS 1.4, a Debian-based desktop distribution with Xfce, and SalineOS 1.0 "Personal Server" edition, a Debian-based distribution for home servers: "SalineOS Personal Server edition 1.0 is now available. The Personal Server edition is designed to make setting up small personal home....

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Amrel announced the availability of Linux on a ruggedized, military-focused handheld PC that includes a five-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen. The Rocky DB6 has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, 32GB of RAM, 64GB or 128GB of SSD (solid state disk) storage, and a Mini PCI Express expansion slot, the company says....

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The Document Foundation has released the fourth beta of LibreOffice 3.4. It will be followed by three release candidates, after which the final version of LibreOffice 3.4 is scheduled to be released on 31 May

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Red Hat today announced JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, which it calls "a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache." Cameron Purdy defines a data grid as "a system composed of multiple servers that work together to manage information and related operations - such as computations - in a distributed environment."

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A new version of Superb Mini Server (SMS), a Slackware-based distribution for servers, was announced earlier today: "Superb Mini Server version 1.6.0 released. SMS 1.6.0 is based on Slackware Linux 13.37 and ships with Linux kernel 2.6.37.6 to honor our compatibility with the new Slackware release; the 2.6.38.4....

Read more at DistroWatch

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Mozilla.org's SeaMonkey Project was my first exposure to Web browsing when I started dabbling in the Linux OS. I have since played around with other browsers, including my workhorse favorite, Firefox, by the Mozilla folks. But I keep coming back to SeaMonkey for its simplicity and charm. SeaMonkey's latest version, 2.0.14, comes much closer to being a clone of the latest Firefox rendition. It has many of the features that have become synonymous with Web browsing. For example, SeaMonkey offers tabbed browsing, interface customization, user profiles and an amply stocked tools menu.

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antiX M11, a lightweight offshoot of MEPIS Linux designed to run on computers with as little as 64 MB of RAM, has been released: "Just over a year since the release of antiX M8.5, the antiX team is pleased to announce that antiX MEPIS 11 'Jayaben Desai' -....

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With the recent look at the major Linux power regressions taking place within the Linux kernel, some initially wondered if the increase in power consumption was correlated to an increase in system performance. Unfortunately, it is clear now that is not the case. With that said though, here's some performance benchmarks of all major kernel releases going back to Linux 2.6.24 and ending with the Linux 2.6.39 kernel.

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Friday, 06 May 2011 00:00 Wazi

In recent years federal courts across the country have been filled with FOSS-related patent claims. Last month, a verdict in the Bedrock v. Google case renewed calls for reform of the US patent system. What exactly were the issues in this case, and what impact is this verdict likely to have on the open source world?

In a two-page jury verdict form returned on April 15 in the Bedrock Computer Technologies, LLC (BCT) suit, a jury held that Google infringed US Patent No. 5,893,120 (held by BCT), determined that the patent is valid, and stated Google must pay $5 million as damages for past infringement. The case is far from over, however, as claims continue to proceed against other defendants and further juries in the case may return additional verdicts that bear watching.

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0.10 adds priority ordering of message queues and producer flow control to the open source, Apache licensed implementation of the AMQP enterprise messaging standard

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Today we released Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and you can find out more about it and download it here.

This has been a ferociously busy cycle and with it we set out with significant, audacious goals. We shipped a new shell, a new media player, significant improvements to Ubuntu One, and we worked hard to deliver all this change and opportunity in a predictable, stable and slick product. I am really proud of the result.

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As I just announced to the X.Org mailing lists (I'm the organizer of this year's event), the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference is taking place in Chicago, Illinois from the 12 to 15th of September...

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Thunar is the Xfce desktop environment's file manager. It's incredibly lightweight, flexible — but largely unappreciated outside Xfce circles. Thunar has a selection of extensions, and allows users to create custom actions that can extend its functionality even further. Let's take a look at how to customize Thunar to get the most out of your Linux desktop.

Thunar's custom actions are used to take action on files and folders found within Thunar and can do anything from bulk-renaming to running specialized scripts. For anyone that uses Thunar, custom actions is a must-know feature. Let's get started!

Thunar custom actions work by creating special conditional commands that work on specific file types within a folder. These custom, conditional commands use special parameters to know how they are going to be run within Thunar. The parameters are crucial to the actions and are:

%f — The path to the first selected file.%F — The paths to all selected files.%d — Directory containing the file passed in %f.%D — Directories containing the files passed in %F.%n — The first selected file name (no path.)%N — the selected file names (without paths.)

Obviously, when dealing with multiple files or directories, the parameter to be used will be a capital letter and if the directories must be passed along with the file names, the parameter with the corresponding case must be used. In other words if %F is used then %D must be the parameter used if the directory pathes must also be passed to the command.

I will demonstrate the creation of custom actions first, by adding an action to Thunar that will open a text file (such as a configuration file) with administration privileges. This particular action is incredibly handy for those who like to edit configuration files (such as smb.conf or apache2.conf) in a graphical editor such as Gedit. Creating this custom action is simple. The first step is to open up the custom actions window. To do this open Thunar and click Edit > Configure Custom Actions. With the Custom Actions window open, click the "+" button to create a new custom action (see Figure 1.)

With the Create Action window open the following information must be entered, in the Basic tab, for this particular action:

Name: Edit with sudoDescription: Edit a text file with administrative privileges.Command: gksu gedit %fIcon: Click the Icon button and then select an icon to represent the action.

The Appearance and Condition tab needs attention as well. Click on that tab and configure the following:

File pattern: *Appears if selection contains: Text Files

When everything has been configured, click OK to save the Custom Action. Before this action can be used, Thunar must be restarted, so close the Thunar window and reopen the application. When Thunar is reopened navigate to the /etc directory and locate a configuration file (such as /etc/samba/smb.conf) and right-click the file. When the context menu opens up a new entry will appear named "Edit with sudo" (or whatever was entered for the "Name" option above). Select the Edit with sudo entry and the sudo password prompt will appear. Upon proper sudo authentication, the configuration file will open in the Gedit application with administrative permission.

I want to offer up a few more actions, to illustrate how flexible this system is. The first action works to convert MP3 files to the more open source friendly OGG format. This action includes a necessary script. The contents of the script (name it mp3toogg.sh) are:

#!/bin/bash

for TRACK in "$@" ; do

# allow filenames containing dots such as "an artist feat. some_other_artist"
OGGOUT=$(ls "$TRACK" |sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/')

gst-launch filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! \ vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.7 ! oggmux ! filesink location="$OGGOUT.ogg" done

Create and save that file in the /usr/local/bin directory, making sure users have permission to use the file as well as execute the file (The command sudo chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/mp3toogg.sh will give the file executable permission.) The above file will require the following tools:

If either of the above applications are not installed, install them using the Add/Remove Software tool. Once everything is installed and in place, it's time to create the Thunar Action that will call the script. Run through the same process as with the "Edit with sudo" action, only using the below information:

Basic TabName: mp3 to oggDescription: Convert mp3 files to oggCommand: mp3toogg.sh %FAppearance and Conditions TabFile Pattern: *Appears if selection contains: Audio Files

Save this action, restart Thunar, open a folder containing mp3 files, right-click on an mp3 file and behold the new action. If that action is clicked, the selected mp3 file(s) will be converted into the ogg format.

Another really handy action to have is the ability to right-click a text-file or image and send it directly to a printer. This action will not work with .doc or .odt type documents, but with text and image files it works like a champ. To create this action, the necessary information is:

Basic TabName: Send to printerDescription: Print text and imagesCommand: lp %fAppearance and Conditions TabFile pattern: *Appears if selection contains: Text Files and Image Files

Here's a really great action that uses the K3B CD/DVD Burning suite to burn ISO images. The details for this action are:

Basic TabName: Burn ISODescription: Burn an ISO image with K3BCommand: k3b --cdimage %fAppearance and Conditions tabFile pattern: *.isoAppears if selection contains: Other files

The ability to create Customized Actions with Thunar makes this particular tool incredibly flexible. In fact, the limitations on these actions is only limited to the imagination and skill of the user. Simply enough, that equates to being able to roll actions that stretch the boundaries of the standard file manager. I invite Linux.com readers to share their customized actions here in the comments.

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Tuesday, 10 May 2011 00:00 CNET

The World Wide Web Consortium's fresh blood includes China Unicom, Netflix, LG Electronics, Facebook, and Zynga.

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Most Linux users are familiar with the GIMP raster graphics editor, a versatile tool for photo and graphics work. What is often overlooked is that a significant chunk of GIMP's power comes not from its built-in functions, but from its extensibility. GIMP supports enhanced features through compiled plug-ins and scripts, for everything from automating difficult tasks to introducing whole new functionality. A basic set of plug-ins is supplied with your distro's version of GIMP, but if you're just sticking with that, you're missing out on many of the high-end features. This weekend, let's take a look at GIMP's plug-in power, through the lens of one of its most advanced add-ons, Resynthesizer.

To find out what your plug-in situation currently is, fire up GIMP and then go to the Help -> Plug-in Browser menu item. You will probably want to expand the window size for readability; for some reason only the first column is visible in the left-side pane, but there is much more. This browser lists all of the installed plug-ins, and for each one allows you to see where in the program's menu structure the added function appears, when it was last updated, what image types it operates on, and any additional information provided by the plug-in author — such as a URL.

The example plug-in we'll be looking at in this project is called Resynthesizer, and it is one you will definitely want to install. Resynthesizer performs "texture synthesis," which means healing and selection-fill-in functions in a picture based on the surrounding image itself. It is essentially the same features provided by Photoshop's "healing brush" and "content aware fill," but Resynthesizer was doing it half a decade ahead of Photoshop. The original author Paul Harrison developed the plug-in for his PhD research, but new maintainer Lloyd Konneker took over in 2010 and is producing binaries and packages for up-to-date GIMP releases.

The officially-sanctioned home for GIMP plug-ins and scripts is the GIMP Plugin Registry. It offers a variety of ways to access extensions, from browsing by popularity or update date, to sifting by category, to subscribing to the registry update RSS feed.

If you are completely new, try taking a look at the popularity-sorted page to get a feel for what other users find helpful. There you'll see support for extra image formats, layer effects, color separation, and entirely new functionality like wavelet-based denoising, adaptive edge-detection, liquid rescaling, and the ability to run native Photoshop plugins.

Despite its official status, not every plugin author makes regular use of the registry, so if you see a plugin that looks interesting but has a long-past "last update" date, be sure to read the comments and to click through to the plug-in's home page. Most are actively maintained, and the comments from other readers will often be a current source of information on the status.

You don't actually have to find plug-ins through the registry at all, of course. Many design blogs feature "five great GIMP plug-in"-style posts on a regular basis, often with an eye towards a particular use-case (design, photo editing, etc.). Start with the lists from MakeTechEasier and LightStalking to get a feel for the option.

Go ahead and close GIMP if you still have it open from the previous step. From a terminal window, type cd ~/.gimp-2.6/ and hit Enter to move to your GIMP configuration directory. An ls shows you the contents, which include directories for saving brushes, curves, gradients and other resources. The directories of interest to the plug-in shopper are plug-ins and scripts.

What's the difference between the two? For historical reasons, scripts (which you might think of as similar to "user macros" in other applications) go in their own directory, are written in a Scheme-like language and use the .scm file extension. Plug-ins can be compiled executables or Python code, and generally implement features that cannot be accomplished via scripting GIMP's existing internals.

On the Resynthesizer registry page, you can download a .tar.gz archive containing everything you will need to install on a 32-bit Linux system. You can also browse the source at Github, where you'll find a basic README. The archive contains two executables, resynthesizer and resynthesizer-gui, and eight Python scripts (one each for each new menu function provided). Extract them all to ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ and then type ls -l at the command line. That will show you the file permissions.

The newly extracted package will not have the executable "x bit" listed in the fourth column, so type chmod +x * to set it. In the future, other plugins you install may or may not require this step, depending on whether you install them through your distro package manager, download them manually, or perhaps compile them locally.

Resynthesizer uses binary and Python plug-ins only, but another package could include both plug-ins and scripts. If you are installing a script, though, the process is exactly the same except for the target directory: extract the script to ~/.gimp-2.6/scripts/ and use chmod to set the executable bit.

Now, when you re-open GIMP, the program will scan the plug-ins directory, pick up the new additions, and integrate their new menu entries directly into the interface. There is no separate "plug-in area" of the menus; that is part of why the Plug-in Browser we opened earlier is important. If you can't figure out whether or not a plug-in is being picked up by GIMP, you can search for it or try and locate it by name, but the listed names correspond to the new functions implemented, not the name of the package as a whole.

In Resynthesizer's case, you gain eight functions: "Enlarge & sharpen," "Sharpen by synthesis," "Heal selection," "Heal transparency," and "Uncrop" in the Filter -> Enhance menu, "Texture" in the Filter -> Render menu, "Fill with pattern seamless" in the Edit menu, and "Style" in the Filter -> Map menu.

If you've been using GIMP for a long time, you may have to worry about plug-ins and scripts from previous major releases. Note that the directory we've been using thus far is ~/.gimp-2.6/. Resources and extensions from the GIMP 2.4 series (if you still have any) are located in ~/.gimp-2.4/. However, it is a very bad idea to simply copy-and-paste objects between these two directories. Changes in the API might make them malfunction in ways that you can't predict, although this is primarily of concern to compiled binary plug-ins. Most plug-in authors keep up to date on GIMP's long release cycle — visit the registry or plug-in URL and see if there is a new version available.

So what about Resynthesizer itself? No, it's not a resurgence of 80's New Wave pop. Thankfully. Instead, the eight new functions it provides implement texture synthesis in very specific uses. The canonical example is cropping a distracting item out of a photograph: you can manually remove the object and paint over it using the clone tool, sampling from the surrounding area. Resynthesizer does this automatically, without risk of smudging up the result through choosing awkward sampling points.

This function is implemented in the "Heal selection" option. Make a selection, then choose is from the Filter -> Enhance menu. The new version of the plug-in lets you choose the size of the sampling area, whether to sample on all sides or just vertically/horizontally, and whether to fill in randomly, work from the inside-out, or the outside-in. What gives you the best result depends on the image.

Heal transparency does essentially the same thing, but for transparent regions of an image. The mysteriously-named Uncrop takes the process to a new level, adding a transparent border to the image, then automatically filling it in with texture generated from the neighboring region, including correctly preserving horizon lines and other features. Sharpen by synthesis and Enlarge & sharpen both work to reconstruct detail in a blurry image by synthesizing pixels. It's not as good as tech teams produce on TV, but it can save an otherwise scruffy-looking photo.

The Render Texture and "Fill with pattern seamless" options are different entirely. They deal with the Resynthesizer engine's ability to detect edges and seamlessly connect to them as it generates pixels. Render Texture uses the current image as a source and generates a reusable, randomized texture preserving visible features (optionally making it tile-able at the same time), while the Fill option takes an external image as a "source" and generates a random-but-natural-looking texture from it to fill in part of the image. The first might be of interest to those who generate textures for 3-D modeling or video game graphics, while the second is a genuine photo-editing tool (provided you don't pick an easily-recognizable source texture).

The last new function is original. Filter -> Map -> Style transfers the "color and texture" of one image into another, through sampling and texture synthesis. The result is that you can take a source image (such as a photograph) and map the "style" of a target image (such as a watercolor painting) onto it. The result ought to be a watercolor-like rendering of the photo.

To be honest, I haven't played around too much with the new functions. I'm happy enough to have the healing functionality of Resynthesizer return to GIMP after such a long absence.

When you've worked with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for a while, the process for managing GIMP plugins seems quaint by default. Here's hoping a future version of the editor will automate more of the installation process, or perhaps even tie the registry directly into GIMP's Plug-in Browser so you don't have to switch to a web browser. But don't get too down on the GIMP's process — it'd be nicer if it was fully automatic, but it's fairly simple already. Most people just haven't tried it. In fact, you've probably got enough of your weekend left that you can check out some additional plug-ins, too. Here's a hint: if you like Resynthesizer, try G'MIC for extra credit.

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The PyPy 1.5 release is out. PyPy is an alternative Python interpreter with a focus on speed. "This release updates PyPy with the features of CPython 2.7.1, including the standard library. Thus all the features of CPython 2.6 and CPython 2.7 are now supported. It also contains additional performance improvements."

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Mozilla employe and JavaScript Brendan Eich is giving a surprise talk at Node.js today on the subject of using Mozilla's Spidermonkey JavaScript engine in Node.js, instead of Google's V8.

The Spidermonkey/Node.js project has been known for a while now.

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When you're ready to move up from simple audio recording applications like GNOME's Sound Recorder, take a look at the excellent Ardour digital audio workstation. Ardour is one of the shining jewels of FOSS, a robust professional-level multi-channel recorder, editor, and mixer. Follow along as we learn the basics by making a simple recording. You will need a computer with a sound card, even a cheapo on-board chip, and a microphone or instrument to plug in to your sound card.

JACK, the Jack Audio Connection Kit, is required to run Ardour. If you're going to use Linux for serious audio production then you must become well-acquainted with JACK. (In an amazing coincidence, my "Book of Audacity" has a chapter on using JACK.) JACK is a real-time low-latency audio router. With JACK you can fine-tune latency and throughput, connect software audio applications, and connect audio hardware in all different ways. A simple example is recording a single instrument, say a guitar, and using the wonderful Hydrogen software drumkit for a backing track. With JACK you can have Hydrogen playing and recording at the same time you play your guitar, and have individual control over routing all inputs, outputs, and monitoring channels.

When you install Ardour JACK should be a dependency. If it isn't with your distro, then install it separately. Fedora with the CCRMA packages is a great audio platform, and so is Ubuntu. I'm using Ubuntu Studio 10.04 LTS because everything works and I plan to keep it that way.

I am not a fan of Pulseaudio for audio production because it gets in my way. I rely on JACK and ALSA. ALSA provides sound card drivers and a basic mixer, and JACK does the routing. Pulseaudio is also an audio router, so it's redundant with JACK. JACK and Pulseaudio often clash, depending on your distro and how old it is. How use PulseAudio and JACK? will help you sort it out. Pulseaudio and Jackd has some good tips.

There are two ways to start Ardour. You can start JACK first and tweak the settings, or start Ardour and let it start JACK for you. Let's fire up Ardour without starting JACK first and see what happens:

What the heck do you do with that? Not much, really! First fill in the Name field; this is your project name, something clever and descriptive like "test". The Open Session tab is for opening existing projects. Don't change anything on the Audio Setup tab, with one exception: if you have more than one audio interface, for example an internal sound card and a USB audio interface, then pick the one you want to use from the Interface selector. Go back to the New Session tab, click New, and you should see something like Figure 2.

There you are, the default Ardour screen in a stylin' dark theme. See the Master bus? You will always have a Master bus. What is a bus, you ask? An audio bus, whether hardware or software, is for grouping tracks. You might put all backing vocals on one bus, or all bassoons, or alpenhorns, or what-have-you, and then apply edits to the whole group at once.

A bus is no good without some tracks, so let's add a single mono track. Click Session > Add Track/Bus, and then add one mono track in Normal mode. Now you have a Master bus and an Audio 1 track. I like to give tracks descriptive names, which you can do by clicking on the track name and typing a new one. I'll call mine "vocal". Buses can also have any name you want.

Next, click the red button on your new mono track to start the recording level monitor, and start making noise. If everything is set up correctly you'll see a tiny vertical volume meter on the right edge of the track panel, like in Figure 3.

A better way to monitor recording levels is to expose the Editor Mixer, so if it's not already visible click View > Show Editor Mixer. Now you have a decibel scale and other controls. Click on the track panel to make it the active panel, make noise, and you should see something like Figure 4.

All righty then, let's make a recording! There is a red button up on the Transport Menu, next to a green-lit button, which is the Stop Playback button. Click the red button, and it should start blinking. Now click the Play button to start recording. Click the Stop Playback button to stop recording. Figure 5 shows a recording session in action.

There is too much red in this image. The input level indicator on the Editor Mixer directly underneath the Solo button is red, and there are red marks in the waveform. This is because the recording level was too loud, which causes clipping, which creates distortion. Watch your recording levels because you do not want distortion. If you want to add some on purpose, do this later during editing when you can control it. With digital audio we have a very low noise floor, so it's not necessary to push recording levels right up to the line, and you can give yourself 8-12dB of headroom without worrying about noise.

This is often an adventure in Linux. I prefer to use audio hardware with actual knobs to twist because those always work, and it's faster than fumbling around trying to find the right software control. You can use alsamixer to control recording levels, and if nothing else make quieter or louder sounds. Which is not really the best way, but it's all right while we're testing and getting the hang of Ardour. alsamixer tip: if you have more than one audio interface, press F6 to select the one you want to control.

Naturally we want to hear our recording right away. Click the track panel to make sure it is selected, press the Home key to return the red marker to very beginning, and click the Play button. When you're finished listening click the Stop Playback button. Drag the red marker to start playback at a different location on the track. Create a playback region by clicking the little Select/Move Ranges button on the second toolbar, then select a region of your audio track with the cursor. Then click the Play range/selection button (top toolbar) to play only the selected region.

You can create multiple arbitrary regions on one track by holding down the Shift key when you make your selections. Then you can export just the selected regions into a single audio file, or into multiple separate files.

It's fine to listen to our recordings in Ardour, but usually the goal is to export to a portable audio format for playback on other devices. Click Session > Export, choose what to export (whole session or partial selections), and then choose your file format. If you accept the defaults you'll get a nice WAV file in the export directory of your project directory, which will play in any of your favorite software media players.

At export you'll get a gentle nag screen asking for donations. Nothing shows appreciation like cold hard cash; commercial equivalents to Ardour cost hundreds of dollars.

That concludes our Ardour crash course. This barely scratches the surface of what it can do. For more documentation and forums visit the Support page, and watch this space for more Ardour tutorials.

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Meshcentral.com, our web based management site already supports a lot of different devices. Yesterday we added a new Android/x86 port of the mesh agent to the long list of supported devices. One of my friends at Intel was working on getting Android working on a standard Intel tablet and since that was working pretty well, I figured I would try my hand at downloading the Android kernel and perform a x86 compile of the mesh agent. I had compiled for Android/ARM in the past so the x86 port was very quick and works perfectly.

You can get the new port by going to the "account" tab and clicking the install button.

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Novell announced that it has completed its previously announced merger with Attachmate Corporation and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group.

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SimplyMEPIS 11.0, a new version of the user-friendly, Debian-based distribution featuring the KDE desktop, has been released: "Warren Woodford is pleased to announce the release of SimplyMEPIS 11, the latest version of the renowned SimplyMEPIS Linux operating system that is designed to be easy to install, easy to....

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After a year and a half at Mozilla, John Resig is moving to the Kahn Academy to promote and develop open source and software for learning

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Intel's MeeGo team isn't resting on its netbook-centric laurels. In February, the chipmaker released what it called a "developer preview" of a MeeGo user experience (or "UX") for tablet computers. In April, it officially made the source code available too, making it one of the first publicly-visible glimpses at MeeGo 1.2.

As is frequently the case, the hardware that is officially supported for the Tablet UX preview is highly restrictive — specifically, only ExoPC Tablet products running on Intel's "Pinetrail." Luckily for those of us who don't follow Intel's CPU code-names, that's just an Atom processor, so if you have an Atom tablet from 2010 or newer, the odds are that it will boot. Whether you get usable performance is another matter, but then again this is only a preview.

I had no trouble booting the Tablet UX on a Lenovo Ideapad S-10, which is convertible between netbook and tablet mode. Getting started is straightforward: the April release is provided for download as a disk image (with a .img file extension, which for all practical purposes is the same as a .iso image). Copy it onto a blank USB keychain drive using the tool of your choice; I am fond of Aaron Bockover's image-usb-stick script. Then pop the USB drive into a free port on your tablet, and power up.

The MeeGo splash screen will let you run the Tablet UX from the drive in Live USB mode or start an installer. On my initial run-through, I choose Live USB mode because I wanted to test for basic support of the touch screen, keys, and networking hardware, but the system was fast enough even in Live USB mode that I continued to use it.

The Tablet UX borrows a lot from the Handset UX in terms of layout, starting with the white-icon-on-black taskbar that is now common on every mobile platform and is making its way onto Linux desktop environments as well.

But the primary "home" screen is quite different; it uses a set of independent panels for common tasks, which float side-by-side. You flick-to-scroll horizontally between them; on the Ideapad only three fit on-screen at once. The panels include a "My Tablet" app launcher, a "Friends" newsfeed display, a "Music" panel with recently-played tracks and playlists, "Photos" and "Video" (oddly singular) launcher panels, and a "Web" panel with your recent history exposed as push-buttons. You can switch off all of the panels except for "My Tablet" from the settings app. I didn't catch it initially, but the My Tablet panel provides access to common settings — network, sound, etc — if you flick upwards to scroll it vertically.

This basic "launcher" approach is very similar to the functional breakdown in Intel's Moblin-derived Netbook UX, which uses the "tab" metaphor and drop-down tab selection widget that hides just off the top edge of the screen when not in use. I still don't know if I simply miss the point or am far out of the mainstream among device users, but the multimedia tab and panel concept still feels like a waste of space to me. Honestly, how often do people fire up their tablet or netbook and say to themselves "okay, time to browse screen-by-screen through my own personal photo collection"? Is that really a common activity?

In my experience, when it comes to photos, we either open our device needing to find one particular photo to show someone, or (if it has a camera) to snap a new picture. That means "photo browser" isn't a first-class operation. Neither is "video browser" or "music browser." They make for colorful demo apps, but in day-to-day operation, we either launch the full player app (which you can already do from My Tablet without scrolling horizontally), or we need a search box. On the other hand, the web history integration is nice (it beats having to launch the browser first, then wait for your history to load), as is the recent item feed in Friends, and the Top Applications section of My Tablet does a good job of adjusting its offerings to match your app history.

You can tap on "View all applications" to bring up a screen with your full app library on it, in an interface that mimics the Handset UX almost exactly. It's convenient, though I suspect the ability to choose which six apps are presented in Top Applications is more useful. Also borrowed from the Handset UX is the lock screen, which requires a finger-swipe to open back up.

The Tablet UX is clearly designed for a device with a hardware "home" button that the Ideapad lacks, but I found the keyboard's Windows key does the same thing: hit it once, and you return to the home screen. Hit it again, and a running-application switcher pops up. That appears to be the only way to tell which apps you've left running in the background, and only by tapping-and-holding can you close an application.

Digging in further, although this is a preview release only, you can get a good feel for how UI items like settings, modal dialogs, and other widgets are intended to work. They are very finger-friendly: the buttons are sized for direct touch rather than a stylus, but at the moment this has the unintended side-effect of making all of the other UI widgets (such as title bars) Playskool-sized as well. There is a secondary method for activating the settings app (grab the top status-bar, and swipe down), but for whatever reason it only offers access to two of the settings menus, WiFi and sound.

The on-screen keyboard is roomy and responsive. Keyboards (hard and soft) attract considerable brand-loyalty among some users, but I did not run into any real hardships using it. It uses a three-level layout, with just 31 keys onscreen at once: by default, it displays the alphabet; tapping the "?123" button brings up level two's numeric and punctuation keys, and tapping "1/2" brings up level three's currency and additional characters.

Make no mistake, when Intel describes the Tablet UX as a preview, they mean it in a very serious fashion. The release has some noticeable missing pieces, such as the lack of a file selector (which made getting screenshots off of the Ideapad quite a challenge), uncooperative Bluetooth, and the inability to manually add a WiFi network to the connection manager (which you'll need if you don't broadcast your SSID).

If you plan on running the preview release on an Ideapad like I did, be aware that several of the UI widgets are clearly sized for smaller screens, so (for example) there is dead space to one side of the on-screen keyboard. The Ideapad does have its own hardware buttons for functions like muting sound output, but they are not recognized. I also picked up on some UI weirdness that I'm not sure how to classify: in several situations, after you type the first character on the keyboard, it is automatically selected, which means it is then immediately erased when you type the second.

Perhaps most importantly, the preview runs as-released, and doesn't take alterations. Although you can boot the Tablet UX from a USB key that stores a squashfs filesystem in a "LiveOS" directory, the system does not appear to actually use it to store files, and I was unable to get the system to recognize any other USB attached storage devices, even from the command line. Finally, you cannot add additional applications -- at least not through any method I was able to discover, which is different from the MeeGo IVI UX and other previews I have seen.

On the plus side, the installed apps do include a Terminal, so you can root around. As is the point of MeeGo, under the hood the Tablet UX is a fully operational Linux stack, and you get enough utilities to explore it and compare what it does to the Handset and Netbook UXes.

To me the most interesting part of this release is that Tablet UX's main interface is written in Qt and QML, as opposed to the Clutter-based UI Intel wrote for the Netbook UX. It certainly looks pretty, and the transitions and animations are quick and display without tearing or jitter. I am not going to estimate as to whether the QML home screen or transitions are faster than the Clutter alternative. For one thing, if there is any speed difference, it is virtually undetectable. For another, rendering speed alone is a popular metric, but it is too simplistic to be the only important factor.

If you are an application developer, the Tablet UX preview gives you a nice playground in which to imagine your app. The real mettle will be shown when MeeGo 1.2 is officially released and a tablet SDK comes along. For now, all you need to know is that MeeGo tablets are going to provide as smooth a user experience as Android. Under the hood, you have a different set of questions to consider, but the MeeGo APIs are not substantially different between the various UXes.

This spring, a lot of virtual ink has been exchanged between the online pundits trying to predict what Nokia's strategic smartphone "shift" means for MeeGo and Qt developers. At the very least, the Tablet UX shows that even if Nokia doesn't care about migrating its phones to MeeGo this year (or next), Intel is still pushing forward, including work based on Nokia-originated components like QML.

If you're a tablet buyer, you've got reason to be optimistic. This initial tablet offering is a good starting point. The real underlying advantages of MeeGo over Android, ChromeOS, webOS and other Linux-based platforms is supposed to be how easy it is for app developers from the Linux world to adapt to it. The Tablet UX shows a small, but highly functional suite of apps, and it wraps it up in a slick and user-friendly package. There is no product announced yet, but it looks like when it does arrive, it will deliver a comfortable experience.

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Android users on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile no longer have access to some apps that allow consumers to use their smartphones as broadband modems for free access to the Internet.

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We need you! And, we want you to join us at LinuxCon. That's why today we're announcing that we will give away one free LinuxCon pass per 20th Anniversary of Linux Video Contest entry.

Our annual Video Contest is one of the only ways that individuals can promote Linux as they see fit and enter it to be considered for high-level visibility and promotion as the annual winner. And, with this year's focus on the 20th Anniversary and with Linus judging, that visibility should be bigger than ever.

But, we understand it takes a little bit of work to put a great video together, and we want to thank you for that effort. That's why we're giving away free passes to LinuxCon for each entry. A free pass to this year's event is one to put in the scrapbook: with the 20th Anniversary Gala taking place opening night of the event, the Video Contest winner being revealed onsite, and keynotes from Jim Whitehurst and Clay Shirky, among other speakers, it's going to be one for the history books.

Don't forget that the big winner of this year's Video Contest gets their choice of an expenses-paid trip to one of four events: SXSW, LA Film Festival, LinuxCon North America or LinuxCon Europe.

Get your entry in early and start racking up the community vote. Linus will be considering community favorites when he chooses the ultimate winner.

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