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Canonical have released Ubuntu 10.04’s final planned maintenance update, 10.04.4, paving the way for the start of Ubuntu 12.04’s Long Term Service. For fans of KDE, Kubuntu 10.04.4 has also been made available as part of this update.

“For the first time, this point release includes backported updated hardware support,†explained Kate Stewart in the announcement blog post, “in addition, numerous post-release updates have been integrated, and a number of bugs in the installation system have been corrected. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.â€

Security updates and bug fixes will be available for another year on desktop versions of Ubuntu 10.04, and a further 3 years for the server edition as part of the Long Term Service plan. However, images and installable media will only include updates made to the operating system to date.

Canonical recommends installing 12.04 LTS on new systems once it’s released.

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The BBC has confirmed that long running rumours of a new BBC Micro are in fact true. The project, tentatively named BBC Micro 2, is not a new hardware platform like the original. Instead, it’s a cross-platform IDE based on Eclipse, the popular open source software development environment.

The BBC plans to release the software on Linux, OS X, and Windows, as well having support for the upcoming Raspberry Pi. The point of the original Micro was to bring computing into schools, teaching a new generation of kids how to code. This new project is designed to do the same, but clearly as part of the user interfaces people associate with and use in their day-to-day lives.

An early build was formally shown running on Raspberry Pi at the Hack to the Future event over the weekend, hosted by Our Lady’s Catholic High School in Preston, Lancashire.

Raspberry Pi initially dismissed these claims on Twitter as a hoax, apparently caused by confusion over existing projects with the BBC. Since then, event organizer Alan O’Donahoe and Rasperry Pi have managed to straighten out the facts.

There is no release date currently attached to BBC Micro 2, however there is a website for the project that will be updated in the near future.

Source: Bit-tech.net

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Open Source your business
How much of the $4bn spent of software last year could you recoup?

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Achieve the perfect working environment with Xmonad

The WebKit masterclass
Create amazing mobile web apps

CD-Ripping super test
The ultimate open source CD ripper revealed

Mint – the taste of success
We speak to Mint creator, Clement Lefebvre

Also inside
- BSD UNIX revisited
- Beginners guide to Arduino
- ColdFusion in easy steps

…and much more!

Linux User & Developer is the magazine for the GNU Generation
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Webconverger is an interesting project, but one that is clearly targeting a small niche of the overall Linux market. Founded in 2007 as a business entity, the project aims to create a fast and efficient locked-down distribution aimed at public-facing computers that only need access to web apps.

Based on Debian and compiled for i686, the latest Webconverger 11.0 release carries on the company’s tradition: there’s no ‘desktop’ to speak of, with the underlying Debian OS instead loading directly into IceWeasel 9.0.1, an off-shoot of Mozilla’s popular Firefox web browser.

The Webconverger live CD boot menu is sparse, to say the least

The idea behind Webconverger is that by removing all the extraneous functionality of a general-purpose distribution and locking the system down to a single web-browsing app, those who need to create ‘kiosk’ systems for public use will find a handy, robust and above all secure environment tailored to their needs.

It’s a neat idea, and one at which at first glance the distribution excels: while free software enthusiasts will be disappointed at the inclusion of ‘binary blob’ software like Adobe’s Flash Player, the Webconverger team has worked hard to ensure that the browser includes as much functionality and compatibility as possible.

It’s only once you start to delve a little deeper that some of Webconverger’s shortcomings become apparent. Configuration, as an example, isn’t as straightforward as it could be: because there’s no access to any of the desktop’s usual settings, all configuration must be done on the kernel options line of the bootloader.

If that wasn’t awkward enough, the default background – the Webconverger logo – clashes with the default text colour – white – to make editing the kernel mode line an exercise in squinting on smaller screens.

In ‘digital signage’ mode, the browser’s chrome is completely hidden from view for a seamless full-screen appearance

If you’re willing to read the documentation and spend the time figuring out Webconverger’s particular configuration language, however, there’s plenty of flexibility to be found: the default home page can be customised to a local or remote page of your choice, while the browser’s chrome – the title bar, icons and address bar – can be minimised or removed entirely to put the distribution in what Webconverger describes as ‘digital signage mode.’

More difficulties are to be had when it comes to configuring the network settings. If you’re planning to use Webconverger on a network with DHCP, then everything will likely work out of the box with the exception of joining a secure wireless network, which requires a single ‘wlan=essid,key’ entry on the kernel mode line; for those who configure network settings manually, things get a bit more difficult with the requirement to edit a file in a chrooted jail by manually deconstructing and reconstructing the ISO image.

Recent changes may also surprise older users: gone is the browser customisation that prevented access to about:config or the file:/// menu, meaning that it’s possible for public kiosk users to start fiddling with settings that they likely have no right to access.

There’s no real ‘desktop’ to be found in Webconverger 11, just a browser window

The security issue this could cause is lessened by the way Webconverger works: browser history and the like gets reset each time a tab is closed, while chroot jails prevent access to the most sensitive system files; if a user does manage to corrupt the system, of course, a quick reboot resets everything to defaults once more.

For those looking to use Webconverger professionally, there’s a final option to consider: for the princely sum of £100, the company will provide a pre-configured ISO with the settings tailored to your needs. It’s not the cheapest option around, but if you need a kiosk system right now and don’t have time to experiment it’s certainly worth considering.

Verdict: 3/5
Webconverger is a distribution aimed at a small but important niche, and it does its job well. An up-to-date browser and Adobe Flash Player are let down only by an unnecessarily complicated configuration system that can leave newcomers – or, at least, those unwilling to pay £100 for the commercial version – scratching their heads.

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The Document Foundation proudly announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.5 yesterday, the third major release of the open source office suite. Over it’s 16-month development, 30,000 code changes were made and many new features were added to the final product.

As well as the featured additions, including the debut of the online update manager, a long list has been released discussing in detail all the new features and bug fixes.

In Writer for example, the new grammar improvements are made from bundling LightProof, previously an OpenOffice.org extension. A lightweight program built in Python, it provides links to explain any corrections it suggests, and tries to adapt its checks based on the rest of the document.

Other little changes to Writer include displaying the PPI of images, support for comments in docx, and fixing the positions for label printing. As well as the individual packages, there’s also information on changes made to the overall GUI (like an updated colour picker), and how performance has been increased.

While the entire list has over 100 changes, it also mentions some of the high priority bugs that weren’t fixed but that are being worked on. The list of these bugs is not very long – but there are numerous other small bugs that are still looking to be squashed. You can find out how to contribute in our three part LibreOffice bug hunt feature from Linux User & Developer issues 108 and 109, with part three in issue 110 on sale tomorrow.

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News that nearly passed under the radar during January was the revelation through a leak to Computer Weekly that the British government has withdrawn its already weak commitment to open standards after lobbying from Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance.

In January 2011 The Cabinet Office issued a policy that stated “When purchasing software, ICT infrastructure, ICT security and other ICT goods and services, Cabinet Office recommends that Government departments should wherever possible deploy open standards in their procurement specifications.”

The Cabinet Office defined open standards, accurately, as standards which “result from and are maintained through an open, independent process”, “are thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost;” “have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis; and “as a whole can be implemented and shared under different development approaches and on a number of platforms.”

The basic requirement for a standard is that it preserves the integrity and neutrality of the data. Governments and other organisations have a vested interest in the implementation of open standards because they want to ensure that the documents of today will be readable tomorrow, and that any vendor’s software can talk to any other vendor’s software. Independent vendors and developers want open standards because they allow the opportunity to develop alternative ways to edit, interpret and transmit the data.

Microsoft, and other corporate entities have lobbied the Cabinet Office to rescind their policy and replace the definition of an open standard with a definition that is termed Reasonable and Non-discriminatory (RAND). RAND allows “patent holders to claim royalties from anyone trying to implement the standard,” which would work against the participation of free and open source software, and inhibit interoperability.

Governments should be in the business of promoting a homegrown software industry, and levelling the playing field to encourage participation. Open standards allow a user to be platform, vendor and software independent. The absence of truly open standards for any segment of computing is bad for users, choice is removed, and prices escalate, and the market works in favour of the encumbent monopoly.

In some cases, the encumbent monopoly has subverted the standard to further its own interests. After all, the solution to competition from Linux and free software was stated clearly by a Microsoft engineer, Vinod Valloppillil, in a leaked Microsoft internal report as far back as 1998: “OSS [open source software] projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditised, simple protocols,” he wrote. “By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we [Microsoft] can deny OSS projects entry into the market.”

Valloppillil went on to describe areas in which Microsoft has “de-commoditised” protocols, and can do so in the future, with the objective of sabotaging interoperability, namely: “DNS integration with Directory. Leveraging the directory service to add value (sic) to DNS via dynamic updates, security, authentication,” which translates as using market dominance in one area as a means of stretching and proprietising standards in another, suffocating innovation in the process.

The promise of an open standard is that it opens the market to competition. It is future proof and offers accessability. No longer will it be necessary to have the latest version of the latest software from the biggest vendor on the latest upgraded computer to read the latest document in the latest twist to a proprietary format. The purpose of open standards is to promote interoperability between different applications on different operating systems. The effect of proprietary data formats is to encourage reliance on single vendor applications and to discourage the implementation of competitive products.

Fawning to encumbent monopolies has been the state of play with governments of all colours for the last 30 years. Procurement policy is beset by a ‘safety first’ policy of reliance on ‘trusted’ suppliers and risk aversion, even where this has resulted in massive failure. British governments have a talent for being impressed by the talk of billionaires, and a knack of stabbing themselves in the back.

Every other year there is a fresh committment that open source solutions will be preferred for government funded projects, and that open standards will be adopted ‘wherever possible’. The logic for these decisions is well understood, but is soon forgotten when the monopoly comes calling.

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The Linux Foundation today posted on their blog the results of the first ever Linux Jobs Report. Conducted by Tech Job site Dice in association with the Linux Foundation, the report looks very positive for Linux professionals.

As well as revealing that 81% of recruiters are making the hiring of Linux talent a priority, it also goes on to say how 63% believe there will be an increase in hiring people with Linux-related skills. In a blog post, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation expanded on some of the points in the report:

“Google, Facebook, Amazon, Qualcomm, IBM, Intel and hundreds of other companies who rely on Linux to support their businesses, especially their highly-valued data centers and embedded systems, are paying big bucks to find and retain Linux talent. The Linux Jobs Report shows that nearly 1/3 of the companies surveyed are giving pay increases to these professionals that are above the industry norm.”

The full report goes into detail on these figures and more, such as the difficulty employers are having finding qualified Linux people, and the variety of benefits offered to those who get a job.

Now more than ever is a great time to be looking for Linux work.

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Samsung has just announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0), the start of a new generation of one of the most popular Android tablet brands. Boasting improved technical specs and a trimmer design, the new 7-inch tablet will also be the first Ice Cream Sandwich powered Samsung tablet.

The specs provided by Samsung have their ups and downs – while it’s very reasonably powered by a 1 GHz Dual-Core Processor using 1 GB of RAM, it’s 7-inch screen only handles a resolution of 1024×600. To put that into perspective, the recently released Galaxy Nexus was 1280×720 on a 4.65 inch screen.

The screen will also use the new PLS technology, developed to be an IPS competitor, a departure from the usual OLED displays deployed by Samsung. It’s also remarkably light, weighing in at 344g, well into the sub-1 lb sweet spot many Kindle users swear by.

The original Galaxy Tab shipped with Android 2.2 FroYo to mixed reception – although generally the 7-inch form factor was positively received. With a version of Android more suited to tablet use, the new Tab 2 could well be a decent device when it launches in March. As long as it’s priced accordingly.

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Canonical announced today that their latest “Remix†has been released, Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. Its main focus is to offer more business orientated software out of the box, while also removing unnecessary games, media players, and sysadmin tools.

“This remix takes the most common changes we’ve observed among institutional users and bundles them into one CD which can be installed directly or used as a basis for further customization.†wrote Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, on his blog.

Mark was also keen to address any fears over exclusivity, “Everything in the remix is available from the standard Software Centre. Packages out, packages in. No secret sauce for customers only; we’re not creating a RHEL, we already have an enterprise-quality release cadence called LTS and we like it just the way it is.â€

The release is currently based on 11.10, and you will need to register if you plan to use it. This remix comes just in time to be tested before it’s implemented into 12.04, which as an LTS release is expected to be adopted by businesses over other releases.

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If you’d like to use FreeBSD as a desktop system, you’ll have to invest a lot of time in setting up the operating system and installing all the right packages. Obviously, this is a serious barrier for a lot of Linux users who are interested in trying out FreeBSD. PC-BSD fills in this gap by offering a completely usable and user-friendly FreeBSD desktop install with all kinds of stuff pre-configured. In a way, PC-BSD is to FreeBSD what Ubuntu is to Debian.

PC-BSD 9 is based on FreeBSD 9.0 and hence inherits its new features, such as ZFS version 28, which has a lot of new functionality compared to ZFS version 13 from FreeBSD 8, including triple-parity RAIDZ, improved snapshot creation and deletion performance and deduplication. But PC-BSD has a lot of its own improvements too. For instance, it now supports installation to BootCamp partitions on a Mac.

You can install PC-BSD on a UFS or ZFS filesystem

In previous editions, PC-BSD was KDE-only. Beginning from the new PC-BSD 9 release, the Ubuntu of the BSDs doesn’t lock you into KDE anymore but allows you to choose your desktop environment among KDE 4.7, GNOME 2 (GNOME 3 hasn’t been ported yet), Xfce 4 and LXDE. The DVD version comes with all these desktop environments, but we downloaded the CD version which installs a minimal LXDE environment. In the installer, you can choose the default UFS filesystem or the ZFS filesystem. The latter is  more advanced, with features like snapshots, transparent compression and deduplication, but it’s only recommended if you have a 64-bit system with at least 4GB of RAM.

When you log into your installed PC-BSD system, three icons appear on your desktop: the AppCafe, the Control Panel and the Handbook. You are also greeted by a welcome window that gives you a crash course about some PC-BSD tools, such as the wireless tray icon, the AppCafe and the Control Panel. As its name says, the AppCafe is the program where you search for and install applications. It’s rather basic (it doesn’t even show how many applications are available for installation, nor how big an application download will be), but it gets the job done.

PC-BSD 9 is not KDE-only anymore, but also offers the lightweight LXDE desktop environment

The Control Panel is the one-stop shop for managing your system. For instance, this is where you configure your firewall (which has a default configuration that allows SMB and NFS) or your network connection and where you enable and disable system services, add a printer or a new user etc..

An interesting application installed by default is Life-Preserver, which makes it easy to automate backups of your home directory and synchronize your data to a remote FreeNAS system or another backup server. Life-Preserver uses rsync and SSH for this, and PC-BSD installs a tray icon to configure your backup schedule, such as daily or weekly. It’s a quite basic tool, but it ‘just works’ and even restoring a backup is very easy to do.

Life-Preserver is one of the easiest backup tools we have ever seen

Working with PC-BSD feels a lot like working with a Linux distribution. Of course that’s because almost all the software you can install from AppCafe is the same you’ll find in Linux. There is, though, one big issue: even more than in the Linux world, graphics hardware support can be a challenge. If you want 3D support, having an Nvidia card is the best option, as there’s a proprietary driver for FreeBSD/PC-BSD. But if you’re having an ATI or Intel chip, you’re out of luck for now.

One of the strong points of PC-BSD is its documentation: the PC-BSD Handbook on your desktop has 247 pages explaining all major tasks, including pre-installation, installation, the various desktop environments, installing applications, using the control panel, some common tasks and finding help. For more low-level help, the FreeBSD Handbook is also an excellent resource.

Verdict: 4/5
If you love 3D games and don’t have an Nvidia graphics card, PC-BSD obviously isn’t the choice for you, but if you want to try out a BSD system instead of a Linux distribution, PC-BSD is definitely the way to go. It offers a nice graphical installer and a fully functional desktop environment, with powerful FreeBSD technology under the hood, not to mention the the ZFS filesystem.

You can find out more about PC-BSD 9 on the project homepage

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In a recent interview with Linux User & Developer, Raspberry Pi developer Eben Upton got a chance to talk about the performance of the upcoming SoC that is due out later this month.

“Raspberry Pi, in terms of multimedia, outperforms any other dev board in existence – which is nice,†explained Eben, “In terms of general purpose computing, it’s got this 700MHz ARM11, and our benchmark shows it’s about 20 per cent slower than a Beagleboard for general purpose computing. But, you know, it’s a quarter of the price.â€

The incredibly low price of the board is in no small part thanks to the deal with Broadcom, and there has been some speculation that this kind of pricing won’t last. Eben, an employee of Broadcom himself, puts the record straight:

“I can say – putting my Broadcom employee hat on briefly – if we sold all our chips to Raspberry Pi, that’d be just great. We haven’t given a price that means that Broadcom is losing money on this activity. It’s not losing money. The understanding that I have with Broadcom is that they are happy to continue providing chips for this project forever.â€

You can read more from this interview, including reasons for delays, the benefits for them to be a charity, and gripes with Canonical, in the upcoming Linux User & Developer 111 on sale 15/03/2011.

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Successful code isn’t just about stringing bits and bytes together. Code has to be accessible to users and users have to know what the code is doing, and coders are not always the best people to document a project. Documentation isn’t necessarily that interesting to the programmer who has solved the problems he or she set out to solve, and many will tend to bypass the simple instructions that are the starting point for less informed users. Good code may be self-documenting, but, however good a programmer is, code that doesn’t contain some level of internal documentation is hard to follow and maintain, and code that isn’t documented at the user level isn’t always easy to use.

Documentation and the usability of the software can be seen as interchangeable notions and free software projects have always been in need of volunteers to do the less exciting jobs, such as documenting the software or maintaining the websites. The willingness of volunteers to do the apparently less interesting jobs – to document and translate the software, to maintain the development trees and mailing lists, to do the things the coders don’t necessarily want to do – is a vital element in the success of a free software project, and is just as important as the code itself.

The earliest attempt to co-ordinate knowledge of Linux programming efforts was the Linux Documentation Project (LDP), which began life as the Linux FAQ in 1992, and claimed to be the home of one of the first Linux websites on the web (at tdlp.org). The result was a mass of formatted documents that first appeared in hard copy format as The Linux Bible: The GNU Testament, published by Yggdrasil Computing.

Yggdrasil also produced the first plug-and-play Linux, and the first Linux distribution to come on a CD-ROM, but disappeared without trace sometime during the mid-Nineties. Coincidentally, when Yggdrasil filed for a trademark on the title of the book of the project, ‘The Linux Bible’, in May 1996, the claim was rejected on the grounds that the Linux trademark was the sole property of a William R Della Croce Jr of Boston, Massachusetts, who had taken advantage of the rising popularity of Linux to register the trademark. Nobody involved with the Linux kernel project had ever heard his name before. His claims were eventually dismissed, but he was the first of a few to have claimed ownership of Linux, of which the most memorable is The SCO Group.

The LDP meanwhile continues to tick over, and work produced by The Linux Documentation Project still forms the basis of most GNU/Linux system-level documentation and of several books, the best known of which has probably been the Linux Network Administrators’ Guide. Linux and other free software has been fortunate in the extent and quality of online documentation and publications devoted to the software.

The growth of Linux coincided with, and reflected, the development of the world wide web. It also coincided with the rise of US book publisher O’Reilly, which devoted itself in the early days to documenting open source languages and tools, from Perl to Linux device drivers. These days, there are few technical publishers who don’t have at least one or two free and open source texts at the heart of their catalogue – and for the impatient user with an immediate problem or question, the answer is more often than not, a click and a search away. If the internet, properly used, is the most diverse information resource that has ever existed, free and open source software is probably the most heavily documented topic on the net, but close and accurate documentation of what a project intends remains a vital resource for every user.

One of the many advantages of free software is that the source is available to your peers, who will tend to tolerate the good and ditch the bad. Even so, reading the source is not always the best way to discover what the coder intended – which is not always the same as what the code actually does. Good documentation is vital for users, initiates, wannabe real programmers, contributors, and those who just want to get involved, not to mention those who have (or think they have) forgotten more than the rest of us will ever know… and contributing to the documentation (or translation to a minority language) of a free software project is a good way to get involved for those who simply don’t know where to start.

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