GNU Open Source Device Porting: 11/21/12

SCALE Call for Papers Opens Today

From the SCALE organizers (you might recognize one of them from our August cover):

The Linux Exposition of Southern California is proud to announce the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo -- SCALE 10x -- will be held January 20-22, 2012 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel.

The SCALE Call For Papers opens August 25, 2011. Submittals for a wide range of topics around Open Source software will be considered.

To submit your proposal, go to http://cfp.socallinuxexpo.org.

The SCALE Team

Go get those proposals in, and I hope to see you there!

______________________

Katherine Druckman is webmistress at LinuxJournal.com. You might find her chatting on the IRC channel or on Twitter.

SCALE 10X to host SCALE Kids Conference

For the first time ever, the Southern California Linux Expo will host the SCALE Kids Conference, a free and open source event where the community leaders of tomorrow will be able to spotlight their talents and ideas.

The goal of the conference is to be as "kid driven" as possible. The event offers a unique opportunity for kids 10 to 16 to see and experience the inner workings of planning, determine the content, and help to steer the direction that the conference will take.

The SCALE Kids Conference will take place on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012 in parallel with the main SCALE 10X conference.

For those parents and kids interested in helping to plan the event, we encourage you to join the scale-kids mailing list at the following URL. https://lists.linuxfests.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scale-kids

SCALE 10X will be held from Jan. 20-22 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel. For more information on SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org

______________________

Katherine Druckman is webmistress at LinuxJournal.com. You might find her chatting on the IRC channel or on Twitter.

Linux Heavyweights Develop Secure Boot Strategy

Canonical and Red Hat have issued a joint statement regarding Microsoft’s plan to make UEFI Secure Boot a requirement of Windows 8. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation has issued a similar statement.

We first covered this issue in September.

The joint Red Hat and Canonical statement opens with an assessment of the situation:

The UEFI specification for secure boot does not define who controls the boot restrictions on UEFI platforms, leaving the platform implementer in control of the exact security model. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s recommended implementation of secure boot removes control of the system from the hardware owner, and may prevent open source operating systems from functioning. The Windows 8 requirement for secure boot will pressure OEMs to implement secure boot in this fashion.

We believe that restrictions that prevent users from exercising full control over their hardware is not in the best interest of those users, and works against the spirit of open source software in general.

It's a fair assessment of the situation. It's worth noting that the language used in both documents is reasonable and doesn't go out of its way to demonize Microsoft. Both documents outline the difficulties that will be caused to Linux adoption in general by the proposed measures. They also highlight some of the benefits of EUFI and secure boot, and I got the impression that all three organizations have accepted that Secure Boot is an inevitable development in some form.

The Canonical/Red Hat document concludes with three proposals:

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Munich Linux Migration Project LiMux Reports Success

LiMux, a project to convert local government institutions to Linux and open source software in Munich, has exceeded initial expectations. The project has done slightly better than projections of 8,500 and now boasts 9,000 Linux migrated workstations. The progress and evolution of this project that began in 2003 is well worth examination.

LiMux is the name of both the migration project and a specialized Linux distribution. The LiMux distro, which is based on Ubuntu, is certified by the German government for use in both government institutions and private businesses. I've long been an advocate of this approach, and I wish that more was being done in the UK and the US to ratify a standard national Linux distro.

It's nice to be able to report on this success story after the disappointing news, earlier in the year, that the German Foreign Office had abandoned its Linux adoption plan in favor of a return to Windows and other proprietary software. One thing that the community has had to learn is that celebration upon hearing the announcement of a plan for Linux adoption is sometimes premature. The news that migration has been successful and is going well is a more reliable indicator that Linux is establishing a foothold on the desktops of government workers.

In a 2010 webpost, Florian Schießl, one of the architects of the project, admitted that they had underestimated the difficulty of the task and labeled their initial approach

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The Future Web at DrupalCon Denver

It's DrupalCon season once again, which means Drupalers from all over the world will converge next week on Denver, Colorado, to educate each other about their favorite CMS and platform, and this eternal debate about CMS vs. platform seems to be at the heart of this year's event.

After a recent conversation with representatives from a couple of very prominent companies in the Drupal space, Mike O'Connor, co-founder of Commerce Guys, and Amy Cham, Director of Marketing at Treehouse Agency, I am even more anxious to hop on my flight to Denver. The theme for DrupalCon Denver is "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device," and I am excited to see which new developments people will be talking about most.

As most regular Linux Journal readers know, I am heavily biased toward the wonders of Drupal. I don't deny it. All bias aside, however, I am quite impressed by the forward thinking of the Drupal community with regard to future releases and not only keeping up with web development trends, but really anticipating and helping to form the future web in a way that can't help but give the platform a leg up in coming years. With several initiatives led by Drupal community members and focusing on mobile friendliness, HTML5, and web services integration, the next version of Drupal, Drupal 8, will be a powerful contender.

The potential for Drupal as a context-aware platform is interesting in particular. The ability to serve data across multiple formats, devices and platforms will likely be absolutely essential to content producers in the very near future. This portability of information is not only valuable in the world of mobile devices, but also in the field of eCommerce, as Mike and the Commerce Guys know very well. And someone's paying attention to this great potential, as Commerce Guys just received $5 million in venture funding.

Starting Monday, there is much to see and do at DrupalCon, and it's not just for core developers. There is content for all types of citizens of the Drupalsphere, and the event has become increasingly useful for those on the business side of things with offerings that should help evaluators learn why so many of us swear by Drupal as a platform.

"It’s been amazing to watch the growth of DrupalCon from something that was almost developer-exclusive to a much more recognized event,

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Blue Drop Awards Celebrate Achievements in Open Source Web Development

The first ever Blue Drop Awards for excellence in Drupal development were announced yesterday. Organized and led by Ben Finklea of Volacci, the awards were both a community effort to celebrate the great work of Drupal Developers, and also a vehicle for Drupal and open source evangelism.

"Blue Drop Awards was a huge success at DrupalCon this year with almost 200 Drupal sites nominated. The positive response from the community has been overwhelming and humbling. Drupal truly is one of the greatest communities - open source or otherwise - in the world today. It was great to see sites nominated from small Drupal-specific sites like The Weekly Drop to mega-corporations like Sony Music and Microsoft," said Ben when we talked about the awards at the recent DrupalCon Denver.

We in the open source community are really great at singing the praises of our favorite projects amongst ourselves, but any opportunity to show off to a broader audience is a necessary and wonderful thing. To that end, the winners of the inaugural Blue Drop Awards are:

The winner of the 2012 Drupal Website of the Year is Eyemaginations.com, developed by Unleashed Technologies, LLC of Columbia, MD.

In the category for Best Enterprise Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Energy.gov, developed by Phase2 Technology, New York, NY
Second Place: Subaru.com.au, developed by Sitback, Sydney, Australia
Third Place: Grandhotel.se, developed by Happiness, Stockholm, Sweden

In the category for Best Business Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Shunra.com, developed by Unleashed Technologies, Columbia, MD
Second Place (TIE): Ferca.pt, developed by Javali, Open Source Systems, Caparica, Portugal
Second Place (TIE): Ternbicycles.com/us/, developed by Zivtech, Philadelphia, PA

In the category for Best Marketplace Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Safaribooksonline.com, developed by Lullabot, Providence, RI
Second Place: Gifts.rescue.org, developed by Jackson River, Washington, DC
Third Place: Themakingspot.com, developed by Deeson Online, Canterbury, U.K.

In the category for Best Social Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Allplayers.com, Irving, TX
Second Place: Refurborrebuild.co.uk, developed by Livelink New Media, Manchester, U.K.
Third Place: 10000solutions.org, developed by KWALL, Scottsdale, AZ

In the category for Best Non-Profit/Education Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Forging.org, developed by Unleashed Technologies, Columbia, MD
Second Place: k12videos.mit.edu, developed by Lullabot, Providence, RI
Third Place: Worldcampus.psu.edu, developed by Phase2 Technology, New York, NY

In the category for Best Media Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Grammy.com, developed by Lullabot, Providence, RI
Second Place: Zagat.com, developed by Phase2 Technology, New York, NY
Third Place: Timeforkids.com/homework-helper, developed by Zivtech, Philadelphia, PA

In the category for Best Personal Website Built with Drupal:
First Place: Thetrek.co.za, developed by Amazee Labs, Zurich, Switzerland
Second Place: AmandaRodriguez.com, Brooklyn, New York
Third Place: Mcuk.si, developed by ETELJE, Ljubljana, Slovenia

In the category for Best Interesting Website Built with Drupal:
First Place (TIE): Responsivedesign.ca, developed by Foster Interactive Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
First Place (TIE): Inhonorofthepeople.com, developed by Gorton Studios, Eagan, MN
Third Place: Fotobout.com, developed by Amazee Labs, Zurich, Switzerland

Congratulations to the winners and to everyone involved in the awards!

If you develop websites, there is some great inspiration on this list, so please visit the winning sites and congratulate the developers and their clients. And while you are at it, dare a proprietary platform to perform better.

______________________

Katherine Druckman is webmistress at LinuxJournal.com. You might find her chatting on the IRC channel or on Twitter.

Software Discrimination Is Never The Answer

Last night, as I was perusing social media, a post from a friend caught my attention. It seems that the web-types at Kogan, an online electronics retailer in Australia and the UK, have tired of the additional work required to support Internet Explorer 7, and to even the score, have imposed a 6.8% tax on shoppers using IE7.

While others were celebrating the move, as a Linux user, I was appalled. "What? Appalled? You should be cheering — it's a master stroke against evil and outdated software!"

No, no it isn't. It's discrimination, and of a type that every Linux user has suffered.

According to the blog post announcing the move, the cost of supporting IE7 (i.e., the additional development time required to accommodate IE7's lack of standards support) has grown too high, not just for Kogan, but for the internet at large. IE7 is an "antique", released in 2006, and those who have failed to update deserve to be punished for their profit-draining ways.

Customers unfortunate enough to use the abhorréd browser will be presented with this image:

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Using A File As A Storage Device

a empty file in Linux, format it and then mount it as if we are mounting a partition. This… Read more… Categories: Linux Share

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How To Extend Size Of The Storage File

Lets say you create a file name /newfile of size 200MB and format it, after a while you want… Read more… Categories: Linux Share

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Search Wikipedia Through CLI (Shell) In Linux

Wikipedia : One of the most important web portal in geek’s life. Whenever I need to search anything I use two things. First open up the Google and then search for the related wikipedia page. Exploring wikipedia page using shell is possible. Interested fact is that we can do it without even opening the cli browser. We can make wikipedia text query over dns for an ip address. I learned this trick from Ajay Sharma (ajayctk

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Links To All My Linux For You Articles

I started writing for Linux For You Magazine in August 2010. Since Then I have written over 10 articles for this International Magazine. Today I am providing the readers with all the links to my articles. All the work done is under Creative Common License as described in the sidebar widget also. So Let's get started Linux Read the original post on LXer…

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How To Unlock More Space In Linux

When you format a partition in Linux , 5% of the total space gets reserved for privileged processes, by default . This is done so that system processes continue to function correctly ,if the filesystem gets full. This is useful for your

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GitHub Repository For Pygame Examples

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Make Your Work Easy Using Terminator

Flossstuff's BlogA Blog dedicated to Gnu/Linux and Open Source Technologies

Hey there! Thanks for dropping by Flossstuff's Blog! Take a look around and grab the RSS feed to stay updated. See you around!

Command LineGnu/LinuxEducationTips and TricksGreat PeopleOpen SourceRecommendationsUncategorizedMake Your Work Easy Using TerminatorFiled under: Command Line, Gnu/Linux, Open Source, Tips and Tricks — 4 CommentsDecember 27, 2011

Command line terminals are an indispensable part of

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Speak Up In Linux Using Espeak

Flossstuff's BlogA Blog dedicated to Gnu/Linux and Open Source Technologies

Hey there! Thanks for dropping by Flossstuff's Blog! Take a look around and grab the RSS feed to stay updated. See you around!

Command LineGnu/LinuxEducationTips and TricksGreat PeopleOpen SourceRecommendationsUncategorizedSpeak Up In Linux Using EspeakFiled under: Command Line, Gnu/Linux, Open Source, Tips and Tricks — 1 CommentJanuary 2, 2012

Sometimes we want out Linux box to speak to/for us.This ability is very useful to make announcements and alerts in case of many critical events in our machines or can be used just for sheer fun. There exists a command line synthesized known as espeak that comes pre installed in Ubuntu. You can also install it on debian systems by typing the command sudo apt-get install espeak in a command console .For all other operating systems you can install it from source available at http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html The usage of espeak is pretty straight forward, just type espeak

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sdcv: Command-Line Based Dictionary For Linux

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Use XMPP to Create Your Own Google Talk Client

Instant communication is the essence of social networking and the Internet. The popular Google Talk, which uses XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), made this Instant Messaging protocol prominent among open standards protocols. Exploring XMPP (formerly known as the Jabber protocol) is fun — it is a transparent and simple architecture. Once you understand it, you can easily write your own XMPP/GTalk clients from the ground up, using the friendly and powerful Python scripting language.

XMPP is an XML-based open standards protocol. It uses XML streams to implement the entire message communication system. XMPP is used in a de-centralised client-server architecture, in which a server acts as an intermediary for the message transfer, and also manages services like the user account registration, authentication, buddy list database, etc. Since our primary focus is on clients, we won’t dig any more into the server part — we will just consider the server to be a “black box” entity available at a specific IP address/hostname and port number, which meaningfully responds to our XMPP requests.

We connect to the server using a TCP socket in our program. An explanation of networking, TCP/IP, IP addresses, ports and sockets is too much information to put into this article, so if these concepts are new to you, you could visit this Wikipedia article for some quick reading.

Since our purpose in this article is to code our own Google Talk client, the hostname of the server we will use is gmail.com, and the port we will use is 5222, the default port for the XMPP service.

The sequence of the initial interaction between client and server is as follows:

The client connects to the server and sends credentials like the username and password.The server validates the received credentials against its user database and sends a response to the client.When authentication is successful, the client receives a response containing presence notification data. This is a collection of presence data from different buddies of the user, which the client authenticated to the server. Presence is explained below.

As already noted, the communication between client and server is in the form of XML streams, over the connection created at the beginning of the interaction.

Before we get down to the code, we need to define some terms and underlying concepts that are involved with the use of the XMPP protocol. To write an XMPP client, we don’t need a thorough understanding of the XML streams that are exchanged between client and server, since we use libraries that abstract away the complexities of the underlying protocol, and provide an API to us. In this article, we’ll be using Python to write our code, and the python-xmpp library provides us a neat API. We need to understand the types of communication and interaction involved, however, so let’s begin.

Note: The XML streams shown below as examples are not as they would actually be in a live XMPP session, since I have omitted attributes of some elements, and omitted portions of the XML stream that are not required to illustrate the concept. Since the python-xmpp library handles the nitty-gritty of building, sending, and receiving the XML streams, you don’t need to memorise the XML samples — just look at them as illustrations, and not as code that you have to write yourself.

Resource

The XMPP client could be running on any of several types of computing devices, ranging from mobile phones and embedded devices to laptops and full-fledged desktops. The type of devices on which the client is running can be exposed in the from attribute in XML streams sent by the client, and this information is termed “resource”. The from attribute is in the format from

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BackWPup: The All-in-one WordPress Files and DB Backup Utility

Your Web server is somehow nuked — could be anything from an attack to a silly mistake from the webmaster. Maybe the only way to get back on track is to restore the last backup? But, wait! When was the last time you took it? S

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Jamendo Android App: A Perfect Companion for Discovering ‘Free’ Music

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What’s Up in Linux Graphicstopia Lately

tools

Tools

Sending Emails From Terminal Using Gmail Account

By Vatsal Mevada on September 9, 2012 in For You & Me, How-Tos, Open Gurus, Sysadmins · 15 Comments

Linux terminal is one of the coolest tools I’ve ever come across. If you are also a fan of the terminal, and are a Gmail user, you should like this article.

Note: I’ve tested these steps on Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 16.

Security certificate

Before proceeding, we need Gmail’s security certificate on our system. Why? Gmail sends encrypted data over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for security; this certificate is necessary for encryption of data.

Ideally, you should have the file Equifax_Secure_CA.crt under /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/. If you do, you’re ready to move on. If you don’t have it, steps 6 & 7 at http://www.chrisstreeter.com/archive/2009/04/305/gmail-imap-backup-with-mbsync-on-ubuntu may help you. Set the tls_trust_file parameter (in msmtp configuration, described below) to the path of the certificate file.

Installation

We need to install two packages–msmtp (a simple and easy-to-use SMTP client), and mailx (a utility program to send and receive emails). In a terminal, run the appropriate command for your distro; for systems supporting deb packages (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, LinuxMint etc.), use sudo apt-get install msmtp heirloom-mailx; for systems supporting RPM packages (e.g. RedHat, Fedora etc.), use sudo yum install msmtp mailx.

Configuring msmtp

We need to create an msmtp configuration file

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‘Linux was chosen for Raspberry Pi with a purpose’

35 Open Source Apps for Mac Users

By Sufyan bin Uzayr on September 28, 2012 in Applications, Features, For You & Me, Overview, Tools / Apps · 1 Comment

Yes, you read that right. No matter what the warlords at Apple may tell you, you can run open source apps even if you are using Mac OS, which itself is closed source.

Wondering why you ought to choose open source? Well, for a start, owning a Mac is an expensive proposition, so opting for open source applications on the Mac is one decision your wallet will appreciate. Second, it is common knowledge that open source applications are updated more frequently, are community-driven, and easily customisable. What more can one ask for?

The Internet
Mozilla Firefox: Seriously, who doesn

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