Prakash Advani's Blog

Rockchip’s RK3188 processor is one of the fastest ARM Cortex-A9 chips around. The 28nm quad-core processor outperforms the chips found in the Samsung Galaxy S III and Google Nexus 7, for instance. And it’s a relatively inexpensive chip, which explains why it’s proven popular with Chinese tablet and TV box makers.

Most devices featuring the RK3188 processor ship with Android 4.1 or Android 4.2. But soon you may be able to run Ubuntu, Fedora, or other desktop Linux operating systems on an RK3188 device.

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While it is not certain if Google is going to offer Android or ChromeOS for PCs, but Intel is already working on making the $200 Android PC to boost the sagging PC sales.

So far, the notebook market is dominated by two players, Windows and OS X, but there’s an operating system that could drop into this mix and be highly disruptive — Android.

There’s been a lot of discussion bouncing around the tech blogosphere about Intel’s plans to get all disruptive and start supporting Android on devices that will cost in the region of $200.

While Microsoft might not be happy about being sidelined by a company that was once one of its biggest supporters, this is exactly what the PC industry needs.

Think this is a huge leap? It isn’t. Some of Intel’s Atom processors are already compatible with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

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Ubuntu 13.04.10 is here.  Torrent is the preferred method for me.

Other releases.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/13.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/13.04/release/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/13.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/13.04/release/ (Ubuntu Core)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/13.04/release/ (Edubuntu DVD)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/13.04/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/13.04/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/13.04/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/13.04/release/ (Ubuntu-GNOME)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/13.04/release/ (UbuntuKylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/13.04/release/ (Xubuntu)

As always Have fun 🙂

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From:  http://www.slideshare.net/blackducksoftware/the-2013-future-of-open-source-survey-results

Black Duck and North Bridge announce the results of the seventh annual Future of Open Source Survey. The 2013 survey represents the insights of more than 800 respondents – the largest in the survey’s history – from both non-vendor and vendor communities.

Netflix, the popular video-streaming service that takes up a third of all internet traffic during peak traffic hours isn’t just the single largest internet traffic service. Netflix, without doubt, is also the largest pure cloud service.

At the Linux Foundation’s Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, Adrian Cockcroft, director of architecture for Netflix’s cloud systems team, after first thanking everyone “for building the internet so we can fill it with movies”, said that Netflix’s Linux, FreeBSD, and open-source based services are “cloud native”.

By this, Cockcroft meant that even with more than a billion video instances delivered every month over the internet, “there is no datacenter behind Netflix”. Instead, Netflix, which has been using Amazon Web Services since 2009 for some of its services, moved its entire technology infrastructure to AWS in November 2012.

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With Windows 8 pushing a “touch-first” desktop interface—Microsoft’s words, not ours—and with Valve’s Steam on Linux beginning to bring much-needed games and popular attention to the oft-overlooked operating system, there’s never been a better time to take Linux out for a test drive.

Dipping your toes into the penguin-filled waters of the most popular open-source ecosystem is easy, and you don’t have to commit to switching outright to Linux. You can install it alongside your current Windows system, or even try it without installing anything at all.

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for desktop and laptop Linux users, so we’ll focus on Ubuntu throughout this guide. For the most part, Ubuntu just plain works. It sports a subtle interface that stays out of your way. It enjoys strong support from software developers (including Valve, since Steam on Linux only officially supports Ubuntu). And you can find tons of information online if you run into problems.

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The Lego Mindstorms EV3 is the first major revamp of the Lego Group’s programmable robot kit since 2006, and the first to run embedded Linux.

Unveiled at the CES Show in Las Vegas yesterday, with the first public demos starting today at the Kids Play Summit at the Venetian Hotel, the $350 robot is built around an upgraded “Intelligent Brick” computer. Lego swapped out the previous microcontroller for a 300MHz ARM9 processor capable of running new Linux-based firmware. As a result, the kids-oriented Mindstorms EV3 offers far more programmability than the NXT series, which was last updated in 2009, says Lego.

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The team behind the Samba file, print, and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows clients announced the release of Samba version 4 yesterday. This version includes significant new capabilities that offer an open source replacement for many enterprise infrastructure roles currently delivered exclusively by Microsoft software, including acting as a domain controller, providing SMB2.1 protocol support, delivering clustering, and offering a virtual filesystem (VFS) interface. It comes with Coverity security certification and easy upgrade scripts. The release notes include details of all changes.

Notably, this includes the first open source implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory protocols; Samba previously only offered Windows NT domain controller functions. According to the press release, “Samba 4.0 provides everything needed to serve as an Active Directory Compatible Domain Controller for all versions of Microsoft Windows clients currently supported by Microsoft, including the recently released Windows 8.”

Samba 4 can join existing Active Directory domains and provides all necessary function to host a domain that can be joined by Microsoft Active Directory servers. It provides all the services needed by Microsoft Exchange, as well as opening up the possibility of fully open source alternatives to Exchange such as the OpenChange project.

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While ARM is gaining a lot of momentum, the challenge with ARM until now was that every architecture is very different from different vendors and requires a separate kernel and entire OS stack.

With Linux Kernel 3.7, this has changed for the better.

ARM’s problem was that, unlike the x86 architecture, where one Linux kernel could run on almost any PC or server, almost every ARM system required its own customized Linux kernel. Now with 3.7, ARM architectures can use one single vanilla Linux kernel while keeping their special device sauce in device trees.

The end result is that ARM developers will be able to boot and run Linux on their devices and then worry about getting all the extras to work. This will save them, and the Linux kernel developers, a great deal of time and trouble.

Just as good for those ARM architects and programmers who are working on high-end, 64-bit ARM systems, Linux now supports 64-bit ARM processors. 64-bit ARM CPUs won’t ship until in commercial quantities until 2013. When they do arrive though programmers eager to try 64-bit ARM processors on servers will have Linux ready for them.

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From PC World.

Ubuntu is a widely popular open-source Linux distribution with eight years of maturity under its belt, and more than 20 million users. Of the roughly 5 percent of desktop OSs accounted for by Linux, at least one survey suggests that about half are Ubuntu. (Windows, meanwhile, accounts for about 84 percent.)

The timing of this latest Ubuntu release couldn’t be better for Windows users faced with the paradigm-busting Windows 8 and the big decision of whether to take the plunge.

Initial uptake of Windows 8 has been unenthusiastic, according to reports, and a full 80 percent of businesses will never adopt it, Gartner predicts. As a result, Microsoft’s big gamble may be desktop Linux’s big opportunity.

So, now that Canonical has thrown down the gauntlet, let’s take a closer look at Ubuntu 12.10 to see how it compares with Windows 8 from a business user’s perspective.

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Over €10 million (approximately £8 million or $12.8 million) has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city’s own Linux platform. The calculation of savings follows a question by the city council’s independent Free Voters (Freie Wähler) group,

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Urge your city to save money from taxes, its your hard earned money.

After installing Ubuntu 12.10, the first thing I wanted to do, was to disable reverse scrolling – you scroll down and it scrolls up! This is also called natural scrolling by Apple. Don’t know what is natural about it 🙂 but may be natural for Apple users.

Open the terminal and edit this file using any editor and edit the .Xmodmap in your home directory for example:

 gedit .Xmodmap

Here you would seet his:

pointer = 1 2 3 5 4  6 7 8 9 10 11 12

You would note that in the sequence of numbers 5 and 4 are interchanged. Change it back to the sequence..

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Now you are done, logging out and in should do the job.

If you have Ubuntu Tweak installed. Just go to Tweaks-Miscellaneous and you would see an option to toggle Natural Scrolling on/off.

Ubuntu 12.10 is here. With this release there is no CD image only DVD image which is 800 MB in size. Torrent is preferred method for me.

Have fun 🙂

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From the article:

“You’d be a fool to use anything but Linux.” 🙂

Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

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Apple — one of the most closed companies in the world — is actually using lot of open source and software. Licensing information in the Apple iPhone proves this. Go to the legal section on the iPhone and it cites Linux Kernel developer Ted Ts’o for his code. Linux Suse is there, too.

Zemlin made the point that Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, which is enough to buy HP, Intel and Dell combined. Instead, Apple purchased the copyright to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which now is on every Linux and Apple system.

The list of companies using Linux does not stop at Apple. Microsoft, which once equated open source with communism, is now a top contributor to the Linux Kernel project. And VMware is getting on the bandwagon.

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OpenStack has the potential to become as widely used in cloud computing as Linux in servers, according to Rackspace’s chief executive Lanham Napier.

Napier noted that OpenStack has more code contributors than Linux did when it started: it had 206 code contributors by its 84th week, whereas Linux took 615 weeks to get to that level. Similarly, OpenStack had 166 companies adding to it by its 84th week, whereas Linux reached 180 companies by its 828th week.

OpenStack is already well on the way to building that community, given the broad adoption the technology has seen since its launch two years ago. At the moment, more than 100 companies have put OpenStack into production, including AT&T, Korea Telecom, the San Diego Supercomputer Centre, HP and the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

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The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order.

The order was at least for ten million GPUs, which given the current low-end parts, would value the order at least 250 to 350 million dollars (USD).

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A few days back, Linux founder Linus Torvalds was unhappy with NVidia because of their Linux drivers are binary only. In the talk he called NVIDIA “the single worst company we have ever dealt with” and he said a few other nice words too. 🙂 Hope NVidia open sources it drivers.

After Dell and HP, now MiTAC has announced that they are doing an ARM server.

• 1.6 GHz
• 4 Cores
• Ubuntu 12.04
• 4U Rack server with 64 CPU and 256 Cores
• 32-Bit processor

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In the battle of the desktop operating systems (OS), there are only three dominant players left – Windows, Mac and Linux. At some point, Windows was cast as the platform for the common man, Mac as the one for the artist, and Linux as the geek’s playground.

Linux found favour in powering servers, supercomputers, large businesses and even stock exchanges. And Google even used it as the platform to build its popular Android mobile operating system. But in the desktop and notebook space, it still failed to gain traction.

There’s an image associated with Linux that can be frightening for a normal user, invoking pictures of command lines and terminal windows. But over the past 20 years, some massive steps have been taken to make the OS more accessible.

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The same was also published on Economic Times.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is here. This is the first time Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Desktop) will be supported for 5 years.

Torrent is preferred method for me.

Other Links:

CD images + Alternative CD.

Ubuntu Core – Just 35 MB  of pure Ubuntu.

Have fun 🙂