HP Delivers WebOS Community Edition

If you're old enough to remember the heyday of Palm and how many people swore by their Palm devices, you may wax nostalgic at the news that Hewlett-Packard has released the first part of WebOS Community Edition (WOCE), which is what the Palm operating system has morphed into after all this time. The open source offering is targeted at people who own HP's TouchPad tablet. The first release of WOCE is downloadable now.
While HP has already open source some WebOS components, WOCE is a full Community Edition mobile operating system. There is a support wiki available for community members to ask questions and generate discussions.
There is another release coming from HP called OpenWebOS, slated to arrive in September, which will be an open source platform that is appropriate for many kinds of mobile devices and not just the TouchPad.
You can find HP's blog post about the new WOCE offering here. As the post notes:

"The Community Edition is focused on supporting the TouchPad. By contrast, the Open webOS 1.0 release planned for September includes modernized technologies to better enable the community to port webOS to the hardware of their choice, and to integrate open source technologies in areas such as BlueZ bluetooth and GStreamer. No matter which aspect of the platform you care about, webOS will provide options for you. The source code can be found here."

Announcements Pour In from Red Hat's Conference

This week, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 conference is going on, and Red Hat is making a number of new announcements. In addition, Red Hat's always highly quotable CEO Jim Whitehurst--a veteran of the airline industry--is out with some notable reflections on the state of open source.
Much has written about Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which gives developers tools and frameworks for building cutting-edge cloud applications. At this week's conference, Red Hat has delivered some forward-looking glimpses at OpenShift's business model. In particular, Red Hat will offer enterprise-class service for it. One strain of the platform and surrounding services will be called FreeShift and remain free, while a paid offering called MegaShift will include full support services from Red Hat.
Red Hat has also announced the Red Hat Pathway to Open Source Enablement consulting service aimed at helping customers "formalize enterprise open source adoption, development, and governance strategies." The strategic business consulting service is scheduled to be available in North America beginning in July, and will expand into additional regions. 
Meanwhile, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has delivered some wise words at this week's conference. As ZDNet notes, there are some key decisions coming up regarding open source and its role in IT architecture:

"Open source has gone mainstream … open source is the default choice of the next generation IT architecture...The decisions we make over the next few years [are critical] … if we have a new architecture with an old business model it still does not get us there."

 Only a few days ago, Red Hat's stock slid after the company reported earnings, but it has since picked up momentum again. And, only recently, Red Hat became the very first billion-dollar-a-year company focused on open source.

Download KDE SC 4.9 Release Candidate 1

The KDE Project announced a few minutes ago, June 27th, that the first Release Candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.9 desktop environment is available for download and testing.

KDE SC 4.9 RC1 is here to fix bugs found in previous development versions, as well as to further polish old and new functionality.

KDE Software Compilation 4.9 will be released in August and it will contain features such as Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, improved searching, sorting, display and inline rename on Dolphin, better integration of Activities for files, as well as lots of performance improvements and bugfixes to improve the overall user experience.


Download KDE Software Compilation 4.9 RC1

SolusOS 2 Alpha 5 Has LibreOffice 3.5.4 and VLC 2.0.1

Ikey Doherty has just announced today, June 27th, that the fifth Alpha version of the upcoming SolusOS 2 Linux operating system is now available for download and testing.

SolusOS 2 Alpha 5 comes with updated software, internal improvements to the desktop interface, and lots of small bugfixes. It also includes non-free audio/video codecs for an out-of-the-box multimedia experience, and firmware for common WLAN chipsets.

Highlights of SolusOS 2 Alpha 5:

 




· Linux kernel 3.3.6 (with preempt/BFS);
· LibreOffice 3.5.4-2;
· Mozilla Firefox 13.0.1;
· Mozilla Thunderbird 13.0.1;
· Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.235;
· VLC Media Player 2.0.1;
· GNOME Panel 3.4.2.1;
· Nautilus 3.4.2;
· SolusOS Desktop 3.4.3.2.1.


Download SolusOS 2 Alpha 5

Calise Sets The Screen Backlight Based On Ambient Brightness

Calise (Camera Light Sensor) is an application that uses your computer's camera as a light sensor for obtaining the ambient brightness and then calculates and sets the correct backlight according to an user defined scale.
Calise features:

• command line, GUI (with tray icon) interfaces and daemon mode
• profiles support
• DBus service optimized with automatic dawn/sunset recognition and weather information by using latitude and longitude.

More info on Calise cam be found at its official website.

Install and set up Calise

Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04, 11.10, 11.04 and 10.10 users can install Calise from the main WebUpd8 PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install calise

Note: I've only tested it in Ubuntu 12.04 because it can't be tested in VirtualBox.

After the installation completes, you must start the Calise calibration process (but before you do, read the "Important" note below) using the following command:

calise --calibrate

Important: before proceeding with step 3, you have to give write permissions to the file used for step 2 (the sysfs backlight path) using the following command:

sudo chmod 666 INTERFACE

Where "INTERFACE" is the file you've selected under step 2 (example: /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness).

Then, continue with the remaining calibration steps.

Once you're done, you can run Calise from the menu / Dash. If you prefer to use the command line interface or the daemon mode, use the following commands to see the available options:

calise --help #command line interface
calised --help #daemon mode

Arch Linux users can install Calise via AUR.

Download Calise for other Linux distributions via SourceForge.

Parted Magic 2012.06.26 Has Linux Kernel 3.4.3

Patrick Verner has announced the release of Parted Magic 2012_06_26, an updated version of the project's specialist live CD with utilities for disk management and data rescue tasks: "Parted Magic 2012_06_26. Lots of little changes and some new programs added. The most noticeable additions are Samba and the proprietary binary video driver from NVIDIA. The NVIDIA driver doesn't come pre-installed, but it is available as a ready-to-go module. Make sure you grab the drivers that match the kernel in the version of Parted Magic that you are currently running. You must also disable the nouveau driver from the Fail Safe menu. The panel has been almost completely reworked. Clonezilla and our famous 'Erase Disk' program have been added to the desktop. ARandR replaces LXRandR." See the project's news page to read the release announcement. Download (MD5): pmagic_2012_06_26.iso (234MB), pmagic_2012_06_26_i486.iso (233MB), pmagic_2012_06_26_x86_64.iso (235MB).

Patrick Verner announced last evening, June 26th, that yet another maintenance release of his Parted Magic Linux operating system for partitioning tasks is available for download.

Powered by Linux kernel 3.4.3, Parted Magic 2012_06_26 comes with the following updated packages: Mozilla Firefox 13.0.1, XRandR 1.3.5, BlueZ 4.91, FSArchiver 0.6.15, e2fsprogs 1.42.4, Sed 4.2.1, Nouveau video driver git_20120614_36d3f8c, FreeType 2.4.10, GNU ddrescue 1.16, Pixman 0.26.0, X.Org Server 1.12.2, gzip 1.5, PSmisc 22.18, ClamAV 0.97.5, ethtool 3.4.1, xz 5.0.4, Conky 1.9.0., xdg-user-dirs 0.13, xdg-utils 1.1.0 RC1, Boost 1.49.0, cifs-utils 5.5, and libdrm 2.4.35.

Moreover, the following new programs have been added in Parted Magic 2012_06_26: Arpwatch 2.1 Alpha 15, sallu-xclamscan 1.1.1, ARandR 0.1.6, Samba 3.5.14, pm-utils 1.4.1, libmcs 0.7.2, and libmowgli 0.7.1.

Parted Magic 2012_06_26 also adds the proprietary binary video driver from NVidia, which is available as a ready-to-go module.

Download Parted Magic 2012_06_26