The Perl Foundation has received its seemingly largest donation of $100,000 from the Craigslist Charitable Fund. This donation will be used towards the maintenance of Perl 5. Craigslist is built mostly using Perl, and it uses many other open-source technologies.

Craigslist is so popular in its niche that it was mentioned on this episode of The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon wants to buy Uranium, online.

The President of the Perl Foundation, Karen Pauley, expressed his gratitude to the Craigslist Charitable Fund, saying,

This generous donation will allow us to improve the Perl 5 Core and the work done with the Core Maintenance Fund, as well as sponsor a range of Perl 5 related activities through grants and initiatives already in existence and in the community.

The Perl Foundation has received heft donations earlier. Booking.com donated $50,000 to the Perl Foundation in 2008, and Liquid Web, a web hosting company donated $10,000 to the Perl Foundation in September last year. However, development of Perl has slowed down considerably over the last decade, with new versions primarily resolving bug fixes, and including minor syntax changes. This donation should be a boost for the Perl Foundation, and should help it revamp the development of the “duct tape of the Internet”.

Perl is released under the GNU GPL and the Artistic License. It is an extremely dynamic, flexible and (perhaps the most) powerful programming language. It truly deserves these donations, and much more love.

If you have not heard of Wayland until today, it is because Wayland has not had any public release of their display protocol. Wayland has been available at its Git repository for anyone to try it out, though finally, it will get the public release of its first version 1.0, after four years of development.

Wayland has been of special interest for many Linux enthusiasts, as it is a perfect replacement for the X Window System. The Wikipedia article on Wayland explains it in simpler language.

Wayland provides a method for compositing window managers to communicate directly with applications and to communicate directly with video and input hardware. Applications render graphics to their own buffers, and the window manager becomes the display server, compositing those buffers to form the on-screen display of application windows. This is a simpler and more efficient approach than using a compositing window manager with the X Window System.

Wayland will provide an excellent alternative for those who loath the X Window System. Fedora and Ubuntu are the two major Linux distros, which have always been interested in Wayland, and they will replace X with Wayland at the first chance. The Tizen project is also looking forward to using Wayland.

Kristian Høgsberg is the founder of Wayland, which is released under the MIT license. You can read this interview of Kristian Høgsberg for this coming FOSDEM. Wayland will be announced and released at this FOSDEM 2012, to be held in a few days.

Apple’s iPad has dominated the tablet market for quite a few years now. Nonetheless, many Android tablets have taken a shot at the iPad, and according to recent stats, they are succeeding. The tablet space is finally seeing some fair competition, now that Android tablets have captured 20% of the tablet market. Now, a new player has entered the tablet space. Aaron Seigo has revealed a new tablet called Spark, based on the KDE Plasma Active interface.

The biggest complain that open-source advocates have against Android, is that all the Android development done by handset manufacturers happens behind closed doors. This goes against the true philosophy of Open Source. This Plasma Active based tablet, developed by Aaron Seigo and team, aims to change this scenario. This tablet will be unlocked, and will sport a Linux stack, making it open in every possible form. The hardware specs of Spark are given as

The hardware is modest but compelling: 1 GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7″ capacitive multi-touch screen and wifi connectivity.

Moreover, the price of the tablet is 200 euros or a decent $260, which is acceptable for the features it has to offer. The Spark tablet has big ambitions for the future.

The people who get to use these tablets will have in their hands a device that is more than an application bucket that sees them as a consumer. They will have a device that places value on who they are and what they are doing. This lies at the heart of Activities in Plasma Active and the open software stack will drive that trend further.

Let us see if it is able to capture the interest of the regular tablet consumer and the open source enthusiast.

Linux Mint has been trying to move away from Gnome 3 and did not even consider Unity as an option, when it comes to the desktop environment. About a month ago, we came to know that Clement Lefebvre at Linux Mint is trying to create a custom desktop environment for Linux Mint, called Cinnamon. The latest word is that the first version of Cinnamon has been released officially.

Linux Mint has made earlier attempts at a decent desktop environment by improving on Gnome 3. They created Mint Gnome Shell Extension (MGSE), and it was shipped with Linux Mint 12. However, Clement was not satisfied with MGSE, and wrote on the Linux Mint forum saying:

I am not going to argue whether Gnome Shell is a good or a bad desktop. It’s just not what we’re looking for. The user experience the Gnome team is trying to create isn’t the one we’re interested in providing to our users. There are core features and components we absolutely need, and because they are not there in Gnome Shell, we had to add them using extensions with MGSE.

Thus came Cinnamon version 1.2, the first stable release on Cinnamon. With this release of Cinnamon, the API and the desktop are fully stable. However, it is not the only product that the Mint team has in plan. They want to build a complete desktop-environment ecosystem with themes, applets, extensions, user ratings and comments.

Now that Cinnamon is out, it is definite that this will be the default desktop environment on Linux Mint 13. Linux Mint has overtaken Ubuntu as the most popular Linux distro, and the war is clearly between these two Debian flavors. With further development, we will see a tough competition between the HUD enabled Unity and the feature rich Cinnamon.

Google’s vision of a faster web just got real. SPDY is Google’s internet protocol replacement for HTTP, which has some interesting features to speed up the internet. It was revealed for the first time back in 2009, around the time I joined Techie-buzz as a staff writer. Two years later, now, Mark Nottingham, the chairman of the HTTP working group has invited SPDY to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard.

The Chromium blog defined SPDY as,

SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

The test results were impressive, with up to 55% speed improvement, over traditional HTTP. This was tested by developing top 25 websites using SPDY and HTTP. You can read all about it at this post. SPDY is also Open Source, allowing community-based development. The primary improvements in SPDY are

• A slash of 50% in page load time
• Communication from server end if the client needs resources and server can provide them
• Use of SSL as the underlying protocol, providing a secure web
• Use of header compression
• Allowing concurrent HTTP requests in a single TCP session

HTTP is an old protocol, and the web has improved by leaps and bounds since then. There could not have been a better time for a new application layer protocol.

The next step for Google is travelling further down the protocol stack, and it is already proposing an alternative for TCP. Besides SPDY, Google also proposed increasing the initial congestion window from three to ten, which has already been hacked by them internally as part of the TCP Slow start hack, and incorporated into their Google.com domain. If you have been wondering, this is one of the reasons why the Google.com website loads so fast.

At a time when Europe is facing a hard time in a financial crisis and Apple is worth more than Greece, price cuts of any form are always welcome. Perhaps for this reason, a slew of European countries have moved to FOSS technologies for use in their internal operations. France, Germany and many prominent European economies have started using FOSS technologies, and have benefited hugely in saved IT costs. This time, Spain’s autonomous region Extremadura wants to move to open-source solutions in place of their current proprietary desktop software.

The IT department of the region has estimated that about 40,000 computers will be migrated to open source technologies, as part of this move. If the project proceeds as planned, it will be Europe’s second largest desktop migration project. The largest was of course the one at Gendarmerie, France, for which the French government floated a huge maintenance tender a few months ago. The city of Munich in Germany recorded the third high, with 14,000 computers migrated to open-source technologies.

Extremadura has chosen to use a Debian based system. The region’s CIO, Cayetano López, claims that the Debian system will be ready in three months. The next one year will be spent deploying it across various regional government offices.

That version gives us a good starting point to adapt Debian to the needs of a standard user, offer a light, and secure desktop, compliant with the requirements of ISO and IEC 27001 IT security standards.

This migration will unify all desktops across offices making them free from security problems and viruses. Nevertheless, the best advantage of using FOSS is unanimously decided as immense cost savings.

Over the last few years, Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth have become extremely innovative about User Experience (UX). Ubuntu really has some UX experts in its team, and the kind of things that have been coming out of Canonical for the last few months shout out loud that Canonical is putting them to good use. The recent UX change for Ubuntu is “Heads Up Display” or HUD, and it surely looks like a good feature.

Heads Up Display, or HUD is a new way of interacting with applications, where you do not go through multiple menu hierarchies to reach a menu item. Instead, you simply type it and HUD will search it for you, in live. Moreover, HUD remembers what you typed last and prioritizes those commands in search results, so is also very fast for common tasks. It bridges the gap between the command line interface and application menus, and does it wonderfully.

As mentioned by Olli Ries in a blog post, who was once the Principal Director of engineering at Novell, and is one of the Product Strategy Engineering Managers at Canonical presently, plans for HUD were underway even before the last Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Back in 2009, when Android phones were not that powerful in hardware, there were very few apps as interesting as Google Sky Maps. Google Sky Maps was one of the best 20% projects at Google. However, the app always stayed a part of the 20% projects, and failed to gain popularity. It was launched in May 2009 for Android phones, and has been an astronomy-enthusiast’s favorite app. Our in-house science-geek Debjyoti speaks of Google Sky Maps as

The ancients have got to be jealous; you can now see the map of the entire Universe on your android phone, thanks to Google Sky Map.

Seeing stagnant growth for years, Google has decided to stop working on Google Sky Maps, and donate the app to the Carnegie Mellon University for further development. This is a welcome move in that they did not decide to kill it instead.

At Carnegie Mellon University, Google Sky Maps will be developed as a series of student projects. This will give students something to boast of, as well as ensure development of this stagnant product. Google Research blog announced this news, saying,

Today, we are delighted to announce that we are going to share Sky Map in a different way: we are donating Sky Map to the community. We are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in an exciting partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects.

This has sparked an intriguing discussion on Slashdot, on whether we can rely on 3rd-party cloud services for creating our applications. With Google withdrawing many of its services like Picnik and Needlebase, there is no guarantee that other providers will find it necessary to make their services available continuously. Only if you are lucky enough, like in case of Google Sky Maps or App Inventor, Google makes them open source and available for further development. However, if the services fails to gain popularity, Google decides to kill it with a few months’ notice, and those few months is all you have to shift base, in case you have based your business around that service.

Linux has tried gaining a respectable position (by market-share) in the desktop world, and has failed for years. Apparently, not many people want to use Linux until they have something specific to do with Linux. Linux is not the first choice for many and this second-class status is going to stay as long as OEMs keep choosing Windows to be shipped with their laptops and desktops.

However, nothing beats Linux when it comes to the enterprise sector. The enterprise sector is the playground of Linux, and its adoption has been on a constant rise in this sector. Recently, the Linux Foundation revealed some trends, gathered from a survey conducted among enterprise users. There has been a rapid growth for data handled by the enterprise sector, and Linux is their first choice for handling big data requirements.

In the survey, over 80% of the enterprise users have expected an increase in the number of Linux-based over the next five years. However, a welcome change is the survey on perceived technical-barriers in these deployments, which has dropped to 12.2% from 20.3% last year. As always, more than 2/3rd of the participants considered Linux safer than other operating systems. The top three reasons for adopting Linux were:

• Lower cost
• More features
• Security
• In-house talent pool
• No vendor lock-in
• Openness

The 428 participants in the survey were employees of companies with $500 million in sales, or an employee-strength of over 500. It would be wonderful if this survey result translates into market-penetration.

You can get a copy of the survey result, at Linux Foundation.

An enterprising user has reported to seclists.org mailing list a very easy way to bypass a screen locked by a user – by merely hitting few keystrokes.

The user, going by pseudonym Gu1, has reported that by pressing Control + Alt + * (the asterisk key on the numpad) instantly kills most lock screen programs including gnome-screensaver, kscreenlocker, slock and slimlock, amongst others. Further discussion on the mailing list confirms the vulnerability and has been given a CVE id of CVE-2012-0064 by the Red Hat security team.

Further digging from the git sources indicates that all X.org server versions upwards of 1.10.99.902 seem to be affected. To test whether or not you’re affected, just lock your screen and press Ctrl + Alt + * (note: you’ll have to hit the * key on the Numeric keypad, not on numbers on top of the QWERTY row.)

If you’re on Ubuntu Oneric Ocelot, i.e, Ubuntu 11.10, then this won’t affect you since Ubuntu 11.10 runs on X.org version 1.10.4.

As a temporary workaround, commenting

interpret XF86_Ungrab {
action = Private(type=0×86, data=”Ungrab”);
};
interpret XF86_ClearGrab {
action = Private(type=0×86, data=”ClsGrb”);
};

lines from your xfree86 file ( typically found in /usr/share/X11/xkb/compat/ directory) and then running

setxkbmap $(setxkbmap -query | grep layout | awk '{print$2}')

should fix this for now.