http://www.theinquirer.es
Según se desprende de los datos publicados por la firma W3Techs, Debian ha superado a CentOS para convertirse en la distro de Linux más empleada en el mercado de servidores.

En concreto, Debian está presente en el 29,4% de los servidores de páginas web gobernados por Linux, lo que equivale a un 9,6% del mercado global y lo convierte en el sistema operativo que más crece en internet.
Por su parte, Ubuntu también ofrece datos positivos y logra pasar del 12 al 18 por ciento en el campo de los servidores basados en Linux.
En el lado negativo, el informe de W3Techs sitúa a otras distribuciones como CentOS, SuSE, Fedora o RHEL, ya que pierden todas ellas clientes.
Asimismo, si analizamos la distribución geográfica de Debian apreciamos que su mayor cota de implementación se da en Europa, principalmente en Alemania, Polonia y Rusia, mientras que en Asia es casi inexistente y en América también es menor a la media.
En lo que se refiere a los datos referentes a España, se muestra que Debian está presente en el 14,2% de las webs con dominio .es, una cifra discreta.

Matt Mullenweg, fundador de WordPress, ha reflexionado sobre el presente y futuro de la web, en la que la potenciación del Open Source es parte fundamental.

Al joven estadounidense le preocupa la web independiente y los creadores de contenido; especialmente atendiendo al hecho de que el “100% de la distribución de todo empieza en unas pocas webs”, algo que para él, mata la vitalidad de la red. Las tiendas de aplicaciones se están multiplicando.

Chrome ya tiene su tienda, Firefox también y Microsoft está en camino. Augura mucho poder a estos mecanismos de distribución, pero también más poder a los creadores de software y desarrolladores. Porque en la medida que compiten entre sí, “se verán obligados a abrirse y a ser mejores”.

Pide que internet sea una plataforma sólida e independiente. “El Open Source es una especie de muestra de de nuestra Declaración de Derechos. Es nuestra constitución. Si no somos fieles a esto, poco importa el resto”, dice. Alaba WordPress porque, además de que él mismo lo fundó, considera que es la cuna de un montón de creación de contenido original, en lugar de sólo unas pocas cosas que se reciclan una y otra vez. “Creo que los blogs son como el arte. […] Es una parte de tu identidad”, reflexiona. Mullenweg quiere dejar huella, no le importan los beneficios económicos. Se considera afortunado de participar en ambos lados: en la parte del ánimo de lucro y en la que no existe.

Pero tiene una preferencia que no puede ocultar. “La parte del Open Source es muy gratificante, sabiendo que trabajo en algo que sobrevivirá durante décadas”. Asegura que se ha convertido en una persona mucho más apasionada sobre el funcionamiento de la organización, de la que viven en la actualidad entre 20.000 y 30.000 personas. “Es como la diferencia entre el primer y segundo trimestre de Steve Jobs en Apple. Pasó de ser un visionario para ser un líder”, sentencia.

La figura de Jobs ha impactado especialmente a Mullenweg. Se ha convertido en un referente para “miles y miles de fundadores y desarrolladores” que se preguntan qué hubiera hecho Jobs para enfrentarse a ciertas cuestiones. “Las cosas que esta gente cree serán mayores que las de Apple”, augura.

http://arstechnica.com

In a statement on the open.NASA blog, the space agency announced on Wednesday the launch of a new code.nasa.gov website that will become a portal for NASA’s open source software development activities. In its current form, it hosts a directory of the organization’s open source software projects and provides documentation about NASA’s open source software processes. As the site matures, NASA intends to turn it into a development hub with a forum and hosted collaboration tools that make it easier for NASA software projects to transition to open development.

NASA has a long history of productive collaboration with the open source software community on projects ranging from beautifying bug trackers to building more scalable open source solutions for self-hosted cloud computing. The latter is, of course, a reference to OpenStack, an increasingly significant open source software project that NASA pioneered with Rackspace.

The open source software projects that are listed in the new code.nasa.gov directory at launch include a lunar mapper and an orbit determination toolbox. Some of the projects on the list already have source code published in NASA’s GitHub repository, but others are labeled to indicate that code is coming soon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk

Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

The report by IT group EMC said 74% were “not very confident” they could fully restore their networks.

It also found that 54% admitted they had lost data or suffered systems downtime in the past 12 months.

A total 1,750 IT bosses in countries including the UK were questioned.

The other countries covered in the survey were Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Russia.

Its report found that the most common cause of data loss and downtime was hardware failure, followed by power outage and software malfunction.

http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr

L’Etat vient de publier un appel d’offres d’une valeur estimée de deux millions d’euros couvrant un large périmètre tant applicatif qu’organisationnel.

La Direction des Systèmes d’Information et de Communication du Ministère de l’Intérieur, de l’Outre-Mer, des Collectivités Territoriales et de l’Immigration vient de publier un appel d’offres visant à trouver un prestataire assurant la maintenance des logiciels libres employés par l’Etat. Le marché public sera un accord cadre dont le montant estimé est de deux millions d’euros sur trois ans, ce montant étant sans engagement. Une prolongation d’un an est envisagée.

Les réponses devront parvenir au service acheteur avant le 9 janvier 2012. Il n’y aura qu’un seul allocataire au marché, éventuellement un groupement solidaire ou un groupement conjoint. La notification est prévue pour le 30 mars 2012.

Une dizaine de domaines sont à couvrir :

1 - Systèmes d’Exploitation et logiciels de base associés : Debian et CentOS, outil de virtualisation tel que KVM
2 - Serveurs de présentation et d’application : Apache, Tomcat, JonAS, CMS
3 - Langages et les frameworks de développement : JAVA, PHP, XML, Perl, Eclipse, Struts
4 - SGBD : PostgreSQL, MySQL
5 - Bureautique : OpenOffice
6 - Outils réseaux et supervision et exploitation : Ethereal, Jmeter, Nagios
7 - Outils de sécurité : Tripwire, OpenSSL
8 - Services d’annuaire et de messagerie : OpenLDAP, Sendmail
9 - Portails et gestion documentaire, knowledge management : Nuxeo, Ezpublish, Alfresco
10 - Indexation et recherche : Lucene, Zettair

La quasi-totalité des administrations centrales est concernée :

- les services du Premier Ministre ;
- la Cour des Comptes ;
- le Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes ;
- le Ministère de la Défense et des Anciens Combattants ;
- le Ministère de l’Ecologie, du développement durable, des transports et du logement ;
- le Ministère de la Justice et des Libertés ;
- le Ministère de l’Intérieur, de l’Outre-mer, des Collectivités territoriales et de l’Immigration ;
- le Ministère du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Santé (secteur Santé) ;
- le Ministère du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Santé (secteur Travail) ;
- le Ministère de l’Education nationale, de la Jeunesse et de la Vie Associative (secteur Education Nationale);
- le Ministère de l’Education nationale, de la Jeunesse et de la Vie Associative ( secteur Jeunesse et vie Associative) ;
- le Ministère de l’Agriculture, de l’alimentation, de la pêche, de la ruralité et de l’aménagement du territoire ;
- le Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication ;
- le Ministère des Solidarités et de la Cohésion sociale
- le Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche ;
- le Ministère de la Ville ;
- le Ministère des Sports.

http://www.openideas.info

FOSS icon The French government has published a request for tenders to provide ICT support. The authorities are looking for a three-year support contract, worth two million euros and covering two-thirds of the country’s twenty-two ministries as well as the Court of Audit. According to Le Monde InformatiqueFrench language link this will include departments ranging from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Justice and Freedom to the Ministry of Sports and Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The support tender seeks services to support hundreds of packages, from infrastructure and operating systems such as Debian, CentOS and FreeBSD, KVM and Xen virtualisation, Samba, Bacula, NFS and GFS, to desktop applications such as putty, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightning, LibreOffice, Scribus, VLC, 7zip, VNC and Blender. There are also enterprise applications including Lucene, Alfresco and Nuxeo; databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL; development environments; languages including Java, Python, Ruby and jRuby; tools such as Bugzilla, Hudson, JUnit, Eclipse, Subversion and Git; and libraries including Hibernate, Spring and various Apache projects. The list does appear to cover each department separately and there is some duplication, but it still covers more than five pages.

The tender is organised by the Directorate of Information Systems at the Ministry of the Interior and involves detailed questions about how prospective bidders will address support issues when the community does not support, or ceases support for, particular features. The deadline for responding with an offer is 9 January 2012 and the contract is expected to be awarded by 30 March 2012. The tender documents, in French, are available online.

http://www.theinquirer.es

La distro de Linux openSUSE ha estrenado hoy la versión 12.1, que está basada en el kernel 3.1 y  presenta nuevas funciones para mejorar la experiencia de los usuarios con la plataforma.

En el plano del escritorio las opciones principales son GNOME 3.2 o KDE 4.7, y además, está nueva versión presenta herramientas de gestión del color compatibles con ambas interfaces.

De todas formas, aquellos usuarios que tengan equipos con recursos limitados podrán optar también por las interfaces Xfce o LXDE.

Una de las ventajas que aporta openSUSE 12.1 es una reducción en el tiempo de arranque gracias al empleo de la herramienta systemd.

Además, aunque Ext4 sigue siendo el formato de archivos por defecto, la plataforma también es compatible con Btrfs.

En el apartado de programas integrados, esta versión viene con Firefox 7.01, LibreOffice 3.4.2, la versión 2.4.3 del reproductor de música Amarok, GCC 4.6 y X.org 7.6.

Aquellos que deseen obtener openSUSE 12.1 podrán hacerlo desde software.opensuse.org mediante la descarga de las correspondientes imágenes ISO para sistemas de 32 y 64-bit.

Por último, las fechas previstas para los próximos lanzamientos de la distro de Linux, que ofrecen cambios en el sistema de numeración, quedan como sigue a continuación: 12.2 en julio de 2012, 12.3 en marzo de 2013 y 13.1 en noviembre de 2013.

http://mashable.com

Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his opinions on Microsoft, Apple, open vs. locked down technologies and the future of Linux, at the LinuxCon Brazil conference this week.

“Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds when asked about Microsoft’s secure boot feature, which he likened to Apple’s use of DRM technology. “People want freedom and markets want freedom,” he added.

Secure boot is a feature in Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system designed to protect against low-level hacker attacks, but it could also end up preventing users from installing Linux on a PC shipped with a pre-loaded copy of Windows 8.

“I’m an optimist: openness is successful in the long run, secure boot is another one of these passing fads,” said Torvalds.

His statements carry a special weight in Brazil, where Apple iPhone users cannot buy games for the device, due to specific legal requirements from the Brazilian government. Apple has reacted by simply removing the games category for users in Brazil altogether. Because of its secretive corporate culture, Apple has recently been criticized in Brazil for being the “most closed company in the world.”

http://www.h-online.com

Among the most prominent advancements of Linux 3.1 are the kernel’s 3D support for new NVIDIA graphics chips and virtualisation enhancements for KVM and Xen.

About 3 months after the version jump to 3.0, Linus Torvalds has now released the second kernel in the 3.x series. Without the break-in at kernel.org, the new version would probably have been released three to four weeks earlier, as the temporary unavailability of the central server structure slightly hampered the kernel developers’ work.

However, the scope of modifications compares quite well with that of the new kernel’s direct predecessors, as another round of advancements enhances the range of features and hardware support of Linux. Users are likely to benefit from these advancements in the near future, because distributions such as Fedora 16, which is due to be released in November, are already planning to use kernel version 3.1.
Graphics

In Linux 3.1, the Nouveau-DRM/KMS driver for example will be able to generate a “fuc” firmware for Fermi graphics chips. The firmware allows the kernel to use the 3D functions of various Fermi GPUs on the two latest GeForce graphic chip series, 400 and 500. The Nouveau wiki says that this feature will probably work on the NVC0, NVC4 and NVCE chips that are incorporated in GeForce GTX models with such numbers as 460, 465, 470, 470M, 480, 480M or 560. Several other models with Fermi GPUs have known issues; some are yet untested or are only known to work with the original firmware, which can only be obtained via the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and some rather cumbersome tricks.

The developers of the Intel DRM/KMS driver had intended to enable the “RC6″ feature by default; RC6 is a power saving mechanism that is available with many of the processors and chip-sets Intel has introduced in the past couple of years (such as the Core CPUs with integrated graphics). However, the kernel hackers soon reverted the modification to enable RC6 by default, as the technology caused problems with at least one user’s system. It does work fine with many notebooks though, where it can sometimes reduce an idle system’s power consumption by 6 watts. This can significantly prolong a computer’s battery life; less heat development also means that the fan will run less frequently or noisily. On some notebooks with RC6-compatible graphics hardware, it may therefore be worthwhile to enable and test the feature – for this purpose, add the “i915_enable_rc6=1″ parameter when loading the i915 module, or call the kernel with the “i915.i915_enable_rc6=1″ parameter.

The kernel developers have added the rtl8192de driver (for example 1) that supports Realtek’s RTL8192DE and RTL8188DE PCIe Wi-Fi chips. The iwlagn driver that covers the WiFi chipsets Intel currently included in many Core notebooks will support WoWLAN (Wake on Wireless LAN). The b43 driver for WiFi chips by Broadcom now supports various 802.11n-compliant WiFi cards that use Broadcom’s Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) – such as the BCM43224 (PCI-ID 14e4:4353) and BCM43225 (14e4:4357) chipsets, which until now required Broadcom’s staging driver brcmsmac.

However, the Linux developers usually avoid having several drivers to support one chip or a series of closely related components in the kernel. Background details can be found in a Kernel Log and in the article “Kernel comment: The obstacle course of cooperation” at The H Open. Currently it looks as though the brcm80211 brcmsmac driver will win the race to mainstream, as there are plans to move it from staging to the wireless subsystem in Linux 3.2. It remains to be seen whether the kernel developers disable some functions in the b43 driver to avoid problems and confusion.
Virtualisation

While Linux 3.0 provided the last essential components to enable Dom0 operation for the Xen hypervisor, version 3.1 got the Xen PCI backend, which enables the kernel to pass through PCI/PCIe devices to Xen guests (for example 1, 2). KVM now offers the basic functionality for starting guest systems from within another guest system (nested virtualisation) on Intel processors (for example 1, 2). Classified as experimental and disabled by default, the zero-copy RX support for Macvtap and Vhost-net is designed to improve network performance in virtualised environments, as it reduces the administrative overhead when network data is revived or forwarded by the host.

Dennis Ritchie, best known as the creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the UNIX operating system, has died at the age of 70 after a long, unspecified, illness. News of his death came from past collaborator, Rob Pike, in a message on Google+ which read: “I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.”

Ritchie’s work with Ken Thompson in developing the UNIX operating system, led to them receiving the Turing Award in 1993, the IEEE Hamming medal in 1990, the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and, most recently, the Japan Prize for Information and Communications in 2011.

UNIX came about from attempts by Ritchie and his collaborators to create a simpler, cleaner operating system as a reaction to the “big system syndrome” which they saw in contemporary operating systems. From its early days in the 1970s at Bell Labs, UNIX redefined how people thought about operating systems. UNIX was not just code, but a culture based around ideas such as small programs connected by pipes. It was the Unix culture that inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux, the open source UNIX-like operating system. The C Programming language, which UNIX was written in, became the de facto language for systems, application and embedded programming and is still one of the most popular languages in the world; Ritchie once said of his creation “C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”

As noted by Tim Bray (editor of the XML specification), Ritchie also brought to the world the idea of introducing new languages with a “Hello world” program, null-terminating byte strings, creating processes by duplicating existing ones, and writing operating systems in a compiled machine-independent programming language. “It is impossible – absolutely impossible – to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie” said Bray, “I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years.”