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Remember Google Wave – the innovative way of communication which Google unveiled amidst much fanfare a year back ? When it was released, Google Wave was considered to be a potential replacement for the ubiquitous Email. However, things did not work o…

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As a GNOME user, have you ever wondered – How big is the GNOME project ? What is its make up ? How are decisions taken ? And how many GNOME developers are there ? If yes, then you need look no further. Because Neary Consulting – A Free software consultancy, has released the GNOME Census giving an overview of the GNOME project and its functions. The census report analyzes how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.
A glance through the GNOME census report brings out the following details -

• The GNOME 2.30 release and external dependencies consists of 189 modules. This represents 13 years of coding, and over 468000 individual changesets. 
• Since the project’s inception, over 3000 individuals have committed changes.
• The most prolific 5% of the developers (top 165) have together made 65% of all the changes in the 13 year history of GNOME.
• Red Hat is said to be the biggest contributor to the project and its core dependencies, with its employees being responsible for nearly 17% of all commits. Canonical, Collabora, Fluendo, Intel, Novell, and Sun Microsystems have also contributed substantially to the GNOME project.
• 70% of the GNOME developers are volunteers. A further 20% say they have contributed to GNOME project both as a volunteer and a paid developer.

The full report titled “The GNOME Census : Who writes GNOME ?” is available as a free download from Neary Consulting.

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openSUSE 11.3 – the latest version of Linux distribution from Novell has been released. One of the highlights of openSUSE 11.3 is its enhanced support for netbooks. openSUSE 11.3 provides improved hardware support for netbook users. It also bundles with it two netbook desktop environments namely – KDE’s “Plasma netbook workspace“, and MeeGO – A visually rich netbook user interface developed by Intel and Nokia.
MeeGo on openSUSE 11.3 is code named Smeegol, and it brings many additional features like support for popular social networking sites Facebook, Digg, MySpace, and Flickr.

Improved smartphone support is another unique feature of openSUSE 11.3 release. If you own a Blackberry, iPhone or any cell phone running Android or Symbian OS, then you are in good hands as openSUSE will let you interact with all these devices. Under the hood, openSUSE 11.3 runs Linux 2.6.34 kernel. Upstart and Grub 2 are also included but are optional. Support for the experimental btrfs file system is another feature of this release. On the desktop front again, openSUSE doesn’t disappoint its users. It bundles all the latest and greatest desktops namely – GNOME 2.30.1, KDE SRC 4.4.4, LXDE 0.5.5 (A light weight desktop environment ideal for old computers), and XFCE 4.6.1. openSUSE team has opted for an 8 month release cycle instead of the more common 6 month release cycle. The belief is that the extra 2 months they save will help them to close many more bugs and fine tune the system prior to each release.

Different flavors of openSUSE

openSUSE 11.3 is available as an all inclusive 4.7GB DVD image which contains a large collection of software for use on desktops and servers. Apart from that, you can also download desktop centric LiveCD images of GNOME and KDE respectively. Visit the openSUSE 11.3 download page to choose your download. Novell also provides a service called SUSE Studio which allows you to build and download a customized version of Linux. Here you can mix and match all the packages you require and then download an image suitable for a USB stick, Live CD/DVD, Hard disk, Vmware, VirtualBox, or Xen. In other words, a custom distribution, with your own software and branding. openSUSE education team has put together what they call the openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e. It is a customized Linux distribution geared towards education. It contains carefully selected softwares for students, educators as well as parents. The software selection encompasses everything required to make computers productive for either home or educational use. Such as -

• Educational software covering wide range of subjects such as IT, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, electronics etc catering to students right from preschool to research.
• Software for graphic designers including GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and more. 
• Office applications to work on pdfs and any office formats including those of the latest Microsoft Office.
• Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, LAMP stack, databases, IDEs … everything that a student or developer will need to learn to program in Linux.
• An easy implementation of Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is also included on the DVD.

In other words, openSUSE team has put together a bonanza for Linux users in releasing openSUSE 11.3.

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Qubes is an open source operating system based on Linux, which is designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Its unique selling point is that all applications that are run on Qubes is sand-boxed from each other. This is achieved by way of virtualization of all applications using Xen Hypervisor.

Computer systems usually provide OS security in three basic ways, namely -

1. Security by correctness,
2. Security by obscurity, and
3. Security by isolation.

Qubes OS developers have embraced the path of security by isolation. To do this Qubes utilizes virtualization technology to isolate various programs from each other. This makes Qubes OS a secure by default operating system. The idea is that virtual machines will be created on demand, for each application and discarded after use. Industry pundits have coined a new name for it – Disposable Virtual Machine technology. The project is still in alpha stage and Invisible Things Lab – the firm behind this open source project aims to release a beta version of QubesOS some time this year (2010). The GUI virtualization subsystem design of Qubes OS hinges on two primary goals, that being – security and performance. The sandboxing of applications in individual VMs provide security. For improving performance, Qubes OS architecture optimizes disk usage so that it is possible to run many VMs in the system without wasting precious disk resources. The virtual machines (VM) that run in Qubes OS can be divided into two broad categories – AppVMs and SystemVMs. AppVMs are the virtual machines used to host user applications such as email clients, word processors, web browsers and so on. And those virtual machines that provide system wide services like networking, disk storage etc are classified as SystemVMs. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between applications across different AppVMs using Xen shared memory. Qubes architecture has been designed by Joanna Rutkowska and Rafal Wojtczuk and funded by Invisible Things Lab.

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