This has not been an easy decision to make. Tectonic has been so much a part of my life for for that time that not doing it will leave a sizable gap. On the other hand, Tectonic has come under increasing pressure with other projects and work vying for attention. Because of that, keeping the site running is simply not viable and I no longer have the resources to make the sacrifices that in the past have kept the site running.

Through Tectonic I have met amazing people and made incredible friends. I have also been lucky enough to travel to interesting places and see the innovation and commitment of the free and open source community first hand. I started Tectonic because I was passionate about free and open source software and that passion for FOSS has not faded in the least over ten years, even if my ability to maintain Tectonic has been diminished.

Group effort
While I have run Tectonic from its inception I am not the only one who can be credited with its success. Over the years there have been many writers that have filled the site with news and views. Among these were also many volunteers who expected nothing in return for their knowledge. To Jason, James, Richard and everyone else who contributed time and effort, thank you.

One of the major supporters of Tectonic over the years has been Obsidian Systems without which the site may well have been shut down a lot earlier. Thank you to Muggie, Charles, Robin and everyone else that made this a lot easier than it ought to have been.

Over the years Tectonic also developed a strong relationship with many community organisations from user groups to advocacy groups which both provided information and prompted me to do more. There were also individuals that were consistent and unfaltering supporters offering insight and feedback at every turn. I can’t name everyone but I think you know who you are. Thank you.

Plans
“Closing” is not really the right word. Come August 1 Tectonic will not simply be switched off. I plan to maintain the existing site in an archived form for as long as is reasonable so that the information remains available.

I will not, however, be posting new articles on the site from today and from the end of July I will disable the comments and discussion areas on the site. I have considered various options for extending Tectonic’s life without my input. Depending on resources these may or may not happen, but I am not promising.

On a personal level I have many new plans and opportunities that I am excited about pursuing, many of which naturally involve free and open source software. As these plans take shape I will write about them on my, until now largely ignored, personal blog: http://www.alastairotter.com. Drop by and keep in touch.

Alastair

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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has approved South African company Jumping Bean as an official LPI Training Partner. The LPI qualifications are an internationally recognised Linux industry certification.

“Becoming an approved LPI training institute is an important achievement for us” says Joseph Neusu. The vendor-neutral LPI certificate has three levels of certification from junior to senior Linux professional.

As part of the drive by LPI South Africa to make education more affordable, they have successfully negotiated with the body’s head office for a lower examination fee that fits the pockets of school leavers and their parents. In addition, in order to allow for easier access to the qualification, paper based exams have been introduced overcoming the requirement for students to pay for the more expensive computer based exams.

In order to meet its commitment of ensuring that its training and certification retains its premier status with business and government the LPI regularly reviews and updates its course content to ensure that students receive training that is relevant to the markets needs.

Certified individuals are required to renew their certification on a regular basis to ensure their skills remain up to date and that employers can rely on the qualification as an indication of the holders skill and professionalism. Its rigorous training partner approval process is also aimed at ensuring that students receive only the best possible education from approved trainers and facilities.

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That’s because open source software and the methodologies that accompany it have already been proven to be the chosen route for the vast majority of companies aiming to capitalise on the cloud phenomenon.

For evidence of this, you need look no further than the route companies such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace have taken in building out the massive datacentres they plan to begin selling capacity on in the coming years.

Without fail in each of these examples, open source is either at the core or forms a vital component of what’s on offer. And as cloud computing becomes more a prominent topic, so open source will find greater traction in the market.

The reasons open source is a popular route are not difficult to find. Since the cloud computing players are extremely technically proficient, they have sufficient skill in-house to capitalise on the more open nature of open source – and in doing so, can build a far lower cost solution than what would be on offer from a proprietary technology.

These solutions’ open nature furthermore allow cloud providers to mould and form tools to their own needs, changing and adapting underlying technology rapidly so that extra performance can be eked out of a solution.

Incidentally, cloud companies using open source technologies gain the useful side-effect of adhering to the open standards that the majority of open source solutions subscribe to. This proves to be a great benefit down the line when it comes to integrating disparate line of business systems or solutions providing specific functionality to a business silo.

A number of companies are wondering when exactly cloud computing will hit South Africa, since the topic is becoming an important part of the planning most enterprises in the more developed US or European markets are doing today.

Because of the bandwidth limitations we face locally and despite the arrival of new undersea cables, cloud computing will take on a different form in South Africa to markets where bandwidth is ubiquitously available.

My personal belief is that South African companies will become involved with cloud computing from an internal perspective, building clouds that exist inside their datacentres, but function similarly to clouds located at service providers’ offsite datacentres.

It stands to reason that these customers will need to look at open source technologies just like their outsourced peers, since the level of scalability, customisability and control is just not there in the proprietary world.

For that reason I can’t see why open source won’t go from strength to strength locally over the coming years.

Fred Strauss is technical manager at Obsidian Systems.

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Major changes over previous editions of Ubuntu include Gnome 2.27.1, the latest development release, as well as the latest Linux kernel, version 2.6.30, which was released just a couple of days ago.

Just like Fedora 11, released earlier this week, Karmic Koala now also sports the ext4 filesystem by default, a move that has long been anticipated.

Also now included by default is GRUB 2, the new default bootloader.

With plans firmly in place to reach a 10-second startup by Ubuntu 10.4, Karmic includes a new kernel mode setting feature which the team is hoping will reduce video mode switching flicker at booting and dramatically speed up suspend and resume processes.

Karmic Koala Alpha 2 can be downloaded from one of these places:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Netbook Remix)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/karmic/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu ARM)

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In its release announcement the team said that “KDE 4.3 focuses on polishing and completing the user experience by providing a modern and beautiful free working environment. After the first beta, the focus has now shifted clearly from the implementation of new features to polishing the user experience for the 4.3 release.

KDE 4.3 beta 2 also includes new window animations, a more usable Run Command popup and improved addons in Plasma.

Other major changes include:
- Settings module for actions triggered by hardware events;
- Recent applications, titles and context menus for the classic application launcher;
- New Tree Mode in System Settings;
- Revisited user interface of the crash dialog, including backtrace parsing and rating;
- A network:/ IO Slave to show services such as Zeroconf as view in the file manager;
- Sorting folders in the file manager first is now optional; and
- Support for the mobipocket format in the document viewer and desktop search.

See the full release notes for more details of the changes included in this release and instructions on installing KDE 4.3 beta2.

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On the desktop Fedora includes Gnome 2.26 and KDE 4.2 based on a 2.6.29.3 kernel. Underneath the team has decided to make ext4 the default filesystem.

With most operating systems targeting faster boot-up times Fedora is no exception and users can expect a 20 second boot up from the new release on most hardware.

Another feature in Fedora 11 aimed at improving usability include automatic font and mime-type installation using PackageKit. PackageKit was first introduced in Fedora 9 to manage software and in Fedora 10 it was able to automatically install codecs on demand. In Fedora 11 those capabilities have been improved and PackageKit can now automatically install fonts when needed for viewing and editing documents.

Fedora 11 also extends Fedora’s kernel modesetting (KMS) capabilities to improve graphical boot times. In previous releases KMS only supported some ATI cards. In Fedora 11 KMS now supports a range of additional cards including many from Intel and Nvidia as well as ATI.

Presto
In an effort to streamline software updates, Fedora 11 introduces Presto. Although not enabled by default in this release (it needs the yum-presto plugin) Presto reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded during software updates. Instead of replacing an entire package when it is updated Presto downloads just the differences between the old and new package, reducing downloads by up to 80% in some cases.

The release notes include detailed information on the changes included in Fedora 11. A full list of features included in Fedora 11 is also available. Downloads of Fedora 10 can be found here.

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On the Chromium blog the team wrote: “Please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.”

Some of the features that the team said are not yet complete are the ability to view YouTube videos, manage privacy settings, change the default search provider or print correctly.

The Linux version is available for 32-bit and 64-bit systems running Ubuntu 8.04, Debian 5 or later systems. Support for non .deb-based systems is not yet provided. Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so the system which will automatically keep Chrome up to date. The Linux version is a 12.1MB download and the Mac one an 11.3MB download.

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The KDE community today announced the release of KDE 4.2.4, the latest in the group’s monthly maintenance releases. KDE 4.2.4 is the last release planned for the KDE 4.2 series, which will be followed up by KDE 4.3 at the end of July, six months after KDE 4.2 was released.

Notable improvements and bugfixes in this release include a fix for Okular to correctly select pages for printing, a huge number of bugfixes for KMail and KHTML.

A full list of bugfixes and improvements included in KDE 4.2.4 can be found in the changelog.

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Three of the new features in OpenBill 1.2 include the ability to add variable selling price line items to contracts, ability to send customers credit notes via email and an enhanced contract management interface.

Open Bill has its roots as a billing and contract tracking application developed in-house for Cyber Connect, a mobile broadband service provider in South Africa. Joseph Neusu, Cyber Connect’s divisional manager, says that when the company first experienced significant growth in sales, it looked at the other open source offering available at the time but none suited their needs for handling a large number of relatively low value contracts with recurring billing. “So we asked Jumping Bean, an internal partner, to develop a custom application for us,” says Neusu.

having developed the software, Jumping Bean decided in June 2008 to release the software as open source software under a GNU Public Licence “as a way of giving back to the community,” says Mark Clarke, lead developer of Open Bill. OpenBill is hosted on Java.net.

“Beside the great feeling of being able to contribute back, we also got some extra business in the process,” says Clarke. “We now have several customers who we provide on-going support and customisation services to for the application.”

OpenBill is written in Java and makes use of a number of open source libraries and frameworks to provide enterprise level billing services, says Clarke. Some of the technologies used in OpenBill include the Spring framework for dependency injection and aspect orientated programming, Java Persistence API (JPA) for the data access and domain model layer and Apache Velocity templates for invoice and email templating.

“Now that the release is out-the-door we will be upgrading all our customers to the new version and encourage any other users of the application to do so as well”, says Clarke.

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Issue #25 of the Full Circle magazine (download) includes tips on working with the shell history, using VirtualBox as well as tips on increasing game speed under X. Other features include a review of the Beginning OpenOffice 3 book, an interview with MOTU Guillaume Martres and a selection of top games for Ubuntu. This edition also includes the second part of working with Inkscape, the awesome vector drawing tool.

The Special Edition of PCLinuxOS magazine kicks off with a series of testimonials from users that have become die-hard PCLinuxOS users. On the feature front there is a extended piece on PCLinuxOS on PPC as well as tips on connecting a Blackberry Storm mobile to a PCLinuxOS PC.

Both magazines are free for download from the respective websites: PCLinuxOS and Full Circle

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