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Posts tagged as “ubuntu”

Oracle Loses Again, Red Hat Competes With FOSS & More…

Also included: LinuxQuestions.org has a birthday, six new distro releases, Ubuntu considering dropping 32-bit support and the feds were after Snowden.

FOSS Week in Review

Happy birthday America. And happy birthday to LinuxQuestions.org. America, more correctly known as United States of America since we’re not the only country on this big piece of land, turns 240-years-old on Monday, if you accept July 4, 1776 as it’s “born on” date. If it’s not too hot, I’ll be going to the Shoals community ballpark to watch the fireworks display and eat some 50 cent hot dogs. I’ll be ordering mine “all the way,” which around here means chili, slaw, mustard and onions. The birthday wish for LinuxQuestions.org is a little belated. The site was started by Jeremy Garcia sixteen years ago last weekend.

Now on to this weeks FOSS news highlights…

Canonical Goes Snap Happy, Nextcloud 9 Released & More…

Also included: Two distros with new releases, Fedora 24 due on Tuesday and Ammon, Idaho thinks out-of-the-box.

FOSS Week in Review

When karma comes to visit, the one thing to remember is that in some way — which might even seem totally unrelated — you have some responsibility for that karmic bite. The best thing to do is to accept it with grace and to move on. I tell you this because that should give you a pretty fair assessment of what my life has been like since the last Week in Review.

But it hasn’t all been bad karma. There’s been good news on the FOSS front as well…

Move over LSB, Snaps are here: Once upon a time there was hope that Linux Standard Base would bring the ability to write-once-and-install-on-any-distro capability to GNU/Linux. Most folks quit believing that would ever happen about the time that LSB member distro Caldera shut down to try to make a living suing IBM as SCO. Although LSB is still being developed, it hasn’t been widely adopted and most of us have realized that the distro repository system that now dominates Linux is actually a strength despite the inconveniences.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Jeff Hoogland Talks Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment, Moksha and ‘Magic the Gathering’

The FOSS Force Video Interview Just a few days before releasing Bodhi Linux 3.2.1, Bodhi’s founder and lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, took time out to…

Toronto Getting a Free Meshnet, Six New Distro Releases & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Also: We hear more from DuckDuckGo about its open source donations and welcome Robin “Roblimo” Miller to the FOSS Force team.

While the big news in FOSS media this week was the Ubuntu Online Summit, I wasn’t there. Too far to travel. However, the big news seems to be that Mir and Unity 8 won’t be the defaults when Canonical ships Ubuntu 16.10 on October 20, although both “will be available as an ‘alternative session,’” according to OMG! Ubuntu! Ho-hum. Now on to some real FOSS news…

Toronto
Thanks to two developers, Toronto’s getting a free encrypted Internet meshnet.
By chensiyuan (chensiyuan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The most interesting story this week, to me at least, was a report by Motherboard on efforts underway to bring a free encrypted mesh network to Toronto. A mesh network relies on a series of wireless nodes which only need to be connected to the Internet at a single point. The plan is the brainchild of two local developers, Mark Iantorno and Benedict Lau, who plan to deploy Raspberry Pis as nodes. Meshnets already exist in Barcelona, Berlin, and New York City.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Running Windows on System76

System76 is known throughout the world as one of the few companies exclusively selling new PCs and laptops preinstalled with GNU/Linux. The question is, will they run Windows?

Some things are so counterintuitive that they seem just plain wrong, like a crime against natural order. Things like running Windows on a System76 machine, which is something that would never have occurred to me to do, not even if it was the only computer available and I absolutely had to boot into Windows. It would be like putting ketchup on a delicately seasoned and perfectly grilled spencer steak.

It’s something I would never do, and yet, I am responsible.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

UbuntuBSD Should Heed Kubuntu’s Cautionary Tale

Larry the BSD Guy

Should UbuntuBSD be officially tied to the Canonical family of operating systems?

Our good friends at Softpedia reported last week that the fledgling UbuntuBSD variant could be seeking the imprimatur from Canonical and become an official Ubuntu “flavor.”

Jon Boden, the lead developer of UbuntuBSD, submitted a post on the Ubuntu developers’ discussion list to let them know that he would “like to contribute all my work to Ubuntu Community and, if you think it is worthy, make ubuntuBSD an official Ubuntu project like Xubuntu or Edubuntu.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

OSVDB Shuts Down, Firefox Add-ons Unsafe & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Bubbling beneath the headlines in this week’s FOSS news review: ownCloud gets a new release, the Linux kernel grows by a half million lines since January 1, a new OS for the Pi 3 and FOSS Force welcomes a new columnist.

It seems as if even some FOSS writers have been buying into “Microsoft luvs Linux” this week, as some have been been bending over backwards to applaud the Ubuntu connection with bash on Windows. I only have one thing to say about that: Windows with bash support is still Windows.

In the real FOSS news this week…

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Ubuntu Coming to Windows 10

In its quest to become the Microsoft of the Linux world, Ubuntu and Microsoft are expected to announce today that Ubuntu will soon run on Windows 10.

Holy crap!

In Friday’s Week in Review I jokingly opined that I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Ubuntu for Windows” as a move by the folks at Canonical as part of their plans for world domination. Guess what? It’s really happening.

In an article published Tuesday, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that “[a]ccording to sources at Canonical” a deal has been worked out between Ubuntu’s parent company and Microsoft that will lead to the GNU/Linux distro being able to run alongside Windows 10. According to Vaughan-Nichols, “This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.”

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Ethical Hackers Unethically Hacked, Keystroke IDs & More…

FOSS Week in Review

While Facebook and Google work to better identify you by your typing skills and Red Hat counts the bucks from its best ever year, Ubuntu finally makes it possible to launch from the bottom.

If you depend only on mainstream tech media’s coverage of FOSS, you might be excused for thinking that the biggest news of the week revolved either around Ubuntu’s new summer home in the world of BSD — which isn’t a Canonical project by the way — or Microsoft’s open sourcing of every scrap of code it can find that might benefit Microsoft if it were open sourced.

In my not-so-humble opinion, both of these stories were yawners. Of course somebody’s attempted to create a BSD *buntu. There are already Ubuntu flavors for every single desktop environment known to mankind, as well as a few DEs that are figments of Canonical’s imagination, so where else was there to go but to another operating system? What’s next? Given the way Ubuntu has been cozying up to Microsoft, I’m expecting Ubuntu for Windows.

As for Microsoft’s continuing open sourcing? There’s nothing new here, move on. When Redmond loves Linux and open source enough to quit suing open source projects over patents it claims it has — that will be news.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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