FOSS Week in Review
With colleagues like mine, you can rest assured everything is covered. From FOSS Force columnist Ken Starks’ friendship column this week to Christine Hall’s commentary on the contiuous battles free and open source software developers and advocates face, the week has been a very thoughtful and reflective one in the FOSS Force neighborhood.
Nevertheless, here are a couple of more FOSS morsels to wrap up the week:
There is no Dana… Over at OpenStack, a discussion initiated by Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph goes into the possibility of a logo for Zuul, OpenStack’s pipeline-oriented project gating and automation system. Because she gets asked during presentations, “What is the logo for Zuul?” Elizabeth has picked up the baton and gone to bat, to woefully mix sports metaphors, on behalf of the issue.
“[A]n open source contributor (and) artist friend” of Joseph’s has already put their artistic talent to work and come up with a logo, which was outlined in Joseph’s missive, and this likeable dragon would make an excellent choice.
However, I would like the OpenStack to also consider another possibility: a red circle-and-slash over the word DANA because, “There is no Dana, only…” well, you know the rest.
Linux Mint introduces Rebecca: The latest release of Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, released this week, had a direct impact on my household; a positive one, of course, since my 17-year-old daughter Mimi is a Linux Mint user.
Here’s how it played out this week: Mimi was having issues with the new wireless router in the house — my birthday present to, well, me. She was on Linux Mint Olivia and since that version is a few removed from where we are today, she chose to reinstall rather than update. When I offered advice on what to do, I got the look and was shushed. Shushed. She did it all herself — backed up the home directory and did a fresh install — all without me saying a word.
I will just take my ThinkPad and go sit in the corner while muttering about how they grow up so fast and how you all can get off my lawn. But so far, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca Cinnamon gets glowing praise from number-one daughter.
Got your paper submitted?: As of today — assuming today is Friday, the usual day this column runs in FOSS Force — you have five days to get your talk proposal in for the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 13x. The Call for Papers closes at midnight Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, Dec. 10, and you could procrastinate for four more days and punctuate your week with a panic-filled submission on Wednesday right under the deadline. But why go through that when you can submit now and miss the final-hour tsunami?
SCALE 13x adds a day to its schedule, becoming a four-day event running from Feb. 19-22, 2015, at the Los Angeles Hilton hotel. With the extra day comes extra opportunities to speak, so if you haven’t done so yet and you really have something pressing you want to say, here’s your chance.
The usual spiel follows: Registration is open for the event, which hosts about 130 sessions and just over 100 exhibitors in the first-of-the-year FOSS event in North America.
See you next week.
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
You know that if you put /home in its own partition you rarely have to back up your home directory, even if you distro-hop, and it makes most of your settings persevere. My own concocted recipe is this : Say you have a 1 TB harddrive, from the install procedure chose to make your own partitioning as follows and in that order: first partition “/” 32 GB (got a lot of games – a minimal size would be 4GB, recommended 12 GB), second partition “/home” 958 GB, third partition “/tmp” 8 GB and last the remaining 2GB as linux swap.
This configuration has proven to be very useful as well as flexible.