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Posts published by “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

HPE Boosts SUSE, Rootkit Targets Linux & More…

Also included: Creative Commons wins in Austria, two new distro releases, a new version for Solus’s Budgie, KDE goes Wayland and Mageia supports DNF.

FOSS Week in Review

Damn if the days aren’t already getting too short for this old soul who no longer feels comfortable driving after dark. This is made worse by the fact I live way out in the country — miles from nowhere, as they say — meaning I’m pretty much stuck in the house at night. The good news is, this means that these days I’m getting a lot of writing done.

Now on to this weeks FOSS news…

Torvalds at LinuxCon Part III: Permissive Licenses and Org Charts

In the last of our three part series that began last week on Linus Torvalds’ keynote interview at this year’s LinuxCon, Linux’s lead developer talks about everything from up and coming operating systems in IoT to the development process.

“You mentioned the strength of the GPL,” Dirk Hohndel said, by now about twenty minutes into his interview of Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon 2016. “Many new kernels have shown up in the last couple of years, mostly geared towards really small devices, the IoT space: Zephyr by Intel, Fuchsia by Google and a bunch more.”

If you are who you work for now, Dirk Hohndel is VMware’s boy. But at the time of the interview, only a few weeks back, he’d been working as VMware’s chief open source officer for less than a month. For almost fifteen years before that — fourteen years nine months he’s careful to point-out on LinkedIn — he belonged to Intel, where he served as chief Linux and open source technologist. Before that he spent six years at SUSE, where he was CTO when he left in 2001, two years ahead of the Novell brouhaha.

“One of the interesting commonalities is they’re all under BSD or MIT,” he continued. “Do you think they’re interesting and do you think that one of them could grow up and become a competitor for Linux or replace Linux?”

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

Torvalds at LinuxCon Part II: Fragmentation and the GPL

This is the second of a three part series that began last Tuesday on Linux Torvalds’ keynote interview at this year’s LinuxCon. In today’s segment, Torvalds talks about how the GPL has helped prevent fragmentation.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Linus Torvalds said, “we still argue. We’re not all happy people, we don’t love each other.”

Linus Torvalds, Dirk Hohndel, LinuxCon 2016
Linus Torvalds being interviewed by VMware’s Dirk Hohndel on the last day of LinuxCon 2016.
He was talking about the Linux kernel community, completing his answer as to the “lowlights” of his years as Linux’s lead developer.

“I suspect a lot of developers really don’t like each other,” he continued, “but quite often, even if there’s not a lot of happy love feelings, I get the feeling there’s a lot of respect for the technical side and things are working very well — in ways that things have not always worked.”

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

Redesigning Tor, Goodbye OpenOffice & More…

Also included: Remembering Vernon Adams, Red Hat vs. VMware, a new distro release, openSUSE Leap and ransomware that deletes files.

FOSS Week in Review

The summer of ’16 is all but over. Good riddance. Here in my piece of the woods we’ve seen all of the 90 plus days with high humidity I can take. Time to get out the long sleeves and sweaters.

It’s also time to look at this week’s FOSS 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

Torvalds at LinuxCon Part I: The Highlights and the Lowlights

Much of what Linus Torvalds talks about in this excerpt from his onstage interview at LinuxCon 2016 will be recent memories for many of our readers. For others, it’ll be ancient history.

On Wednesday, when Linus Torvalds was interviewed as the opening keynote of the day at LinuxCon 2016, Linux was a day short of its 25th birthday. Interviewer Dirk Hohndel of VMware pointed out that in the famous announcement of the operating system posted by Torvalds 25 years earlier, he had said that the OS “wasn’t portable,” yet today it supports more hardware architectures than any other operating system. Torvalds also wrote, “it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.”

Linus Torvalds, Dirk Hohndel, LinuxCon 2016
Linus Torvalds being interviewed by VMware’s Dirk Hohndel on the last day of LinuxCon 2016.
“Because it is what I had,” Torvalds quickly quipped back, which was almost an exact quote of what he had written back in 1991. The line about AT hard disks had ended with the clause, “as that’s all I have.”

“You have to realize the background is that it was a completely personal project,” Torvalds explained. “I expected other people to be interested from a theoretical standpoint. Students of operating systems might want to look at ‘here’s another operating system we can look at.’ That was my expectation, which meant that the kind of hardware I had was the only hardware that it ran on.”

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

The Last LinuxCon, MariaDB Goes Open Core & More…

Also included: Gilles Chanteperdrix passes, corporate Linux, Cisco patches against the NSA, MariaDB’s proprietary moves, Netrunner becomes Maui, Ubuntu to replace Upstart, Fedora and Wayland, and Linux client for Yandex Disk.

FOSS Week in Review

The last LinuxCon: This year’s LinuxCon, held in the city of Toronto which is one of my favorite old haunts, was the last love fest for Linux under the name LinuxCon, which had come to be synonymous for a certain type of Linux festival. In a way, it’s fitting this should be the last as the show ended on the day before Linux’s 25th birthday and was, in many ways, a celebration of the first quarter century of Linux. In another way it’s a crying shame. LinuxCon has come to stand for the community spirited nature of Linux, even though backed by the Linux Foundation, which becomes less of a community organization with the passing of each year.

Linus Torvalds, Dirk Hohndel, LinuxCon 2016
Linus Torvalds being interviewed by VMware’s Dirk Hohndel on the last day of the last LinuxCon North America. Next year’s event in Los Angeles will be renamed Open Source Summit.
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

Desktop Linux Absent from Zemlin’s LinuxCon Pep Rally

While the Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin’s opening keynote address at LinuxCon 2016 was filled with visions of the past, present and future of Linux and open source, the focus was on the enterprise and making money.

Op-ed

“Linux. We made it. Twenty-five years.”

With these words Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, opened up LinuxCon North America, this year being held on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto. As expected, the opening keynote address was a 25 minute pep rally that was long on the enterprise and short on the desktop or any other area where Linux is important but not lining anyone’s pockets with cash.

LinuxCon 2016

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

Why Desktop Linux Still Hasn’t Taken Over the World

The reason why use of the Linux desktop has never taken off has nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with money.

“The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas…,” said Linus Torvalds in April at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego. “I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”

Linux desktopWhy, after 25 years, is the GNU/Linux desktop still near the bottom of the “market share” list of consumer operating systems? It’s certainly not due to quality. Those of us who use Linux on a regular basis and who have experience with other operating systems as well, pretty much agree it’s the best. We also know it to be an industry leader, with features showing up in desktop Linux years before they make their way into, say, Windows. By all rights, Linux should be known by techie and non-techie alike as the superstar of desktop operating systems.

So why hasn’t that happened? One word: marketing.

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

SUSE Apes Oracle, Lithuania Goes LibreOffice & More…

Also included: Fedora and RHEL working for better laptop support, one new distro release and All Things Open announces tentative schedule.

FOSS Week In Review

Look on the bright side. We’re a third of the way through August, meaning autumn is just around the corner. Also, Oracle’s still having trouble getting its cloud off the ground, but I’ll let the mainstream tech folks tell you about that. This is the FOSS roundup, after all…

Fedora logoBetter Fedora laptop support on the way: Red Hat has made an announcement that should eventually have a positive effect throughout all Linux distros. Today we learned from our good friends at Phoronix (I don’t actually know anyone there, but Larabel seems like a nice enough guy) that Red Hat is looking to hire a few good men…or women. They’re needed as an addition to the Red Hat Desktop Team, specifically to test laptops to make sure they’re all supported by Fedora and Red Hat. This is good news, because as far as giant corporations go, Red Hat is a pretty good open source citizen and I’m reasonably sure we can count on them to pass what they learn on to the greater community.

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

Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

If first impressions can be trusted, Manjaro Linux would seem to be a Linux lover’s dream. But how much can you really tell about a distro on a short test drive?

Distro of the Week

Wow! It’s a good thing I never act on love-at-first-sight impulses. About an hour ago, as I’m writing this, I rebooted the old System76 laptop we use for testing after downloading and installing Manjaro 16.06.1 “Daniella.” First impressions are everything, it’s said, and I am completely wowed.

Manjaro Linux Welcome screen
The Manjaro Linux Welcome screen.
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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