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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

Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

By Christine Hall on August 10, 2016 |

Distros and Reviews

Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?Manjaro Linux

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.
Continue readingManjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?
Five Favorite Linux DistrosTux Linux distros

Five Favorite Linux Distros

By Christine Hall on August 8, 2016 |

Distros and Reviews

Like everybody, we love “five best” lists. Trouble is, how can we come up with a five best list of anything when we haven’t even begun to look at them all? What we can do is list “five favorites,” like we’ve done with this list of five favorite Linux distros.

I’ve never been a distro hopper. Not at all. I started out with Mandrake back around 2002, and stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until 2010. When it became obvious that the distro was in serious financial dodo and wasn’t likely to be around much longer, I moved to PCLinuxOS. This move was made partly because the distro had started life as a fork of Mandrake/Mandriva, keeping me in familiar territory, but mostly because it was one of two distros I could find that supported the Wi-Fi on an old Dell laptop I was using at the time. In 2012 I moved to Bodhi Linux after falling in love with the simple elegance of the Enlightenment 17 desktop, and the next year switched over to Linux Mint Xfce edition when we finally got around to setting up a full time office for FOSS Force.

Tux Linux distros

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingFive Favorite Linux Distros
IBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…Wi-Fi

IBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…

By Christine Hall on August 5, 2016 |

Desktops, Distros, Hardware, Media, News and Software

Also included: FCC requires TP-Link to allow users to install open source firmware on routers, five new distro releases, new releases of LibreOffice and KDE Plasma, and Microsoft releases Skype 1.3 Alpha for Linux.

FOSS Week in Review

Maybe because we’re in the last 30 days or so of real summer — as opposed to calendar summer — or perhaps because most ‘Mericans are glued to their TVs as the Clinton/Trump heavyweight bout gets underway in earnest, but this has been a slow news week in the FOSS world. However, there are some notable items worth mentioning.

Wi-FiFCC supports open source Wi-Fi firmware. For the last several months many open sourcers have been up in arms because it looked as if the door was being closed on open source on Wi-Fi routers after the agency changed it’s rules around radio interference on the 5 GHz band, making it difficult for router makers to allow users to install open source firmware on their routers. All along, the FCC claimed that shutting out open source use wasn’t part of the game plan, but we FOSSers are a suspicious lot and we weren’t buying it.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingIBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…
Encrypted File Sharing Service Tresorit Offers Linux Desktop Client, But…Tresorit Linux Client

Encrypted File Sharing Service Tresorit Offers Linux Desktop Client, But…

By Christine Hall on August 3, 2016 |

Reviews, Security and Web Apps

At first glance, Tresorit’s end-to-end file sharing service looks like it might be able to overcome its proprietary nature and win favor with some Linux users. Unfortunately, the service comes with another issue that might be an insurmountable deal breaker for some.

The FOSS Force Review

On Thursday I received an email from Eszter Szilva, a PR manager at Tresorit, which is an “end-to-end encrypted file sharing service.” She was offering an invitation to take a peek at the company’s just released client for GNU/Linux. I must admit I was a little excited by this, despite the fact that I already figured the service was also end-to-end proprietary. I was willing to ignore that, thinking it’s about time for companies to start treating Linux users with the same respect given to users of other operating systems.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingEncrypted File Sharing Service Tresorit Offers Linux Desktop Client, But…
Ghosts in the Voting MachinesVoting Machine

Ghosts in the Voting Machines

By Christine Hall on August 2, 2016 |

Hardware, Politics and Security

Whether or not foreign governments are planning on manipulating our election results in November, it’s past time we started taking the security of electronic voting seriously.

Op-ed

Even if it turns out that the FBI’s suspicions that Russian government forces are behind the hacking of the Democratic party turn out to be untrue, the fact our government is willing to publicly speculate on the possibility should be cause for some alarm. While it’s true that from a hacking sense the Democrats’ computers were probably low lying fruit and easy pickings, so are many of the voting machines that will be called into service in November’s general election.

Voting Machine
Joebeone at en.wikipedia [GNU Free Documentation License]
For decades we’ve known that many voting machines are subject to tampering, and many reasonable people are suspicious that tampering on the state level has already affected the outcome of some elections. This year we can double down on those concerns. In an era when politically motivated officials have been putting in place draconian voter restrictions in order to quell largely unproven fraud by a handful of individual voters, we’ve connected our voting machines to the Internet, which is an open invitation to foreign governments that might have a reason to want to have control over who governs us. In light of the recent allegations against Russia, that should be worrisome.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingGhosts in the Voting Machines
Software Freedom in Kosovo, Waiting for Xfce Mint & More…LibreOffice logo

Software Freedom in Kosovo, Waiting for Xfce Mint & More…

By Christine Hall on July 29, 2016 |

Browsers, Community, Desktops, Distros, News, Operating Systems and Software

Also included: Canonical joins The Document Foundations advisory board, Chromium coming to Fedora, OpenVZ now a complete Linux distro and GNU Linux-libre Kernel 4.7 released.

FOSS Week in Review

It’s not FOSS, but I reckon the biggest story in tech this week, ignoring claims of Russia hacking for Trump, is the sale of Yahoo to Verizon for $4.8 billion. Considering that traffic watcher Alexa says the site is the fifth most visited address on the web, that seems like something of a bargain to me. Add to that Yahoo’s prime Silicon Valley real estate and the price seems to be in the “it fell of the truck” category. The sale puts Verizon in control of both America Online and Yahoo, so I suspect we’ll be seeing Verizon trying to compete with Google and Bing for a share of the search advertising market.

Meanwhile in the world of FOSS…

LibreOffice logoLibreOffice has been in the news this week. The big story, which we first heard on Tuesday, is that Canonical has joined The Document Foundation’s advisory board. In case you’re new in town, TDF is the nonprofit that controls the development of LibreOffice.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingSoftware Freedom in Kosovo, Waiting for Xfce Mint & More…
Disobedience Has Its AwardMIT Media Lab

Disobedience Has Its Award

By Christine Hall on July 27, 2016 |

Community, News and Politics

Civil disobedience gets its due with the creation of a special award that was announced at last week’s Forbidden Research symposium at MIT.

News & Analysis

As one whose early early political education, after I was old enough to quit listening to my father and think for myself, came largely from the various civil disobedience factions in the 1960s, it’s heartening to see that disobedience now has an award. So far it’s one off, but if successful might be repeated and perhaps be awarded annually. The award will also offer the recipient more than mere accolades, as it’s attached to a $250,000 prize.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingDisobedience Has Its Award
Our First Look at Linux Mint 18 CinnamonLinux Mint 18 Cinnamon

Our First Look at Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon

By Christine Hall on July 25, 2016 |

Desktops, Distros and Reviews

It’s been almost a month since Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” was released, so we decided to take it for a spin and have our first ever look at the Cinnamon desktop.

The FOSS Force Distro Review

Being a longtime Linux Mint user, I was happy at the end of last month when lead developer Clement Lefebvre and the gang released Linux Mint 18, otherwise known as “Sarah.” As always, the new Mint was first released with two desktops that are based on GNOME, Mint’s default Cinnamon and the more retro MATE. Those who prefer Xfce (my personal choice) and KDE will have to wait a while longer while the developers get them polished and ready to work and play well with the rest of Mint.

Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingOur First Look at Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon
Microsoft Isn’t Going Away Any Time SoonMicrosoft

Microsoft Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

By Christine Hall on July 20, 2016 |

Business and News

When Steve Ballmer left Microsoft, the company seemed to be losing its grip and many predicted the company would slowly slide into oblivion. The company’s latest financials show the company to be healthy, and not likely to quit being a thorn in FOSS’s side for the foreseeable future.

Common knowledge is a funny thing. It’s often wrong and based on wishes instead of reality. Take the supposition that shows up in the comments on FOSS Force whenever Microsoft pops up in the news. Among many GNU/Linux desktop users, Windows is now irrelevant and Microsoft is a dying company that’s all but on life support. This is pure wishful thinking based on a passionate dislike of all things Microsoft by many Linux users.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingMicrosoft Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon