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

ATO ’14 Off to a Good Start

By Christine Hall on October 23, 2014 |

Business, Community and News

Walking through the noisy between sessions crowd, I asked Charley Rich (not the dead country singer, he assured me) if he’d been at All Things Open last year. He hadn’t. Rich had rented a booth at the conference and had come down from Long Island to unveil his new SaaS product, jKool. We were looking for a reasonably quiet place where we could sit for an interview.

I pointed out that ATO was only in its second year. “Last year it was really good,” I said. “This year is even better.”

I’d been saying that all day, since about an hour or so after I arrived for day one of ATO’s second go. I’m not being paid to shill for the event or anything like that — I’m just truly impressed.

Of course, some may think that I impress much too easily.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Todd Lewis & the Evolution of ATO

Todd Lewis & the Evolution of ATO

By Christine Hall on October 20, 2014 |

Business, Community and News

I spent the summer of ’67, the Summer of Love, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Although the hippie thing hadn’t yet made it there, the city was still cool and somewhat hip, even though at first glance it appeared to be little more than just another sleepy southern capital, flush with tobacco money and not quite sure about the end of state-sanctioned segregation, which was just getting underway. Nearly fifty years later, Raleigh still has cool cred, although time has changed it greatly.

Segregation is thankfully long gone and tobacco money has been replaced by an economy built around computer tech, medicine and education. A great amount of the tech is open source, with many small companies taking advantage of opportunities presented not only by Red Hat’s influence, but also by Research Triangle Park (RTP) and N.C. State. Thirty miles west is Durham, “the city of medicine” and home to old, rich Duke University. Just beyond that, Chapel Hill and the UNC Tarheels.

Last year I returned to Raleigh for pretty much the first time since the sixties to attend All Things Open (ATO) and saw hardly any evidence of the city I’d known nearly a half century ago. That was okay — time marches on. What I saw was vibrant and moderately hip, in a nerdy, geeky sort of way. I was conferencing, so I expected to see the city’s geek side — which I did in spades. So much so that I began to get the idea that Raleigh had morphed into something of an open source Silicon Valley.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Reglue Annual Fundraiser Up & Running

Reglue Annual Fundraiser Up & Running

By Christine Hall on October 16, 2014 |

Community and News

It should come as little surprise to most that Reglue is just about our favorite nonprofit Linux project. This would be true even if the organization’s founder and executive director wasn’t also our own fun-to-read columnist, Ken Starks. After all, what’s not to like about an organization that collects old, worn Windows boxes, fixes them up until they’re practically new again, and finds them homes with school kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a computer? Along the way, those Windows machines become Linux machines, which helps break the vendor lock-in which Redmond tries to create in the minds of American school children.

Of course, sometimes Reglue finds itself battling vendor lock-in which has infected the minds of adult educators who should know better — but that’s another story entirely.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Netflix, Chrome, DRM & Other Nasties

By Christine Hall on October 15, 2014 |

Business, Community, Operating Systems and Web Apps

Monday’s article on easy Netflix coming at last to Linux garnered a few polite responses, taking me to task for my enthusiasm for a “non-free” solution. The problems are that Netflix uses DRM and that currently its use on GNU/Linux requires the use of the proprietary Chrome browser. One commenter even questioned FOSS Force’s commitment to software freedom with the remark: “Your logo “Keeping Tech Free” I take it that means free beer and not freedom.”

Nope. I’m an advocate of free “as in speech” software — which includes the freedom to choose. If there’s a FOSS solution for something I need or want to do, I’ll take that every time, and encourage my friends to do so as well. However, if there’s something I need or want to do with no FOSS solution available, I might use a proprietary solution, depending on the depth of my need or want and on how draconian the terms of the proprietary EULA.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Easy Netflix on Linux

Easy Netflix on Linux

By Christine Hall on October 13, 2014 |

Browsers, Internet and Operating Systems

Linux’s got Netflix. No fuss, no muss, easy-peasy Netflix, straight out-of-the-box.

It wasn’t so long ago that common knowledge dictated that the reason GNU/Linux wasn’t getting traction was software, namely MS Office and Photoshop. Those days are long gone. Office is now pretty much irrevelant, with many if not most home users (at least the people I know) opting for Open Office or LibreOffice. Meanwhile, Photoshop’s moved to the cloud and although it still won’t work on Linux, many graphic artists are finding that GIMP is robust enough to tackle nearly everything thrown at it.

So that should be it, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), a paradigm shift in home computing has occurred during the past seven years. These days, computers are as much about entertainment as they are about word processing, spreadsheets and the like. At the center of the computer-as-entertainment-device revolution is our favorite old DVD rental company Netflix, which offers more streaming moving image titles that you can shake a stick at — if shaking sticks at movie titles happens to be your thing — with unlimited streaming costing as little as eight bucks a month.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2014 |

Business, Community and Media

Sometime overnight, the Hello World educational video project, which has been trying to raise a little money through an Indiegogo campaign, reached its goal — with twelve full days still to go in the campaign. The funds will be used to purchase new equipment.

As of 11 a.m. EDT, the organization’s Indiegogo webpage is showing that it’s so far received donations totaling $2,145, nearly $100 over the goal of $2,048. The organization had chosen to take an “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach to this fundraising effort by choosing the “fixed funding” option. This means that if the goal hadn’t been met, no funds would be received and all donations would be returned to the contributors.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2014 |

Business, Internet and Security

From its inception, we knew the Internet to be an unsafe place. Before the first server was cracked by an online hacker, we knew that was bound to happen sooner or later. We knew because people were already breaking into computers, even without the Internet offering 24/7 cracker/hacker convenience.

Back in the early 90s, when I was living in the college town of Chapel Hill, I shelled-out five bucks or so at the local Egghead Software store for a shrink wrapped floppy disk loaded with “shareware” utilities for MS-DOS. Twenty years have passed, so I don’t remember what tool I needed, but I’d gone there specifically looking for something or another and had been directed to that particular product by a clerk at the store. Once I got home, I stuck the disk into the drive, looked over its contents and installed a couple of the apps.

That was the end of it, or so I thought.

Several months later a biology major friend of mine with no computer skills — yes, in those days it was possible to earn an undergraduate science degree without knowing how to use a computer — dropped by to use my computer, a 486 with a whopping 4 megs of RAM. She was set to graduate soon and needed to use my machine to prepare a resume. I opened WordPerfect and set her loose to type away, answering any questions she had as she worked — such as how to remove a formatting code or preview how the document would look when printed.

An hour or so later, when she finished, I saved her work to a new blank floppy and sent her to see our mutual friend, Tony, to print it, as all I had was an old, noisy and beat-up Epson dot matrix printer and he had a fancy daisy wheel job. Two days later, she was back at my door, mad as hell.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

By Christine Hall on October 6, 2014 |

Community, Internet and Software

I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.

Although I already knew there was a problem, I didn’t know how deep the problem is until I spoke with GitHub’s Arfon Smith. It seems that academia’s inability to catch up with the twenty-first century even puts careers in jeopardy — especially in the sciences.

“…an early career post-doctoral researcher I know has a Python package that has about 100,000 downloads per month by his peers and others,” Smith explained. “To a tenure committee at a university, none of this matters — what matters is how many papers he writes and so he’s currently running the risk of not securing a permanent job, even though the work he does is of massive value to the research community.”

In the academic world it’s still “publish or perish,” and being published online usually doesn’t count for much. The tenure committees still pretty much define “publish” as something bound in paper and sent by snail mail.

Arfon Smith is a scientist with a resume longer than both of my arms. This resume includes such bullet points as co-founding Zooniverse and building DNA sequencing pipelines at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He’s been at GitHub since last October, where he uses his first hand knowledge of the scientific process to help research scientists leverage the organization’s resources. When I spent about an hour on the phone with him a few weeks back, he tried to bring me up to speed on some of the problems with academia, and the reality of scientific research in these postmodern times.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

By Christine Hall on October 2, 2014 |

Business and Community

A little over two weeks ago, I told you about the Brothers Nielsen, Jared and JR, who produce short educational videos which teach Linux and other tech skills to nine to thirteen-year-olds under the “Hello World” banner — a name which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a “programming for dummies” course.

At the time of that article, the Nielsens were just a few days into an all-or-nothing Indiegogo fundraising campaign, hoping to raise the small amount of $2,048 to replace worn-out equipment. That’s it. They aren’t trying to raise money to cover a year’s worth of expenses; they’re not trying to get the public to finance their salaries for the next year; all they want is a little bit of cash for camera’s, lenses, lights and the like. When that article went online, they’d already raised $680, nearly a third of their target amount.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Secure Linux Systems Require Savvy Users

By Christine Hall on September 29, 2014 |

Community, News, Operating Systems and Security

Linux security Patches are available to fix the bash vulnerability known as Shellshock, along with three additional security issues recently found in the bash shell. The patches are available for all major Linux distros as well as for Solaris, with the patches being distributed through the various distros.

After the patch is applied, there are a couple of commands that can be run from a terminal to ascertain that a system is no longer vulnerable. For details, see the article Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written for ZDNet. As yet, there is no patch available for OS X, although Apple says that one is on the way, while assuring its users that Mac systems aren’t vulnerable except for the most advanced users.

The good news about all this is that it demonstrates how quickly the Linux community can get the word out and then rally to engineer a solution when a security problem is discovered. The bad news is that not all Linux users listen. Too many users believe that the security features that are baked into Linux offer complete protection, no matter what. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It never was, nor can it ever be.

My friend Andrew Wyatt, who spent time some years back as the founder and lead developer of the Fuduntu Linux distro, attempted to address this fact recently in a comment to an article on FOSS Force:

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Is Oracle Using Canonical to Counter Red Hat?

Is Oracle Using Canonical to Counter Red Hat?

By Christine Hall on September 25, 2014 |

Business, Distros and Operating Systems

Penguinistas now have another reason not to adopt Ubuntu as their operating system of choice. Canonical and Oracle have each announced, in separate blog posts, that the two companies are working together to insure the compatibility of each company’s Linux offering on the other’s OpenStack cloud implementation.

Such a collaboration isn’t surprising. To be successful in the cloud, Canonical will need to support any Linux distro that potential enterprise customers throw at them, just as they’ll need to support Windows, and to a lesser degree, OS X. What is surprising is that Canonical thought it best to advertise the fact that they’re now holding hands with Oracle, if not in fact dating.

In a PR piece posted on Tuesday, Ubuntu stated, “…Canonical will support Ubuntu as a guest OS on Oracle Linux OpenStack, and Oracle will support Oracle Linux as a guest OS on Ubuntu OpenStack. Canonical will test Oracle Linux as a guest OS in its OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) program. This gives customers the assurance the configuration is tested and supported by both organisations.”

Again, this isn’t surprising, but it would seem to be an ill advised move of desperation by Canonical. Indeed, if the two companies’ relationship has already moved beyond hand holding and the two are contemplating going steady, Canonical would be well served to determine whether Oracle is truly interested in forming an alliance with Ubuntu, or whether Ubuntu is merely a way for Oracle to get around Red Hat.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com