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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

SCO Never Can Say Goodbye

By Christine Hall on August 9, 2012 |

Business and Copyright

I’d almost forgotten that SCO was still around until PJ at Groklaw reported the company was in the process of switching from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. In bankruptcy talk that means the company’s stance has changed from we’re-going-to-come-out-of-this-alive to it’s-call-the-priest-for-last-rites-time. The trouble is, this is SCO, so you know it’s not going to be that simple. They’ll come up with some stupid request for the court that confounds logic, which they’ve done.

If I’m reading PJ right, SCO wants to both eat and have cake, which is pretty much what they’ve always wanted. This time they want to go bankrupt and leave their creditors without a dime but still stick around to continue litagation against IBM for alledgedly giving Linux all sorts of code. Here’s how PJ intreprets what SCO is telling the court:

Continue readingSCO Never Can Say Goodbye

Some Prominent Open Source Forks

By Christine Hall on August 8, 2012 |

Desktops, Distros and Software

Penguinistas used to worry about the dreaded fork, especially of Linux. “What if Linux forks and becomes like Unix?” was a question often being posed in the open source media. Linus Torvalds would do his best to put those fears to rest, explaining that under the GPL forks are usually to be welcomed.

He was of the opinion that if a fork improves a product and is liked by the users, those changes will almost certainly be rolled back into the originating application. If not, and the fork is indeed a marked improvement on the original, then the fork becomes the standard bearer at the expense of the original application.

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 readingSome Prominent Open Source Forks
Create a Bootable Live USB Thumb Drive or Rescue Drive Using UNetbootinUnetbootin screen shot

Create a Bootable Live USB Thumb Drive or Rescue Drive Using UNetbootin

By Christine Hall on August 6, 2012 |

Reviews and Software

A few weeks ago when two ISO images I burned to CDs failed to produce a working live CD intended for a laptop, someone on a distro forum figured the problem was with the CDs. This was a good guess, as the MD5 checksum on the download had matched the source. He suggested I make a bootable USB drive using UNetbootin.

Unetbootin screen shot
Unetbootin screen shot
I’d never heard of UNetbootin before, but I immediately found it at Sourceforge and downloaded it to the Windows desktop I was using. After studying the simple GUI for a moment, I inserted a thumb drive into a USB port. A few clicks of the mouse later, UNetbootin was extracting and copying files to the thumb drive. A couple of minutes later, I removed the drive from the Windows box, made sure the laptop was set up to boot from USB, crossed my fingers and booted. Less than a minute later I was looking at the desktop for the distro I was testing. It was that simple.

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 readingCreate a Bootable Live USB Thumb Drive or Rescue Drive Using UNetbootin

Microsoft and Amdocs: The Linux Connection Is Just FUD

By Christine Hall on August 1, 2012 |

Business and Patents

Trying to understand the recent patent licensing deal between Microsoft and Amdocs is like watching a poker tournament, where you never know whether players are bluffing or if they have pat hands. In this case, it appears that Microsoft is bluffing when it comes to Linux. An inspection of the facts, as they are known, indicates the “Linux licensing” element of the story is only more Microsoft FUD–with Amdocs being a willing participant.

This isn’t the story of an underdog being pressured by the Redmond giant into paying a bounty on some patents Microsoft claims are being infringed upon by Linux servers in Amdocs’s data centers. In fact, it appears as if Linux licensing isn’t really a part of this deal at all.

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 and Amdocs: The Linux Connection Is Just FUD

ZoneAlarm: Defining the Difference Between Freeware and Free Software

By Christine Hall on July 30, 2012 |

Browsers and Security

The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.

We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.

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 readingZoneAlarm: Defining the Difference Between Freeware and Free Software

The ‘Walled Garden’ Approach Won’t Work For Microsoft

By Christine Hall on July 24, 2012 |

Business and Mobile

Welcome to MicroApple.

It’s beginning to look as if Microsoft intends to get traction for Surface and other tablets running Windows by building a walled garden, creating more of the vendor lock-in that’s made Redmond famous. In other words, don’t expect to see any Microsoft programs ported to Android or iOS any time soon. Although this exclusivity has worked to keep the company’s monopoly intact in the past, this time it’s headed for failure. Windows has finally run out of steam.

I’m talking about Microsoft’s revelation last week that it has no immediate plans to make the tablet version of MS Office available on any platform but Windows. According to CNET, Redmond’s spin is that this is being done with only the user in mind:

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 readingThe ‘Walled Garden’ Approach Won’t Work For Microsoft

Is the End Of the Windows Era At Hand?

By Christine Hall on July 10, 2012 |

Business

Sometime during the summer of 2006, the main computer at the shop where I worked suffered a motherboard meltdown. Since I’m not much of a hardware person, I took the box to my friends at Dragonware Computers. After diagnosing the problem, owner Michelle looked around the back room, came up with a used motherboard that would get the job done and installed it while I waited. Michelle always took care of me.

In those days the folks at Dragonware were very Windows centric folks. They hosted their own website on a white box running Windows, and they knew every trick in the book about configuring Microsoft products. It wasn’t surprising then that Michelle’s husband, Phillip, had a pre-release install of Windows Vista loaded on a box in the back room. It also was no surprise that he was in love with the soon to be released OS. Microsoft wrote the book on computing as far as he was concerned.

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 readingIs the End Of the Windows Era At Hand?

Red Hat & Ubuntu’s UEFI Solutions Not Good For FOSS

By Christine Hall on July 6, 2012 |

Distros and Hardware

The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isn’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. It’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.

In early June, Red Hat came under fire from the FOSS press for their way of getting around Secure Boot. Their solution, which will also be used by Fedora, involves joining Microsoft’s developer program in order to obtain a key to be used to load a “shim” bootloader which will then load GRUB. In a post on Red Hat’s web site explaining the move, Tim Burke, Vice President of Linux Engineering, seemed to be dismissing these critics in a terse two sentence paragraph near the end of the post:

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 readingRed Hat & Ubuntu’s UEFI Solutions Not Good For FOSS

Megauploads, WikiLeaks and Independence Day

By Christine Hall on July 2, 2012 |

Internet and Politics

Wednesday is the Fourth of July, the day when we in the U.S. celebrate whatever we perceive to be the vision of our founding families. This would seem to be a good time to wonder what the framers of our constitution would think about the way we’ve been applying, or not applying, due process to the Internet.

There are two cases in the news these days that are quite disturbing. For starters, there’s Megaupload.

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 readingMegauploads, WikiLeaks and Independence Day

Google’s Nexus Tablet; Maddog’s Blog; Patent News & More

By Christine Hall on June 29, 2012 |

Business, Hardware and Patents

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Lot’s of stories of interest in the FOSS world this week. Patent issues, of course, dominated the news. In addition, however, a travel site got outed for a OS bias and a hardware manufacturer discovered the hard way that ignoring open source can be costly.

We’ll start with the patent news…

The Patent Wars Continue

I don’t know what we’re going to do about the patent situation. The sensible thing would be to simply change the law and make software unpatentable, but there are plenty of reasons why that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Banning patents wouldn’t only effect the trolls, those snakes that don’t make anything but monetize their patent portfolios through the courts. If it did, we could probably get it done tonight.

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 readingGoogle’s Nexus Tablet; Maddog’s Blog; Patent News & More
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