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

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2014 |

Business, Community and Media

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

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

Only FOSSers ‘Get’ FOSS

By Christine Hall on September 22, 2014 |

Community, Operating Systems and Software

Back on the first of September I wrote an article about Android, in which I pointed out that Google’s mobile operating system seems to be primarily designed to help sell things. This eventually led to a discussion thread on a subreddit devoted to Android. Needless to say, the fanbois and fangrrls over on Reddit didn’t cotton to my criticism and they devoted a lot of space complaining about how the article was poorly written.

They had me there; admittedly it wasn’t one of my better efforts.

The one comment that caught my attention, however, wasn’t complaining about me or my obviously misguided opinion. This commenter said something about how my article came from a FOSS site and made some snarky remark about how as open as Android is, it would never be open enough for those whiny FOSS people. This is the kind of remark we see all the time from tech people, user and developer alike, who think OSS is as free as it gets and don’t understand the distinction between open source and free and open source.

In other words, sometimes it’s the people who’re the closest to us in opinion who become our biggest ideological detractors.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

King Ellison Abdicates As Oracle CEO

King Ellison Abdicates As Oracle CEO

By Christine Hall on September 18, 2014 |

Business and Humor

Damn it! All of the colorful bad guys of proprietary tech are aging out, leaving in their place boring button down folk with all the charm expected from accountants.

You’ve no doubt already heard that Larry Ellison stepped down this afternoon as CEO of Oracle, though he’ll be sticking around for a while in his new position as executive chairman. In other words, he’s still the boss by way of being the boss’s boss – and by dint of the fact that he remains the company’s biggest shareholder with a 25% stake in the business.

Why is he quitting? Probably because he’s getting old and he can afford to retire; he turned 70 last month. Officially, according to him and the once and future king’s yes-men, it’s all part of carefully laid-out succession plans – meet-the-new-boss, the-king-is-dead and all that.

As much as I loathe Mr. Ellison, I really hate to see him go, especially that part of me that thinks I’m a writer — a FOSS writer. Who’s left for FOSS press brickbats?

You see, Larry Ellison is one of the last, maybe the last, really good and colorful bad guys left on the tech scene.

Who’s left to be the target for split infinitive armed verbal bombs from wanna be hotshot FOSS reporters? Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, Oracle’s co-presidents who’ve now been elevated to the status of co-CEOs? Meh. Not unless Hurd again decides he wants to dip his pen in the wrong inkwell and then use company money to clean up the mess — but I don’t think he’s going to do that. Not at Oracle. Ellison would break his legs if he did. Remember, even though Ellison’s gone, he’s not most sincerely gone.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Redefining the Public Library Using Open Source Ideas

Redefining the Public Library Using Open Source Ideas

By Christine Hall on September 18, 2014 |

Community and Politics

When I read that the Takoma Park Maryland Library has 28 workstations running Linux, I literally couldn’t believe it. Really? A library offering the public Linux? Whenever I go to a library, all I ever see are Windows machines or maybe a Mac or two. When I mention Linux as an alternative, and I sometimes do, I’m usually met with blank stares and the staff begins to think I’m nuts.

To check into this, I contacted Phil Shapiro, the library’s Public Geek. Yup. That’s right, he told me. They are running Linux. The decision was made by his supervisor, Rebecca Brown, some time ago.

“This town is quite diverse, with 92 nationalities, so we needed to find a good multilingual solution,” Shapiro explained. “Rebecca chose a Canandian Linux solutions provider, Userful, whose commercial product is built on top of Fedora Linux. Userful does multilingual very well.”

The Takoma Park Library takes advantage of the multiseat feature built into Fedora, which allows multiple monitors, keyboards and mice to be operated from a single desktop box. Shapiro has been so impressed with how well this set-up works that he’s made a YouTube video demonstrating Fedora’s implementation of multiseat running on an “obsolete” laptop with low specs.

Interestingly, the move to Linux was met with little push back from the patrons using the machines.

“The patrons are quite happy using Linux to get their work done,” Shapiro said. “Very few of them have any clue they’re not using Windows. They surf the web using Firefox and Chrome and use LibreOffice to compose and edit their word processing documents. In the nine years I’ve worked at this library, only one or two people have ever told me, ‘Hey, this isn’t Windows.'”

So much for the learning curve we read so much about — not surprising to those of us who use Linux. Nor are we surprised to hear that running Linux instead of Windows makes things easier on the library’s IT crew.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Hello World: Videos That Teach Linux To Kids

Hello World: Videos That Teach Linux To Kids

By Christine Hall on September 15, 2014 |

Business, Media, News and Operating Systems

The Hello World Program needs a few bucks to buy some new equipment to enable them to continue to keep on doing what they do. What they do is make videos that teach Linux and other computer tech subjects to kids, using sock puppets, robots and animation — sort of Kukla, Fran and Ollie for the 21st century. Or Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop in color and high def.

They don’t need much. $2,048 by their estimation will do just fine — a mere drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things. They’ve been on Indiegogo since last Wednesday, where they’re making their case.

“We don’t have a proper studio to shoot video,” they wrote on their Indiegogo page, “the bulbs in our light kit are burned out, our cameras and lenses are dirty because we’ve been shooting in basements and (very cold) garages for the last year, our backdrop needs replacing, and our highly intelligent robot host requires an upgrade.”

They’re already a third of the way there, with $680 raised so far. But crowdfunding campaigns sometimes stall after getting off to a good start. It happens — ask Mark Shuttleworth. It’s not time to relax yet.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

OpenSearchCon Europe

ATO Meetup: AI 3-in-1: Agents, RAG, and Local Models

Open Expo Europe Congress 2025

Nextcloud Summit 2025

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China

Posts published by “Christine Hall”

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

Secure Linux Systems Require Savvy Users

Only FOSSers ‘Get’ FOSS

King Ellison Abdicates As Oracle CEO

Redefining the Public Library Using Open Source Ideas

Hello World: Videos That Teach Linux To Kids