Posts published by “Larry Cafiero”
Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
Paul Harvey — he was a radio commentator in decades past, kids (check him out on Wikipedia) — used to end many of his radio broadcasts with, “. . . so now, you know the rest of the story.”
Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.
My first Southern California Linux Expo was SCALE 7x, where I was a booth dude for the Fedora Project. The reason I bring this up…
It’s been one of those years, and with 2015 being the 13th year for the Southern California Linux Expo — hence SCALE 13x — you might expect that superstition would be rearing its ugly head.
I can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.
Linux Questions — the place you go where you really need a Linux or FOSS question answered because, well, most of the smart FOSS folks are there answering them — released the results of its Members Choice Awards for 2015.
So when the membership of LQ speaks — or at least votes on FOSS programs — you should probably listen. Don’t take my word for it: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols thinks so, too.
There were some expected results: For example, LibreOffice wins the Office Suite category by a ton, garnering 86 percent of the vote. To break this down, that’s nearly 9 in 10 folks favoring LibreOffice to the second-place finisher, Apache OpenOffice, and the others.
Same with categories like Browser of the Year — Firefox, need we say more? — with the blazing vulpini taking 57 percent in a crowded field. Same for Android, the Mobile Distribution of the Year which finished 40 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher. Even vim, at 30 percent in a crowded field, heads up the Text Editor category with three times the votes of Emacs.
As we get closer to the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x for those of you keeping score at home — it bears mentioning that the largest community-run Linux/FOSS show in North America has grown to host a lot of other sub-events during the course of the four-day expo.
In years past, Ubuntu, Fedora, PostgreSQL and Chef held their own sessions at SCALE — Ubucon, Fedora Activity Day, PostgreSQL Days and Intro to Chef respectively — and they’ll be back this year. Highlighting the “event within an event” lineup at SCALE 13x are also a few others.
Most prominently, Puppet Labs is holding its Puppet Camp at SCALE 13x on Thursday, February 19. Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held around the world for people who are currently using or interested in using Puppet. Attendees have the opportunity to talk to a diverse group of Puppet users, benefit from presentations delivered by prominent community members, share experiences, and discuss potential implementations of Puppet with their peers. There is a separate registration for this all-day event, and more information can be found at the link above.
FOSS Week in Review
While linux.conf.au (held in New Zealand this year) is now in the record books and FOSDEM is currently happening in Brussels, the organizational team over at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) has had its proverbial and collective shoulder to the wheel for the last few months as the first Linux/FOSS event of the year in North America — SCALE 13x — is starting to shape up.
The SCALE 13x schedule was posted earlier this week, and for those more observant among you, you’ll notice an additional day this year. SCALE 13x begins on a Thursday — February 19 — and runs through Sunday, February 22. SCALE’s Thursday schedule will be dedicated to specialty session tracks, similar and in addition to the tracks that have traditionally populated the Friday schedule.
Due to the increasing attendance, SCALE has also extended the exhibit hall hours, which will now open on Friday, February 20, at 2 p.m. Saturday’s exhibit hall hours will remain the same, beginning at 10 a.m. and closing at 6 p.m. And on Sunday — traditionally a quieter day in general — SCALE 13x has opted to close the exhibit hall at 2 p.m., though sessions will continue to run on Sunday afternoon.
Ruth Suehle and a speaker to be named later (more than likely in the next 24 hours) will keynote at SCALE 13x. There are about 130 sessions in the four days, and just over 100 exhibitors.
FOSS Week in Review
One of the most discussed items of the week, arriving with much fanfare, comes from our friends at Canonical/Ubuntu, who brought you Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu Edge — oh wait, they said they’d bring them but never actually delivered — and who now wants to be the operating system behind the nebulously termed “Internet of Things.”
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols starts with a mea culpa in his ZDNet article for assuming that Ubuntu Core — Canonical’s entry in the Internet of Things operating systems — was “a pure server play.” The article, of course, outlines the plan, with details provided by Mark Shuttleworth himself. It’s definitely worth a read.
So let’s see how this flies in the wide world of FOSS….
Stephen Smoogen blogs recently that he’s pitching a proposal for a 64-bit only Fedora starting with Fedora 23 — that’s not the next one, but the one after that; maybe Fedora 24, if it is not possible by Fedora 23.
For those of you keeping score at home, Smoogen is a long-time Fedora contributor who now serves on Fedora’s EPEL Steering Committee. And EPEL? That’s what’s commonly known as Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, “a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL),” according to their wiki.
Editor’s note: As Ken Starks takes time to heal from his surgery, FOSS Force will run “The Best of Ken Starks” on Tuesday’s in his absence. These will feature some of the best articles from his Blog of HeliOS.
FOSS Week in Review
Most of you know already that my fellow FOSS Force correspondent — and my good friend — Ken Starks went under the surgical knife this week, as fellow FOSS Forcer Christine Hall reported yesterday. The short version of this story is that Ken’s surgery was successful — as successful as having your larynx and lymph nodes removed can be — and he is resting well in the intensive care unit.
My appeal is this: After reading Ken’s missives above, for those who are well-versed in text-to-speech software, I hope you can provide insights for options for Ken going forward. Go ahead and leave them in the comments below.
And Ken: Get well, soon. The Astros are making some moves in the free-agent market, and if you’re well enough in mid-May, the two-game Giants-Astros series at Minute Maid is on me.