I went to the Ohio Linux Fest this year to give the closing keynote address to somewhere around 300 folks. And trust me…this will show…
Posts published by “Ken Starks”
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
I spent four days last week attending Ohio LinuxFest 2014, one of the busiest and most successful Linux shows in the country. It was my honor and privilege to deliver the closing keynote this year, and much of what I said either alluded to or squarely addressed our trust in free open source software.
That should be a no-brainer, right? I mean, GNU/Linux, or just “Linux”, is rooted in FOSS applications and principle.
Except when it’s not.
Here’s what I want to know. Is replacing a well known application in Linux with a crippled version acceptable when it’s done in the name of stability? I’ll go ahead and place myself in front of you for scorn and castigation by admitting that I’ve been a member of the Slashdot community since 2002. Everyone has a sig line, right? Mine was thoroughly honed to be as concise a possible:
“Windows assumes you are an idiot…Linux demands proof.”
In other words, for the most part, Linux users are in complete control of everything in/on their system. Linux will allow you to completely bugger your installation, because as a user you have the responsibility to know what you are doing. Fools are not suffered gladly when using Linux. You wanna play with the rm command? Go ahead…it’s your computer.
For a while now, I have been planning to attend Ohio LinuxFest in 2014. It is one of the largest and most prestigious Linux events on anyone’s calendar. Attending OLF 2014 will afford me a chance to meet some people I have yet to meet…in the flesh anyway. There are people that I have worked and collaborated with since 2008 and I’ve never met them in person. Ohio LinuxFest is to be that opportunity.
What took me by surprise was an invitation to be the closing keynote speaker. “Surprised” isn’t nearly adequate. For almost a week afterward, I checked my inbox several times a day, waiting for the apologetic message that they had sent the email to the wrong person.
Nope, they meant me. The email with travel arrangements was in my name. Columbus, here I come.
I am flattered and humbled by the invitation. I was also asked if I would attend the Keynote Dinner on the first night. The Keynote Dinner? That’s when people pay to sit with you and other speakers during dinner. Really? Someone will pay to have dinner with me? Heck, the best I hoped for was being able to stick someone else with my dinner tab.
But to me, Ohio LinuxFest isn’t about a public speaking opportunity, although I am going to have a lot of fun with it. Attending the Ohio LinuxFest is going to be a chance to talk to people, to shake hands with…to hug old friends. It will be a chance to gather with those who understand the amazing thing we do as a truly global community.
We knew it was coming several months ago. At first, just from flimsy rumors, but then mention of the free Time Warner speed upgrade began showing up on credible news sites. Credible enough for me to call Time Warner and find out where these upgrades would take place. When I found out that our small town of Taylor, Texas was included in the upgrade area, I became separated by only 3 degrees from Happy Dance.
When my euphoria dropped to a more manageable level, I took some time to mull it over. Specifically, I was asking myself why Time Warner would include small towns almost fifty miles away from the city in this upgrade? I mean…gifts, horses, mouths and all that. I thought it was a legitimate question.
I wasn’t able to make any sense of it until someone ‘splained it to me.
Exactly three weeks ago today I caught myself before hitting the “share” button on my Google Plus stream. My intent was to complain about some thing or another. I believe it was an out loud groan about a USB wireless device not working out of the box with Linux. I think I was going to triangulate on Broadcom’s insistence on making wireless a real headache.
And yeah, it doesn’t take that much to get a Broadcom chip working in most cases. Unless you are installing Linux at a friend’s house or another place that doesn’t have a wired connection. Then you’re pretty much sunk. The popup says that the wireless will work once you connect to the package manager. Uh, what if I am not located near a wired connection? That’s kinda why I wanted to connect to the web anyway you friggin’ ijit.
Let’s say it together…you’re pretty much sunk. Still. In 2014. Sunk.
There are a lot of other things that are deserving of our collective ire. Wireless shouldn’t have been one of them for me. I chastised myself for throwing my own little private snit concerning something so trivial. If you count back the years with me, the kernel update to 2.27 saw wireless go from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Or it did for the most part anyway. It was an important mile marker for desktop Linux.
Three a.m. can be an interesting time to be in a 24 hour Denny’s Restaurant. The clientèle can range from graveyard shift workers on their lunch break to people who have spent all night partying. I never did understand the “Let’s go to Denny’s” mindset after a night of drinking. Why would I want to ruin a $100.00 drinking spree with a $4.00 pancake breakfast?
Of course, the closest thing to alcohol I put in my mouth most days is mouth wash. I honestly don’t miss the hangovers. Neither do I miss the round of apologies I usually had to make the next day for the dumb stuff I had done the night before.
So, sitting at the counter at 3:20 a.m. working on my third cup of coffee, I watched an older gentleman grow more and more frustrated with the laptop in front of him. After a bit, he pulled an old flip phone from his shirt pocket and left a message when the party did not answer.
“James, this is Ed. Give me a call when you get up. This laptop is going blue screen again.”
Decency…it’s what’s for dinner forums.
It wasn’t but a few days ago that I approached the KDE community in Google Plus to ask a question. In asking that question, I included a screenshot to present a graphical representation of my problem. Three community members responded right away. The first two responses were legitimate queries: questions seeking to gather information needed to calculate an effective attack vector. The third response was…well, not so much.
“Stop, I can’t. My eyes are bleeding. x_x “
The remark about “eyes bleeding” was obviously a reaction to a perceived lack of aesthetics in the screenshot. And yeah, it pissed me off. I didn’t seek a critique on my icon set or color scheme. I was asking how to fix my friggin’ frappin’ problem.
With my verbal weapons cache set to full snark, I proceeded to dress the commenter down for the misplaced and unhelpful comment. I trimmed and honed every word so that my obvious displeasure at the opinion would not be mistaken for anything else.
There are specific and discrete techniques that can help you call someone a jerk. I used a method designed so that the target momentarily believes that you are a nice guy, while everyone else in proximity is checking their clothing for blood spatter. I have become a master of this technique. Whether that’s good or bad, I dunno. It is what it is.
That wasn’t the end of it, however.
I’ve spent my time in the tech support trenches…and someone else’s time as well. Please mark my dues paid in full. I’ve worked from the script-reader doing basic trouble-shooting, up to floor supervisor and level three support. My point? Not everybody who works support at a call center is an idiot, but some certainly are…
Since 2005, I have helped financially-disadvantaged kids get computers in their homes. While it’s become a cliché in the past few years, the “digital divide” most certainly exists. Since our early days of Komputers4Kids, The HeliOS Project and now Reglue, the gap between the tech haves and have-nots remains a problem.
Way more than many of us would think.
With that being established, I want to take a walk down memory lane…to let’s say 2005.
Back then, getting a Linux computer bolted-up to broadband internet was straight forward. Even nine years ago, the biggest challenge to getting Time Warner or eternal-hell-and-damnation Comcast routers online might have been to reboot the router.
Maybe. The majority of the time, not even that.
So imagine my surprise when I wasn’t able to get one of our established Reglue kids online. The oldest boy, Rex, had been using his Reglue computer for four years and it was time for an upgrade. I was working with a brand new Time Warner modem and wireless router, out of the box. I even went back in and made sure I was accessing the modem properly. I was. This task shouldn’t have taken ten minutes and I was now on minute thirty.
I have not paid attention to my birthday for over 30 years.
Personally, I think it’s a bit arrogant of me to put any significance on this random day or to even acknowledge it as anything other than just another day. I don’t think this way about other people’s birthdays. I celebrate with them on their special days. It’s just that on my birthday I would just as soon go about my bid’ness like I did yesterday or the day before.
Something has changed about the way I look at birthdays now. I’ve often said that the only reason humans “invented” time was to mark the progress of our inevitable demise or, in my case, proximity to almost passing.
While reading my email and catching up with Google+ posts this morning, I happened upon an article by Jim Lynch. I enjoy Jim’s writing and this morning’s offering didn’t disappoint. The opening of the article announced the contents succinctly:
“In today’s open source roundup: Is the systemd controversy a battle of the old versus the young? Plus: Which Linux distros do you consider innovative? And a journalist spends a week using Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.”
Which Linux distros do you consider innovative?
A lot of them actually.