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RMS Gets Award, OwnCloud Founder Resigns & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Also: Ubuntu gets ready for Yakkety Yak (don’t talk back), Tails has a new release with an updated TOR browser and Android apps are coming to a Chromebook near you.

Here in the Tar Heel State, MerleFest, featuring performances by John Prine and John Oates sans Daryl Hall, dominates the news. That’s mainly because there are no college hoops being played now that this year’s NCAA March Madness thing has been entered into the record books.

There’s not much talk about this year’s NCAA tourney around here anymore, as “we’re number two” just doesn’t have the proper ring to it. So we talk about other things instead, with how fast the grass is growing topping most people’s list and MerleFest a close second.

Me? I talk about FOSS, and there’s plenty to talk about this week…

DuckDuckGo Wants Answers to Linux Questions

The search engine that works to protect your privacy is looking for some Linux “Instant Answers” for programmers. Would they like some answers to everyday Linux questions as well?

DuckDuckGo, the search engine centered around privacy, is asking for the community’s help in improving its results for Linux related searches. On Wednesday, “Bill” with the Philidelphia based search engine company posted to the Linux subreddit asking for help from the community.

DuckDuckGo logo“DuckDuckGo’s focus is to become the best search engine for programmers,” Bill wrote, “and we’d love your help improving our open-source Linux Instant Answers. There’s currently a couple of cheat sheets here and here. We want to get some great feedback from the Reddit community for the developer, crashrane.”

Charlie Reisinger: Using FOSS to Empower Students

The Video Screening Room

When Pennsylvania’s Penn Manor High School launched the state’s largest free software learning program, they did it a little differently than most schools. As click-baity ads on FaceBook like to proclaim: You won’t believe what happened next.

Phil Shapiro

For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.

My Linux Desktop — Hither and Yawn

The Heart of Linux

Reflections of a once upon a time everyday Windows user.

It’s hard to remember the span of time when I sat in front of my Windows computer on a daily basis. I sat comfortable in the understanding that using my computer came with some non-negotiable requirements, like the constant vigilance against malware threats and my system bogging down from the antivirus software helping me belay those threats. Who doesn’t remember the ever-popular monthly defragging, and for me at least, a complete wipe and reinstallation of Windows every six to eight months.

Windows computer explodingThese things I accepted as a necessary part of using a computer every day.

A few Windows folks will surely chime in, saying that they have used Windows since Captain Kangaroo was a corporal. They’ll say that they never had to reinstall their system due to it becoming unstable, sometimes rebooting for no reason at all and then booting into a black screen. A black screen that would eventually correct itself if you got up to fix a sandwich and take the dog out. A black screen that gave you no frickin’ idea of what it was, why it happened or how to fix it.

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

Getting FOSS Text-to-Speech App Ready for Prime Time

The Heart of Linux

The lead developer of a new text-to-speech app based on MaryTTS talks about what’s been done and what remains to do.

It’s been a while now since we talked about creating a front end GUI to the open source text-to-speech program, MaryTTS. I have a personal stake in this, as I lost my larynx, and thus my voice, due to throat cancer.

FOSS text-to-speech front end
The front end of the new user interface for MaryTTS, a text-to-speech solution.

The state of text-to-speech software in the Linuxsphere is horrible. Don’t get me wrong, the software is out there and much of it is fairly good. Where we fall down is that it requires using the command line to get much of it to work. Often TTS software in Linux comes in parts and pieces that have to be assembled in order to get it to work, and the terminal is where most of that work needs to be done.

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

Mixing Linux and ZFS, LinuxFest NorthWest and More…

FOSS Week in Review

With Bellingham, Washington getting geared up for next weekend’s show, can OSCON’s performance in Austin be far behind?

The Week in Review on a Saturday? Don’t worry, I’ve got a note from the phone company.

On Thursday afternoon, our phone company experienced a widespread outage of its fiber system, meaning FOSS Force had no telephone or Internet for about 24 hours. On Friday morning, I actually packed up a laptop and drove to the village of Pilot Mountain to use the secure We-Fi at my favorite coffee house, The Living Room, to edit and publish Phil Shapiro’s Friday column, and to finish editing and publishing another article which had originally been scheduled to go up on Thursday. Things are slowly getting back to normal, but I’m still behinder than I want to be.

But enough of the woes of FOSS Force. Let’s get on to some real FOSS news…

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

Will North Carolina’s HB2 Affect State’s Open Source Conferences?

While North Carolina’s HB2, the so called ‘bathroom bill,’ has already had a major negative economic effect on the state’s economy, it’s doubtful it will have much impact on the two major open source conferences held in the state.

At this point, how much effect the continuing economic backlash caused by the North Carolina General Assembly’s passage HB2, otherwise known as the “Bathroom Bill,” will have on the state’s two major open source conferences is anybody’s guess. Certainly, the past three weeks have not been good for operators of event venues in North Carolina, nor have they been good for the state’s bean counters, whose job is to make what the General Assembly spends balance with incoming tax revenue, which is certainly taking a hit in at least some counties.

Jamie Clayton as Nomi Marks
Transgender actress Jamie Clayton in her role as transgender ex-hacktivist Nomi Marks in the Netflix series “Sense8.”

Three weeks ago, on March 23, in a hastily called special session of the state’s General Assembly, HB2 was passed as a knee jerk response to a local ordinance enacted in Charlotte which, among other things, gave transgendered people the legal right to use the public restroom of their chosen gender, regardless of their gender at birth. HB2 takes away that right, but doesn’t stop there. It ends up limiting the rights of all North Carolinians except straight, white and Christian males.

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

Teaching New Linux on Old Hardware

The Heart of Linux

It seems, according to this, that the customer service offered by Reglue far exceeds that offered by any big box retail outlet — and the clients get preinstalled Linux to boot.

In 2005, I found myself at a career crossroad. A career-ending injury threw the biggest of monkey wrenches into the works for me. I owned my own business and business was good, but it was only good with a maximum of four employees, counting myself. I attempted to become a “gentleman” owner but I found that paying the extra man proved to be costly as well as difficult to administer. That injury led to me doing what I do now.

I give computers to kids who cannot afford one.

The decision I faced was life-changing either way I went. My inclination was to go back to school and get the certs I needed to work in the Linux administration field. I already had the base knowledge and experience; it was just a matter of jumping through the hoops to get a piece of paper saying I already knew what I was learning. Not that I wouldn’t learn a thing or two along the way.

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

OSVDB Shuts Down, Firefox Add-ons Unsafe & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Bubbling beneath the headlines in this week’s FOSS news review: ownCloud gets a new release, the Linux kernel grows by a half million lines since January 1, a new OS for the Pi 3 and FOSS Force welcomes a new columnist.

It seems as if even some FOSS writers have been buying into “Microsoft luvs Linux” this week, as some have been been bending over backwards to applaud the Ubuntu connection with bash on Windows. I only have one thing to say about that: Windows with bash support is still Windows.

In the real FOSS news this week…

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

Xubuntu Based Emmabuntüs 3, Version 1.03, Released

Emmabuntüs is a GNU/Linux distribution that’s definitely set apart from the crowd, as its developers are motivated less by a love for technology than by a connection with humanity.

The Emmabuntüs Community today announced the third maintenance release of Emmabuntüs 3, version 1.03, based on Xubuntu 14.04.4. Like its *buntu namesake, the distro ships with the Xfce desktop by default, but also includes LXDE as an option.

Emmabuntüs screenshotWhat sets Emmabuntüs apart from other GNU/Linux distributions is the fact that it’s a distro with a mission. The informal community responsible for the distribution initially came together sometime before 2012 with the purpose of creating a distribution to simplify the task of refurbishing used computers to be given to charity organizations, with the key recipient being Emmaus, a secular international organization founded in Paris in 1949 by Catholic priest and Capuchin friar Abbé Pierre to combat poverty and homelessness.

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