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Linux Foundation Scholarships: No Excuse Now

By Larry Cafiero on June 18, 2015 |

Community and Operating Systems

Linux Foundation Scholarships: No Excuse NowLinux Foundation Logo

You’ve read the articles: “Linux sysadmins in demand,” yadda yadda yadda. You’ve been using Linux for some time and have been thinking, “Gee, I wish I could make a living with Linux.”

You can get the training; but it costs so much, you might say. Well, now you can get a scholarship, so there’s no excuse not to go for it.

Linux Foundation LogoThe Linux Foundation, ever in the forefront of shaping the future of Linux, has announced the 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program, which aims to provide educational funds “to up-and-coming developers and sysadmins who show incredible promise…but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses,” according to a page on the Foundation’s website.

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Is the FOSS Infrastructure Crumbling?Heartbleed logo

Is the FOSS Infrastructure Crumbling?

By Christine Hall on June 17, 2015 |

Community and Security

It appears as if much of the open source infrastructure we depend on is suffering from neglect. That’s the message brought to the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) by David Nalley. Listening to his talk, “The Tragedy of Open Source,” it was hard not to think that some of our infrastructure projects are beginning to resemble some disintegrating municipal water and sewer systems, or maybe compare his examples with our crumbling roads and bridges. Nalley is a South Carolina based “recovering sysadmin” who now wears many hats at Apache as well as being an employee at Citrix.

Heartbleed logoThe neglect he mentions has caused more than a few near misses that fell inches short of disaster, with two major incidents happening last year alone.

Take the Heartbleed vulnerability that affected openSSL. Nalley points out that last year when the bug was discovered, there was only one person, earning a mere twenty grand a year, actively maintaining the openSSL project. Also last year, there was only one person maintaining bash when Shellshock was discovered.

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
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SELF Saturday: Linux Under a ‘Carolina Blue’ SkyFrancois Dion

SELF Saturday: Linux Under a ‘Carolina Blue’ Sky

By Christine Hall on June 14, 2015 |

Community, News, Operating Systems and Software

The SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was packed on Saturday, meaning that Jeremy Sands (who told me that day two is always much busier than opening day) knows SELF. Maybe I should’ve asked his advice when I was booking my room in Charlotte. Here’s what I learned on my own: There’s a big difference between a Red Roof and a Red Hat. The later is dependable. The former took three tries to get me into a room that was kinda/sorta what I’d reserved — with Wi-Fi that didn’t work more often than it did.

Francois Dion
Francois Dion giving his presentation as Jupiter Broadcasting handles live streaming in the foreground.
Back at SELF, the place was hoppin’ when I arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and the first presentation was still a half hour away.

Francois Dion’s keynote, “Team Near Space Circus: Computing at 80,000 Feet” was nothing if not fascinating, and I was happy to get filled in on the details of a story I knew a little about because it happened in my backyard, meaning the Winston-Salem, N.C. area (in Mocksville, if you’re planning to take the test).

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 readingSELF Saturday: Linux Under a ‘Carolina Blue’ Sky
In Search of SELF in the Queen CityTom Callaway

In Search of SELF in the Queen City

By Christine Hall on June 12, 2015 |

Business, Community, News and Operating Systems

Day one of this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was kind of slow, without the bone crushing crowds I expect to see at an open source conference. However, talking with the go-to person at SELF, Jeremy Sands, I understand that this is normal for this conference. It seems that Charlotte is a city with a strong work ethic, keeping the crowd away until the weekend. Still, nearly five hundred in attendance isn’t deserving of sneers — especially on a “slow” day.

SouthEast LinuxFest 2015Somehow I managed to get up on time to make the hour and a half trip from my house to the Charlotte area in plenty of time for the 9 A.M. opening, groggy from only getting about three hours sleep, then wondered why I bothered arriving early. After all, the first presentation I planned to attend wasn’t until 11:30, and with no keynote address scheduled for Friday morning, that left me with a lot of time on my hands.

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
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CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes HollywoodTexas Linux Fest logo

CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood

By Larry Cafiero on June 12, 2015 |

Community, Desktops, Media and News

FOSS Week in Review

As we get ready for a wild weekend of Linux, barbecue and guns at SouthEast LinuxFest — and FOSS Force’s Christine Hall will be on the scene reporting from Charlotte — we should first go to our eye in the sky to see what the traffic is like during FOSS rush hour for presentation proposals.

Texas Linux Fest logo
The stars at night are big and bright (clap clap clap clap) . . . Texas Linux Fest is in August.
CFP Jam: Yep, looking down from the FOSS Force traffic chopper, they’re bumper to bumper on the Call for Papers highway today in what can best be described as a rare CFP rush hour in the FOSS realm. In order of closing, down in the Lone Star State, Texas Linux Fest‘s CFP has a deadline looming on June 28, with the festivities at the San Marcos Convention Center is beautiful downtown San Marcos, Texas on Aug. 21-22. Then Ohio LinuxFest has a deadline of July 17, since OLF is held on Oct. 2-3 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center (begging the question, is there a Lesser Columbus Convention Center?) in downtown Columbus, Ohio. To add to the mix, the Southern California Linux Expo — that’s SCALE 14x in 2016 — is a month early in January this time around and, as such, the CFP was moved back and opened yesterday. Deadline for the SCALE 14x CFP is Oct. 30 for the Jan. 21-24, 2016, event at the Pasadena Convention Center.

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

Continue readingCFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood
SourceForge Not Making A Graceful ExitSourceForge logo

SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit

By Christine Hall on June 11, 2015 |

Business, Community, Internet, Software and Web Apps

If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

SourceForge logoNewer converts to open source probably don’t know much about the site, but it wasn’t long ago when Linux users were very aware of SourceForge and how to use the service, at least well enough to download software — perhaps more aware than they wanted to be. It was the go-to site when looking for a program not available in a particular distro’s repository. Not anymore. Not for a while. These days, the more important projects have either migrated to GitHub or are hosting their own.

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
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SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & BarbecueSouthEast LinuxFest 2009

SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

By Christine Hall on June 8, 2015 |

Community, Interview, News and Operating Systems

The FOSS Force Interview

From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

SouthEast LinuxFest's Jeremy Sands
SouthEast LinuxFest’s Jeremy Sands in 2010.
At the very least, I expect to find that at SELF even the software will be southern fried and smothered with gravy. That’s because SELF intends to be more than just another LinuxFest. It intends to be a celebration of southern living, hence the guns and barbecue. Presumably, grits will be served at breakfast, and Southern Comfort and Bourbon will be available at the after parties.

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
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Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU SouthSELF 2013

Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

By Larry Cafiero on June 3, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

Here and elsewhere, like it or not, I’ve compared those who travel from FOSS expo to FOSS expo as the spiritual kin to Deadheads following the Grateful Dead across the country while the band toured. Needless to say, I don’t mean this in a negative way — it’s not like we all show up unwashed for days in tie-dye T-shirts (unless it’s from a vendor at a previous show) in VW Microbuses — but it’s more of a movable feast where reunions take place every few months with far-flung friends and, as it always happens, great presentations take place and folks of all stripes.

SELF 2013
From SELF 2013. Photo by Eugene Mah.
So we can also boil it down into a phrase coined by Robert Earl Keen: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”

That said, the next stop on the Magical Linux-y Tour will be in North Carolina — you’ll see the link in the upper right of this page — the SouthEast LinuxFest, known more commonly by its acronym SELF (FOSS Force is a Supporting Sponsor), takes place next weekend in Charlotte. For three days, June 12-14 to be precise, Jeremy Sands and the rest of the crew at SELF bring Linux, BSD and FOSS to what has lately become my favorite geographical location, by name: the GNU/South.

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

Continue readingBeing SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South
Ubuntu: Show Me the Money & Kubuntu Lead OustedJonathan Ridell

Ubuntu: Show Me the Money & Kubuntu Lead Ousted

By Larry Cafiero on May 29, 2015 |

Business, Community, Distros and News

FOSS Week in Review

Well, so much for an easy week. I was ready to kick back, give Fedora 22 a further test run and pop open a cold one (root beer, of course) while I wrapped up the week with items like Jim Whitehurst’s busy week which included, among other things, an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” a review of Bodhi Linux on about.com, of all places, which I found interesting in a quirky way. And maybe — just maybe — we could all talk about Richard Stallman claiming the OS we all use should be called GNU, oblivious to the fact that this particular train left the station, oh, 20 years ago or thereabout.

Jonathan Ridell
Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell
But no. Now I have to make popcorn, sit back, and watch this drama unfold.

The $143,000 question: Softpedia reported earlier this week that there’s a unaccounted-for $143,000 in donations to Ubuntu that the Ubuntu Community Council can’t seem to find. While this doesn’t seem to be a new story, if mailing list traffic is any indication, it is an issue that does pique the interest for — what do you call them again? Oh yeah — answers.

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

Continue readingUbuntu: Show Me the Money & Kubuntu Lead Ousted
Nitpicking LinuxArguing Linux

Nitpicking Linux

By Ken Starks on May 26, 2015 |

Community, Operating Systems and Politics

We can be a quarrelsome people. We can. All of us. Millions of us.

Millions of people, representing different cultures, languages, religions and political or moral belief structures. But somehow we pull it off — this whole “Linux thing.” From where I stand, this cohesion may well be noted by people hundreds of years from now as a model of cooperation.

Arguing LinuxYeah, that’s a stretch but work with me here.

To press the point just a bit more, there are times when I sit back in amazement when considering what we have accomplished to this point. And indeed, we are taking part in a history changing endeavor.

Dethroning a king can be messy.

However, at the micro level…the place where we stand face to face…I don’t think many of us see the macro, the historical value of what it is we do. It’s difficult to see the whole ship when you are painting it from two feet away.

Which is leading up to this…

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

linuxlock.blogspot.com/
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