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Posts published in “Desktops”

Moksha: Just an Enlightenment Fork or the Birth of a new Desktop?

When Bodhi Linux came out with version 3.1.0 a week or so ago, the distro’s founder and lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, made it clear on the Bodhi website that this was a milestone release.

“This release is a bigger deal for the Bodhi team than our previous update releases have been in the past,” he wrote. “The reason for this is because this release is the first to use the Moksha Desktop which we have forked from E17. Because it is built on the rock solid foundation that E17 provides, even this first release of the Moksha Desktop is stable and is something I feel comfortable using in a production environment.”

Bodhi Linux logoLearning of this, and being a big Bodhi fan, I was eager to download and install this new version to take the newly forked desktop for a spin, which I did earlier this week.

GNOME Is Old Enough To Vote

GNOME logoOn Saturday the popular desktop environment GNOME turned eighteen. Always looking for an excuse for chocolate cake and ice cream, this is a birthday I celebrated, even though I’m not a user.

It’s hard to believe that GNOME is only eighteen, since it seems as if it’s been around forever.

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

Good News, Bad News for Canonical & More…

FOSS Week in Review

It’s been a busy week on the Isle of Man, and elsewhere, so let’s not tarry and dive in, shall we?

Canonical Opens Ubuntu One: After dropping its Ubuntu One cloud storage service a year ago, Ars Techinca reports Canonical this week released the system’s file-syncing code under the Affero General Public License Version 3.

Ubuntu One logo“The code we’re releasing is the server side of what desktop clients connected to when syncing local or remote changes,” said Martin Albisetti, Canonical’s Director of Online Services, in a post on the Ubuntu site. “This is code where most of the innovation and hard work went throughout the years, where we faced most of the scaling challenges and the basis on which other components were built upon.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

LibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

FOSS Week in Review

LibreOffice 5 Ready for Prime Time: LibreOffice, the office suite of choice of yours truly and others in the FOSS field, is now in the starting blocks to take on the proprietary office suites. The Document Foundation announced this week the release of LibreOffice 5.0, with a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, the latest LO release offers better interoperability with proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, with new and improved filters to handle non standard formats.

libreofficsplash-300x85“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” said Michael Meeks, a director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

KDE Plasma Goes Mobile

While FOSS Force gave you a look at setting up KDE Plasma on the desktop in Don Parris’ article last week, KDE recently jumped into the mobile fray by announcing KDE Plasma Mobile at their Akademy conference this week in Spain.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Setting Up Shop With KDE’s Plasma

We’ve all seen those “screenshot tours” of FOSS desktops, but how about a real, guided tour of the Plasma (KDE) desktop? There are still a great many people who simply are not familiar with Plasma’s features. A large number of people never had any computer training, and when they find themselves in such an advanced environment, they feel completely lost. Many people can barely find their way around a single desktop; the concept of multiple virtual desktops is completely lost on them — never mind Plasma’s activities. So let’s take a little time and make some very basic changes to our desktop theme, and then organize our work. After all, that’s what activities are all about.

Some of my favorite features of Plasma are:

  • Customizability: we can change just about anything I want
  • Activities: allow us to organize our tasks into related groups
  • Virtual Desktops (workspaces in some environments): standard fare in FOSS desktops
  • Application Set: Kontact, Digikam, Kate, K3B and Amarok — the apps by which I live and die
Don Parris

Don Parris wears a Facility Services cape by day, and transforms into LibreMan at night. He has written numerous articles about free tech, and hangs out with the Cha-Ha crowd, learning about computer security. He also enjoys making ceviche with his wife, and writing about his travels in Perú.

CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood

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, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Linux & the Bling Factor

I’ve been kicking an idea around for a while now. I deemed it important enough to keep a notebook, a place where I could jot down my ideas and questions…maybe a profound revelation or two. I’ve collected ideas and thoughts concerning this topic from folks like Jim Zemlin, Dana Blankenhorn and Tom Adelstein. And while some conversations took place a while back, the input is no less valuable.

Linux's TuxI’ve spent a good deal of time, as well, kicking this around with my partner-in-ink Larry Cafiero. And some of the things I’ve taken away were not gotten face-to-face: Folks like Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Matt Hartley have discussed it through their preferred media in one way or another.

So what’s this big, important topic?

It boils down to to this: Are you hot…or not?

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

A Few Laps With Fedora 22

To great fanfare, Fedora 22 was released to the wider world yesterday. And to those who awaited it with bated breath, it does not disappoint.

A word to the uninitiated: As many of you already know, in the broadest terms, Fedora is a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developments in Fedora – and there are many, leading to its cutting-edge reputation (which wrongfully scares some users from using it; more on this later) – sooner or later end up on RHEL for the commercial market.

Fedora logoSince the introduction of Fedora.next — the umbrella program for the roadmap for the distro going forward — the distro comes in three basic flavors: Workstation, Server and Cloud. Workstation is the desktop/laptop version — and workstation version for businesses. Cloud and Server are pretty self-explanatory.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Linux Mint Xfce: Moving From Maya to Rebecca

Dammit, Clement Lefebvre, you and your team at Linux Mint have gone and done it. Y’all, and the folks at Xfce too. Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? I was perfectly fine and dandy with Maya and now you’ve gone and ruined it by coming out with something five times better. Thanks for ruining my Saturday. Thanks a lot.

Linux Mint Welcome Screen
The Welcome Screen shows up after boot until and contains links to useful information about Linux Mint.
Click image to enlarge.
Here’s the problem. For the last couple of years or so we’ve been using Mint’s Xfce edition of Maya (that would be version 13 for those who read the box scores) on nearly all of the machines here at FOSS Force. As Maya will be supported until 2017, we had absolutely no plans to make any upgrades until then, as taking time out for the tedious process of upgrading our machines isn’t one of my favorite things to do — and I’m the one who’d be doing the upgrading.

When the folks at Mint released a new LTS Xfce version (Qiana) in June of last year, followed by another LTS (Rebecca) in January, we didn’t much care. We were more than happy with Maya, and following the age old philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we decided to stay the course and keep using what we had until its sunset year arrived. As far as I was concerned, although approaching obsolescence, Maya was damned near perfect. How much better could the latest and greatest be?

However, you might notice that I write about Maya in the past tense. I confess. I killed her.

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

From Windows XP to Linux: Adding to the List

Yesterday on Datamation, Matt Hartley wrote what could best be described as a reminder piece about the folks using Windows XP at home or in small businesses having options when it comes to replacing that particular operating system, and that the best option — go ahead and say it with me — is Linux.

Hartley mentions an adequate lineup of distros — Linux Mint, Ubuntu MATE, PCLinuxOS, and Puppy Linux (okay, for the really old machines, I’ll go with that one) — but in the wide world of Linux, there are more. Several more. Okay, maybe more than several more.

I understand that Matt may not have wanted to get bogged down in a distro food fight, and while I enjoy that as much as the next guy or gal, I’m not looking to hurl edible projectiles either. But I don’t shy away from it either.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

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