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Posts published in “Distros”

Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

If first impressions can be trusted, Manjaro Linux would seem to be a Linux lover’s dream. But how much can you really tell about a distro on a short test drive?

Distro of the Week

Wow! It’s a good thing I never act on love-at-first-sight impulses. About an hour ago, as I’m writing this, I rebooted the old System76 laptop we use for testing after downloading and installing Manjaro 16.06.1 “Daniella.” First impressions are everything, it’s said, and I am completely wowed.

Manjaro Linux Welcome screen
The Manjaro Linux Welcome screen.

Five Favorite Linux Distros

Like everybody, we love “five best” lists. Trouble is, how can we come up with a five best list of anything when we haven’t even begun to look at them all? What we can do is list “five favorites,” like we’ve done with this list of five favorite Linux distros.

I’ve never been a distro hopper. Not at all. I started out with Mandrake back around 2002, and stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until 2010. When it became obvious that the distro was in serious financial dodo and wasn’t likely to be around much longer, I moved to PCLinuxOS. This move was made partly because the distro had started life as a fork of Mandrake/Mandriva, keeping me in familiar territory, but mostly because it was one of two distros I could find that supported the Wi-Fi on an old Dell laptop I was using at the time. In 2012 I moved to Bodhi Linux after falling in love with the simple elegance of the Enlightenment 17 desktop, and the next year switched over to Linux Mint Xfce edition when we finally got around to setting up a full time office for FOSS Force.

Tux Linux distros

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

IBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…

Also included: FCC requires TP-Link to allow users to install open source firmware on routers, five new distro releases, new releases of LibreOffice and KDE Plasma, and Microsoft releases Skype 1.3 Alpha for Linux.

FOSS Week in Review

Maybe because we’re in the last 30 days or so of real summer — as opposed to calendar summer — or perhaps because most ‘Mericans are glued to their TVs as the Clinton/Trump heavyweight bout gets underway in earnest, but this has been a slow news week in the FOSS world. However, there are some notable items worth mentioning.

Wi-FiFCC supports open source Wi-Fi firmware. For the last several months many open sourcers have been up in arms because it looked as if the door was being closed on open source on Wi-Fi routers after the agency changed it’s rules around radio interference on the 5 GHz band, making it difficult for router makers to allow users to install open source firmware on their routers. All along, the FCC claimed that shutting out open source use wasn’t part of the game plan, but we FOSSers are a suspicious lot and we weren’t buying it.

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

When Slashdot Was the Hub for FOSS News and Discussion

The original Slashdot crew was declared redundant in early 2016 by the site’s latest owner, Slashdot Media. Timothy Lord was the last of the early Slashdot editors to be let go, and has posted more stories on Slashdot than anyone else, ever, so we turned to him to learn how and why Slashdot helped the FOSS movement grow and eventually infiltrate mainstream IT.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Starting in the last years of the last century, when Linux and free software were first making their mark on the world, a website called Slashdot was the king-hell news and discussion site for such things, along with a variety of other topics that interested the kind of people you might meet at a LUG meeting or in the CS department of your local university. The original Slashdot tagline (no longer visible on the site) was “News for nerds, stuff that matters.” And one of the people who worked on Slashdot during those heady days was Timothy Lord, who is such a devout Linux person that he has a Tux tattoo (which we forgot to have him show in the video, darn it).

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

Software Freedom in Kosovo, Waiting for Xfce Mint & More…

Also included: Canonical joins The Document Foundations advisory board, Chromium coming to Fedora, OpenVZ now a complete Linux distro and GNU Linux-libre Kernel 4.7 released.

FOSS Week in Review

It’s not FOSS, but I reckon the biggest story in tech this week, ignoring claims of Russia hacking for Trump, is the sale of Yahoo to Verizon for $4.8 billion. Considering that traffic watcher Alexa says the site is the fifth most visited address on the web, that seems like something of a bargain to me. Add to that Yahoo’s prime Silicon Valley real estate and the price seems to be in the “it fell of the truck” category. The sale puts Verizon in control of both America Online and Yahoo, so I suspect we’ll be seeing Verizon trying to compete with Google and Bing for a share of the search advertising market.

Meanwhile in the world of FOSS…

LibreOffice logoLibreOffice has been in the news this week. The big story, which we first heard on Tuesday, is that Canonical has joined The Document Foundation’s advisory board. In case you’re new in town, TDF is the nonprofit that controls the development of LibreOffice.

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

Our First Look at Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon

It’s been almost a month since Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” was released, so we decided to take it for a spin and have our first ever look at the Cinnamon desktop.

The FOSS Force Distro Review

Being a longtime Linux Mint user, I was happy at the end of last month when lead developer Clement Lefebvre and the gang released Linux Mint 18, otherwise known as “Sarah.” As always, the new Mint was first released with two desktops that are based on GNOME, Mint’s default Cinnamon and the more retro MATE. Those who prefer Xfce (my personal choice) and KDE will have to wait a while longer while the developers get them polished and ready to work and play well with the rest of Mint.

Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon

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

Four Alternatives to Raspbian and Ubuntu MATE

While Raspbian and Ubuntu MATE remain the go-to distros for many Raspberry Pi users, our Pi guy reminds us that there are others, and offers us a look at four alternatives.

The Raspberry Pi Report

It seems like every article one reads about the Raspberry Pi always makes a reference to Raspbian. If not, then the writer will probably write about how wonderful Ubuntu MATE is on the Raspberry Pi. Which begs the question: Are there any other OS options for the Raspberry Pi? While there’s nothing wrong with either distro, we should remember that the main appeal of using Linux is the freedom and amount of choice that is offered to the user. With that being said, here are four other distros that offer a great user experience on the Raspberry Pi.

Isaac Carter

In addition to hosting a Raspberry Pi meetup in Washington D.C., Isaac Carter is a co-host on mintCast. He’s also a software engineer who enjoys working with Java, JavaScript, and GNU/Linux. When he’s not coding, you can find him reading on any number of subjects or on the golf course.

Respinning Linux

A talk with Randy Noseworthy, the man behind the Linux respins on the old computers that Reglue makes new again.

The Heart of Linux

It started back in 2009, the first year of Lynn Bender’s fantastic brainstorm “Linux Against Poverty.” Lynn’s idea and subsequent involvement with our organization, then named The HeliOS Project, would infuse our effort with an energy and inventory we still rely on today.

Respin LinuxBender contacted me early in 2009 and proposed we organize an event to bring the greater Austin community, the Austin Tech community and HeliOS under one roof. We would ask people to bring unused or broken computers to our event. Through Lynn’s network connections, a 6th Street bar owner gave up his bar for an entire Saturday. That, in turn, allowed over 50 Austin geeks to converge on 6th Street to set up stations and transform the broken computers coming in the front door into fully-functioning computers going out the back door and into our waiting truck.

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

Ubuntu Hacked, Linux Journal Extremists & More…

Also included: Microsoft shows love of Linux with gift of Skype and Torvalds continues to be Torvalds.

FOSS Week in Review

The biggest Linux story this week by mainstream tech sites’ standards was Skype working to include Linux users in its installed base by releasing a new Linux client to replace obsolete software that hadn’t been updated in at least two years. According to many of the comments on FOSS Force’s coverage, Skype might consider itself a day late and a dollar short.

The big problem, of course, is Skype’s ownership by Microsoft, whose love of Linux is so far unrequited. Add to that the fact that Skype, like Microsoft, doesn’t have the monopoly it once had and the result is a less than enthusiastic response. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if Ubuntu doesn’t start installing the Skype client by default once it comes out of beta.

Now on to some news that’s really newsworthy…

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

Is 32-bit Nearing End-of-Life at Some Linux Distros?

At least three Linux distros have already quit releasing 32-bit versions, and Ubuntu seems to be standing in line to do the same. Is the end at hand for 32-bit mainstream distros?

News Analysis

We have three computers that see regular duty here at FOSS Force. Two are 64-bit laptops, one which is primarily reserved for out-of-the-office trips and the other used exclusively to test distros and software for reviews. The heavy lifting is done by our old 32-bit HP desktop.

In a month or so, when the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 18, otherwise known as “Sarah,” is released, we’ll be backing up our data and doing a clean install on the desktop. This will probably be the last operating system upgrade this computer will ever see. Sarah will be supported until 2021, and by then, this old computer will most likely have already given up the ghost. Even if it’s still running, however, it’s doubtful there will be a 32-bit version of Mint to run on it, as Canonical will probably have ceased development of the 32-bit version of its distro by then.

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

VMware Makes Open Source Move, SCALE Gets Ready & More…

Also included: New releases for Skolelinux and Network Security Toolkit, KDE releases Plasma 5.7 and our writer eats crow.

FOSS Week in Review

A few weeks back I told you I was writing a distro review “for another website.” I did, and it’s done. And since I promised that I’d link you to it when it went up, I’ll reluctantly tell you that it’s a review of Fedora 24 on Distrowatch. Why am I reluctant? Because I made a big gaping error in the review, that’s why (yup, I’m fallible, just like everyone else). Until tonight or tomorrow when I’ll have time to post a mi culpa to the comments on Distrowatch, I’ll leave it to you to figure out where I erred, which I figure many of you will do quite handily, astute bunch that you are.

SCALE 15X logoThe review on Distrowatch was part of a one time trade that had Distrowatch’s Jesse Smith writing a review of Tiny Core Linux for FOSS Force. We got the better end of that stick, because so far no errors have revealed themselves in Smith’s review. I was hoping to write another review for Distrowatch in the future, but if that’s to be possible I’ll probably have to eat more than a single slice of humble pie.

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

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