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Posts published in “Distros”

Tux Paint’s Birthday, RMS Keynotes SeaGL & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Yep, it looks like the end of the week is upon us once again, and with it there has been a lot of news in the FOSS realm. What you might have missed, if you weren’t paying attention, is the following:

Happy 13th, Tux Paint: There was reason to break out the candles this week — 13 of ’em — and put them on a cake before saying “Happy Birthday” to Tux Paint. Tux Paint was first released to the wider world on June 16, 2002. Now that it’s a teenager, we can see what fantastic progress the New Breed Software folks have achieved in this time.

Tux Paint Logo
Tux Paint turned 13 this week, and also became available for Android. Great going, New Breed Software!
FOSS Force — or rather, I — wrote about Tux Paint back in August of last year, and on its birthday back on Tuesday, there was a note on the site that said, and I quote, “We’ve just learned that Tux Paint (based on what will become the 0.9.23 version) has been created for Android, and is available for free in the Google Play Store!”

Advertising Desktop Linux

It ceased to be funny about the third time I read it. “Is this the year of the Linux desktop?”

Uh, yeah it is. Just like it was in 2014, 2013, 2012…It just depends on whose desktop you are talking about.

The topic came up when an old friend, Richard, and I began an email exchange to catch up after a number of years. He’s a senior Linux admin for one of the major New York City hospitals and the topic turned to some things we’ve noted over time. We talked about how Linux isn’t. It isn’t in the public awareness. It isn’t in stores. It isn’t offered by OEMs in any real quantity. It isn’t visible at all. Richard stated that it was probably better that way. Why he said that, I don’t know. I’ll have to bring that up again, but I have a fairly good idea.

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

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

Dell Bets On Ubuntu

Every time we run a story on FOSS Force touching on Canonical’s financial health, such as Larry Cafiero’s notice a week or so ago about Shuttleworth’s musings on a potential IPO, the Ubuntu naysayers come up from their basements to express the opinion that Shuttleworth is finally getting tired of flushing money down the toilet and is getting ready to put a padlock on the door and go home.

Inspiron 14 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition
Dell labels this on its website as “Inspiron 14 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition.”
That’s not going to happen, because that would be snapping defeat out of the arms of victory. Shuttleworth knows the smell of victory — that’s how he came to be worth $500 million — and Ubuntu finally seems to be primed for success.

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

Mandriva 1998-2015

MandrakeMandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.

The distro began life as Mandrake, but was forced to change its name due to a trademark dispute with the Hearst newspaper chain, which owned the rights to the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. Mandriva was a combination of the original name and Conectiva, a Brazilian distro the company purchased for $2.3 million in 2005.

Ubuntu: Show Me the Money & Kubuntu Lead Ousted

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, 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

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

SCALE 14X Moves, Canonical Considers IPO & More…

FOSS Week in Review

While the week started out with some of us waxing nostalgic about penguins on racing cars, it seems that the march of progress and onward-and-upward improvement continues, if news from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is of any indication.

SCALE moving: According to a highly placed source in the SCALE hierarchy — of course, that would be me — SCALE has outgrown a series of hotels over the last several years, and the 2016 edition of the expo will be held at the Pasadena Convention Center from Jan. 21-24, 2016.

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

Ubuntu & the Windows Subscription Gambit

If you believe what you read, which isn’t always a good idea, Nadella & Company is good with the fact that Windows’ market share is shrinking and the company is more than willing to share market space with others, like OS X, Chrome OS, and presumably Linux. The common knowledge is that the folks in Redmond have come to accept the future and understand that Windows will no longer continue being the cash cow on which an empire was built. Microsoft, going forward, will be more humble than it was in the past and will be leaving its plans for world domination behind.

Ubuntu logoI suspect this new Microsoft is humble like a fox, or more precisely, like a particular lab rat I used to watch on television: that each night as the lights are being dimmed, somewhere in the maze of the Redmond campus an assistant turns to Satya Nadella and says, “What are we going to do tomorrow, boss?”

“The same thing we do every day, Pinky — try to take over the world.”

In other words, the humbleness is a distraction and Microsoft’s new face is merely a mask. It seems that Nadella, the man behind the mask, is sneaky in ways that Ballmer only wanted to be, but couldn’t because his brain wasn’t wired to understand subtlety.

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

Linux Mint Going systemd, Foresight Closes Shop & More…

FOSS Week in Review

An active week — both here at FOSS Force around the Fossosphere — is coming to an end, and by “active,” I completely mean that in a good way. Special tip of the hat to Ken Starks and his interview on FOSS Force yesterday, which you should check out if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the FOSS realm…

Linux Mint to go with systemd: While Linux Mint did not join the systemd derby when the green flag dropped, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre expects the next releases of Linux Mint to use systemd by default, according to an article this week in PC World.

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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