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Posts published in “Distros”

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 is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. 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 is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. 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 is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. 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 is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

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 is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Linux Mint in June, Matt Hartley’s Goodbye & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Well, as they say, TGIF: Thank God it’s FOSS. As folks get settled in this weekend in beautiful downtown Orem, Utah, at OpenWest — the expo formerly known at one time as the Utah Open Source Conference — here’s a look at some of the things that transpired during the course of the week.

Linux Mint LogoHello, Rafaela: According to a Softpedia article, Linux Mint announced this week that it will release its next version of Linux Mint 17 — 17.2, which was given the release name Rafaela. Not much else was released in the way of information, other than the release candidate would be available next month, as well as lead developer Clement Lefebvre saying that Linux Mint 18 will be available sometime next year.

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

Linux From Square One

This week I had been pursuing a story on a virtualization development which was prematurely suggested/whispered/uncovered at LinuxFest Northwest. However, I understand from those who know more about the subject than I do — which is just about everyone — it was apparently not as groundbreaking as I thought. With my knowledge of virtualization ranking just slightly above my non-existent grasp of quantum physics, I had to put that one aside thanks to a ever-approaching deadline.

Opensource.com logoBut never mind: Something better came along, and the virtual lemons now become lemonade.

We’ll take a walk down memory lane in a minute, but Jason Hibbets and his team of scribes at Opensource.com published a story today announcing a new page on the site to introduce everyone — from the curious to the not-yet-enlightened and beyond — to Linux/FOSS.

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

Final Numbers on LinuxFest Northwest, Riding Hurd on Debian & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Normally, I’d race back home after a weekend event like LinuxFest Northwest in order to get back to what is commonly, maybe tragically (okay, it’s not really that bad), known as “life as usual.” But my darling daughter wanted to visit her friends in Seattle and Portland on the way home, which added two days to the trip. Getting to spend some time in those cities was a joy — the Seattle Public Library downtown is a gem, and I got to go to Powell’s in Portland for the first time this decade.

But upon returning to the redwoods, I’m so far behind it isn’t funny.

Hence, in continuing to catch up this week, this end-of-the-week wrap-up is going to be brief. You’re welcome.

'It's Tricky, to compile software that's right on time . . . ' The 'Run GCC' shirt and stickers from the Free Software Foundation were a hit at LinuxFest Northwest (Free Software Foundation)
‘It’s Tricky, to compile software that’s right on time . . . ‘ The ‘Run GCC’ shirt and stickers from the Free Software Foundation were a hit at LinuxFest Northwest (Free Software Foundation)
LFNW by the Numbers: Last week while attending LinuxFest Northwest, the number 2,000 was bandied about as a possible attendance threshold that the 16th annual show had yet to reach — and I take partial responsibility for publicizing that number during the course of the fest on my social media feeds. Mea culpa, folks: When the final numbers were tallied, so says LFNW organizer Jakob Perry, the total number registered for LFNW was 1,850 — short of 2,000, but still a high point in the show’s history.

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

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