Can you hear me now? The question, if it’s presented with early 21st century pop culture in mind, is rhetorical. If you are relying on…
Posts published in “Software”
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s at SCALE 13x, covering the event for us while fulfilling his duties as the conference’s publicity chair, so he twisted my arm to again take care of the week’s news review. Well, he didn’t really twist my arm; he asked politely. And promised to give me some piece of conference swag he has no use for. Can’t wait to see what it is.
New Xfce due next week
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Speaking of Larry, back in December he helped quash a rumor that the popular Xfce desktop had been abandoned. Now we have further evidence that he wasn’t just talking through his hat — as if there was ever any doubt.
Today the folks at Softpedia announced that Xfce 4.12 will be released by the end of February, or most likely on March 1st:
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 Questions — the place you go where you really need a Linux or FOSS question answered because, well, most of the smart FOSS folks are there answering them — released the results of its Members Choice Awards for 2015.
So when the membership of LQ speaks — or at least votes on FOSS programs — you should probably listen. Don’t take my word for it: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols thinks so, too.
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There were some expected results: For example, LibreOffice wins the Office Suite category by a ton, garnering 86 percent of the vote. To break this down, that’s nearly 9 in 10 folks favoring LibreOffice to the second-place finisher, Apache OpenOffice, and the others.
Same with categories like Browser of the Year — Firefox, need we say more? — with the blazing vulpini taking 57 percent in a crowded field. Same for Android, the Mobile Distribution of the Year which finished 40 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher. Even vim, at 30 percent in a crowded field, heads up the Text Editor category with three times the votes of Emacs.
As we get closer to the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x for those of you keeping score at home — it bears mentioning that the largest community-run Linux/FOSS show in North America has grown to host a lot of other sub-events during the course of the four-day expo.
In years past, Ubuntu, Fedora, PostgreSQL and Chef held their own sessions at SCALE — Ubucon, Fedora Activity Day, PostgreSQL Days and Intro to Chef respectively — and they’ll be back this year. Highlighting the “event within an event” lineup at SCALE 13x are also a few others.
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Most prominently, Puppet Labs is holding its Puppet Camp at SCALE 13x on Thursday, February 19. Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held around the world for people who are currently using or interested in using Puppet. Attendees have the opportunity to talk to a diverse group of Puppet users, benefit from presentations delivered by prominent community members, share experiences, and discuss potential implementations of Puppet with their peers. There is a separate registration for this all-day event, and more information can be found at the link above.
The Best of Ken Starks
My Dad’s side of the family was an amazing mix of loggers. lawyers, bank robbers, bankers, cattle rustlers, ranchers, soldiers, policemen and Gypsies.
No, really…I’m talking real Gypsies.
In some parts of Europe they are referred to as “travelers.” Today, many have been assimilated into the various ambient populations and cultures, but many have not.
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My uncle Emil claimed to be of the Romnichel clan. He maintained his wandering ways throughout his life, right up until his 84th year when a State Trooper found him frozen to death on New Year’s Day at a rest stop outside of International Falls, Minnesota. His car had stalled, along with the heater, as it sat idling while Emil slept. He froze to death in his sleep, an empty pint of Four Roses whiskey on the seat next to him.
I remember, as a young boy, waking up to find Uncle Emil’s 1950 Chevrolet and his old Airstream trailer sitting in front of our house. He had arrived sometime during the night and I could always count on him to be sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, chain smoking camel cigarettes, drinking coffee and regaling them with his latest adventures.
Then, on any given morning, I might wake up to find him gone. He was with us only long enough to “borrow” money for gas and food, then disappeared with the wind.
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
Last Wednesday, when Larry Cafiero published his story negating the rumors of Xfce’s demise, a few snarky commenters on Reddit said the rumor might as well be true, given the snail’s pace of development at Xfce. I paid these comments little mind. Over the years, I’ve learned to expect Reddit readers to be glad to find fault with software projects, almost without exception.
Here on FOSS Force, the comments were a bit more thoughtful and a lot more mixed. Most of our readers agreed that the development process at Xfce is slow, but most seemed to think that despite the mantra “release early, release often,” sometimes a slow release cycle is a good thing.
A reader calling himself “woolie” maybe put it best:
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“hey, chill off people, Xfce is perfect as is today, why would one add stuff that is not necessary? just to prove to some insecure, unstable person, that it is ‘still in development’?… preposterous!”
Woolie, I concur 100 percent.
Continued development on a project for the sake of continued development is often counterproductive. Sometimes a project arrives at a point where it’s time to take a rest and just concentrate on fixing bugs and staying on top of security issues for a while.
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
First my FOSS predictions for 2015: cloud, systemd, vulnerabilities, containers, and Linus uses the “F” word.
Let’s forget predictions; they’re boring. They’re either too obvious or they’re not likely to happen. So is my wish list, with two major exceptions. First, wishes are much more subjective, making them much more fun for the wisher. Second, when predictions don’t happen, they’re wrong. When I wish for things and they don’t happen, they’re still things I wish for, so they’re not wrong, they’re just not happening. Caution must be exercised, however. Remember the old proverb ascribed to the Chinese about the possibility of wishes coming true…
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Oh, one last thing about how I wish. Sometimes I wish in very great detail. My friends who believe in magic tell me this is good, that it will help bring my wishes to fruition. Time will tell. Stay tuned…
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
Rumors: They exist, for better or worse, and there’s not much you can do about them. In addition, rumors are the starting blocks for the old Churchill adage that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Three times this month, Xfce came up in conversation — online, of course, and in the realm of social media and in forum discussions — and the context in which each conversation came up had the desktop on the brink of closure, with one unwitting person saying that Xfce was dead.
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Nothing could be further from the truth, and several in the discussions rose to Xfce’s defense on the absurdity.
Xfce lead developer Olivier Fourdan “won’t really comment on the rumors,” he said, “but as long as there are users and developers, the project is not dead.”
I like living here. “Here” is a low-cost, no maintenance condo-type neighborhood for us folks who are 55 or older or have a disability. A good friend of mine, a bit older than me, told me that since I live here now, I need to start acting my age.
Well pass the Ensure and bingo cards Gladys …I’ll get right on that.
The same good friend also described me once as the oldest juvenile delinquent he has ever met.
But there’s really no getting away from the fact that I’ve reached the stage of life when grandchildren are finally accepted and I no longer wince when one of my grand babies address me as “grandpa.” Yeah, it took me almost a decade to be comfortable with the fact that I am indeed a grandpa.
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A medley of aches, pains and cramps often remind me that I can’t do stuff as fast and for as long as I used to. These days, my life consists of blazing my way through my work day then hobbling to my comfy sofa, moaning my regret for all that day’s blazing.
This is a nice place to which to come home. One of the great things about living here is how close the residents are…and not in just proximity. We lived in a fairly nice home prior to moving here and in the three years we stayed there I couldn’t tell you the last names of the people living next door or across the street from us. In less than a week here, almost every neighbor had stopped by to say “hi” or to bring various house warming baked goods.
This past Thanksgiving, Diane and I went to the pot luck community gathering at the community center. To be honest, I really didn’t want to go. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I had promised a computer to the kids of a single mom, but while installing it, gremlins found their way into the machine. The computer that worked perfectly on the workbench suddenly decided that a kernel panic was in order. I needed Thanksgiving evening to myself so I could get another system ready, but a long, chilly look from Diane was enough to forestall that mission…for a couple of hours anyway.
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
You can tell it’s the holiday season — a lot of people are focusing more on the guy with the red suit who looks quite a bit like Jon ‘maddog’ Hall than they are on digital matters. This also is the time of year, naturally, where pundits make their predictions for the following year.
However, I should admit something here. Truth in advertising: I don’t have a good record in predicting the future. I have a hard enough time predicting what to wear the following day — oh, right: clothes. But Linux and FOSS being, well, Linux and FOSS, these projections are as good as any prediction now being foisted on the FOSS public by the army of digital pundits out there.
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So what’s going to happen in 2015?
A lot. Like…