Tatiana Kochedykova If you’re looking for a free and open source replacement for the convenience and functionality offered by the likes of Google Docs and…
Posts published in “Web Apps”
It’s easy to be tempted to draw a parallel between the recent fork of ownCloud by Nextcloud and The Document Foundation’s fork of OpenOffice six years ago. Slight differences are there, but they’re probably meaningless.
There are more than enough similarities between the recent forking of ownCloud to Nextcloud and the creation of LibreOffice out of OpenOffice six years ago to draw comparisons, but there are also many differences. As Yogi Berra might say, they are the same but different.
OpenOffice, if you’ll remember, was forked by a group of developers who had been frustrated for years by roadblocks to what they saw as necessary development by Sun Microsystems, which had created the open source project out of Star Office, a proprietary suite it purchased in the late 1990s. When the situation worsened after Oracle took ownership, the developers created The Document Foundation, forked OpenOffice and released it as LibreOffice under the GPL. Improvements became evident right away, with much of the early work centering on cleaning up the bloated code base.
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
If FOSS is to have a future, we must embrace both mobile and the Chromebook model and develop a distro that’s equally at home on a phone, a low resource cloud based computer and on a traditional PC.
Op-ed
When Linus Torvalds started work on Linux, his purpose wasn’t to reinvent the operating system. Just the opposite. His purpose was to build an operating system that was a lot like the already existing Unix. In other words, he embraced what was already being used.
As development continued, refinements were naturally added that didn’t exist in other operating systems, many of which eventually ended up in other *nixes and even Windows, just as many new additions to Unix also ended up in the Linux kernel. But the original purpose was simply to build on what had gone before, not to create something radically different.
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
An unadorned search page that loads fast. Search results combined from a number of sources. No sponsored search results to get in the way of…
Also included: Maru OS brings Android/Debian convergence, three new distro releases, Google making Android more proprietary and EFF asked to investigate Miscrosoft.
FOSS Week in Review
Here I am, sitting at the FOSS Force table in the land of the not-so-deep-south. I’m in Charlotte, in the northern Carolina, 33 miles exactly from the border with the other, southern, Carolina, which is probably good, just in case I need to make a quick getaway. I’m also almost exactly 90 miles from the termite eaten shack I call home up near the Virginia state line. Essentially this morning I’ve traveled from state to shining state.
I am, of course, at the SouthEast LinuxFest, which is Tux’s gift to the land of fatback, grits and turnip greens. This year’s trip is something of a working trip, because I really can’t afford to take three days away from work. So FOSS Force has a table here, convenient for me to get my work done, as I’m doing now, writing the weekend roundup. It’s just like my home office, except here I’m surrounded by Linux using and loving folks instead of by unswept cobwebs and more stink bugs than I can tolerate, which is how I live. It’s fun here. It’s different. Later on I’ll take in a lecture, which will be the first performance I’ve seen that’s not on a TV screen since last October.
But first, the FOSS news…
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
Also included: Four new distros, the quote of the week, Steam Machine lacks steam, Ubuntu’s tool for making Snaps, and ArchAssault changes its name.
FOSS Week in Review
The week ahead looks exciting. Again this year, I’ll be going to the SouthEast LinuxFest and will be turning in reports from the conference. Also, FOSS Force will have a booth at this year’s event, a first for us at any conference. So if you’re going to be there, remember to keep an eye out for us.
Meanwhile, it’s been an interesting week in the world of FOSS…
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
The Video Screening Room
While the initial reaction from the FOSS community to Android Apps on Chromebooks will probably be a little cooler than lukewarm, the fact is that this might eventually be good for free and open source software.
When Google announced this week that future Chromebooks (and some current ones) will be able to run Android apps, a booming thunderclap spread across Silicon Valley — and could be heard in the four corners of the world. This news is indeed a game changer, reported nicely here in video form by The Verge.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
Breaking News: Patched versions of ImageMagick now available.
FOSS Force has now learned that the ImageTragick hole has been patched in versions 7.0.1-2 and 6.9.4-0. Websites using ImageMagick are urged to upgrade.
Security researchers are reporting that cracker/hackers are currently taking advantage of ImageTragick, the easy to exploit security vulnerability in ImageMagick, a popular open source image manipulation tool used by many websites. However, so far the attacks don’t appear to be widespread.
FOSS Week in Review
Also: Ubuntu gets ready for Yakkety Yak (don’t talk back), Tails has a new release with an updated TOR browser and Android apps are coming to a Chromebook near you.
Here in the Tar Heel State, MerleFest, featuring performances by John Prine and John Oates sans Daryl Hall, dominates the news. That’s mainly because there are no college hoops being played now that this year’s NCAA March Madness thing has been entered into the record books.
There’s not much talk about this year’s NCAA tourney around here anymore, as “we’re number two” just doesn’t have the proper ring to it. So we talk about other things instead, with how fast the grass is growing topping most people’s list and MerleFest a close second.
Me? I talk about FOSS, and there’s plenty to talk about this week…
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
The Raspberry Pi Report
If you want to add ‘Internet of Things’ functions to your home, you can now do so with relative ease using Raspberry Pi and Cayenne, an easy-to-use online service.
As the Internet of Things gets bigger and bigger, some of you may be wondering how you can get started with IoT without having to purchase an expensive setup. Companies such as Nest and Wink are great for automating your home, but who wants to spend a lot of money only to realize that home automation isn’t for you? This is where the Raspberry Pi can be a great tool for figuring out if the IoT world is right for you. But even if you own a Raspberry Pi and are tech-savvy, getting started in the IoT realm can be quite daunting, which is where Cayenne comes into the picture.
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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.
The Heart of Linux
“You’ve got mail compromised mail!”
The emails started coming in slowly at first. Friends and colleagues were telling me that my Gmail address was pushing out spam.
“Spam? Really?”
My first inclination was to push those emails aside as a temporary albeit bothersome incident. Something similar had happened a few years earlier, but subsided quickly with no real or evident damage. I guessed that some bot did a drive by and picked up my email contacts and started pumping out spam and other messages.
But this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem.
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