July 6, 2025
Keeping tech free
The Second Annual Fossetcon Conference, which is scheduled to be held at the Hilton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando, Florida on November 19-21 has announced its Call for Papers on the conference website. According to the site, the call is officially open until August 17, but might be extended if certain conditions, such as “speaker diversity, relevant content and or lack of submissions” are not met.
The website lists some specifics that the organization is seeking:
FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.
Here at FOSS Force, we’ve found Mageia 5 available for download at The Linux Kernel Archives. 32 and 64 bit downloads are available for both the GNOME and KDE4 desktops, in both CD and DVD formats. We are in the process of downloading the 32 bit “live CD” image of the distro with KDE and plan to have screenshots and a review in the next couple of days.
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.
First of all, we’d like to thank the 49 contributors who generously contributed to our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign and to all who helped support and get the word out about our efforts. Special thanks go to Elizabeth K. Joseph, Todd Lewis and his incredible team at IT-oLogy and Ken Starks for supplying us with items to offer as perks during the campaign. We’d also like to thank Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Carla Schroder for writing articles for FOSS Force supporting our efforts.
At just before midnight pacific time Monday night, our IndieGoGo fundraising effort ended after a six week run. In the end, we raised exactly $2,300, or 38.33% of our goal of $6,000 (its nice to see that the folks at IndieGoGo are nothing if not precise when it comes to figures). The money is to be used to expand our coverage of FOSS and free tech by offering compensation to writers. Although this is not enough to fund our planned expansion for six months as intended, it is enough to get us started while we put “Plan B” into effect.
You’ve read the articles: “Linux sysadmins in demand,” yadda yadda yadda. You’ve been using Linux for some time and have been thinking, “Gee, I wish I could make a living with Linux.”
You can get the training; but it costs so much, you might say. Well, now you can get a scholarship, so there’s no excuse not to go for it.
The Linux Foundation, ever in the forefront of shaping the future of Linux, has announced the 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program, which aims to provide educational funds “to up-and-coming developers and sysadmins who show incredible promise…but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses,” according to a page on the Foundation’s website.
It appears as if much of the open source infrastructure we depend on is suffering from neglect. That’s the message brought to the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) by David Nalley. Listening to his talk, “The Tragedy of Open Source,” it was hard not to think that some of our infrastructure projects are beginning to resemble some disintegrating municipal water and sewer systems, or maybe compare his examples with our crumbling roads and bridges. Nalley is a South Carolina based “recovering sysadmin” who now wears many hats at Apache as well as being an employee at Citrix.
The neglect he mentions has caused more than a few near misses that fell inches short of disaster, with two major incidents happening last year alone.
Take the Heartbleed vulnerability that affected openSSL. Nalley points out that last year when the bug was discovered, there was only one person, earning a mere twenty grand a year, actively maintaining the openSSL project. Also last year, there was only one person maintaining bash when Shellshock was discovered.
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.
The Sunday Times article, with the headline “British Spies Betrayed to Russian and Chinese,” carries the byline of Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman and expands on a news story spreading across the UK on the pulling of some intelligence operators from Russia and China by the UK government over fears that they might have been compromised by information leaked by Edward Snowden.
Today is the last day of our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign, which we at first called our “May Pledge Drive” until we extended it into June. At somewhere about a second before midnight tonight, the fine folks at IndieGoGo will pull the plug on our campaign and quit taking contributions. In other words, if you haven’t made a contribution yet, the time is now.
So far we’ve raised $2,225 of our $6,000 goal. While reaching our target doesn’t appear doable at this late stage of the game — that’s okay. The money that’s been generously contributed will get us started on our planned editorial expansion and you should see us ramping up our coverage considerably in about three or four weeks time, after we receive the funds from IndieGoGo and start putting our new policies in effect.
The SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was packed on Saturday, meaning that Jeremy Sands (who told me that day two is always much busier than opening day) knows SELF. Maybe I should’ve asked his advice when I was booking my room in Charlotte. Here’s what I learned on my own: There’s a big difference between a Red Roof and a Red Hat. The later is dependable. The former took three tries to get me into a room that was kinda/sorta what I’d reserved — with Wi-Fi that didn’t work more often than it did.
Francois Dion’s keynote, “Team Near Space Circus: Computing at 80,000 Feet” was nothing if not fascinating, and I was happy to get filled in on the details of a story I knew a little about because it happened in my backyard, meaning the Winston-Salem, N.C. area (in Mocksville, if you’re planning to take the test).
