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CrunchBang: The Rest of the Story

Paul Harvey — he was a radio commentator in decades past, kids (check him out on Wikipedia) — used to end many of his radio broadcasts with, “. . . so now, you know the rest of the story.”

Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

Visit With a Little Boy

A while back, my globe trotting niece Niki Starks made the drive out to our place in Taylor. We spent most of the afternoon categorizing some of the old family pictures I had haphazardly thrown into a box. There were a lot of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Pictures of my great grandmother, a woman I barely remember from my childhood.

I remember, at that moment, thinking just how old she looked, and she was old…94 years old. I remember attending her funeral as a young boy. My family has the custom of open casket funerals. Me? I think that practice is grotesque, but that’s just me. I’d rather my last mental image of a person be one of laughing and joy. I remember looking down on my great grandmother’s corpse and thinking she looked better laying there dead than she did the last time I saw her alive.

Front yardAnd that’s the thing…

The things we remember and the way we remember them. The four hours that Niki and I spent at our dining room table was probably the most important four hours I’ll spend for the rest of my life.

Often, I think of myself as a 61 year old orphan. Silly really…thinking of yourself like that when you are in your 60s. What solidifies that in my mind is that fact that I am the only one left alive in my direct family.

Both my parents died from various cancers and heart/liver disease. That didn’t take a psychic to see coming, given they both smoked and drank like they were in training for an Olympic event. My kid brother died in a nasty head-on truck wreck at 3:44 in the morning less than a mile from his home. I’m fairly sure that’s the time he died, because that’s the time the cracked and bent face of his watch bore when it was given to me. My sister dropped from sight shortly after receiving her share of our brother’s estate. Addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, there’s little doubt why she cannot be found. Odds favored her dying in an alley somewhere or in a cheap motel room that one of her “friends” paid for. I am still scouring the Internet for her death certificate. My older half brother Bill, Niki’s dad…he died in the hospital from heart failure. He was my boyhood hero.

Samsung’s Spying TVs, Ubuntu Phone Sells Out & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Larry Cafiero is busy working for SCALE (pun intended), so you’re stuck with me for another week. Sorry.

Ubuntu Phone sale is gone in a flash

The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”

Ubuntu phoneThat was referring to the first flash sale, held Wednesday morning EU time, in which all devices being made available were sold out in “just a few hours,” according to Softpedia. In fact, it sold so quickly that a decision was made to hold another flash sale that same afternoon. The original flash sale was supposed to last for nine hours. The number of devices sold hasn’t been released.

Keurig Delivers DRM in a Cup

Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.

Keurig Coffee Machine
Keurig Coffee Machine
Forget that the newfangled coffee pods, which are now all the rage with the yuppie crowd, were already a bad idea. Forget that the damage they do to the environment is about on par with plastic throwaway water bottles or that they make a home brewed cup of joe as expensive as Starbucks — only without the barista to get your name wrong. Now Keurig wants to make damn sure you’re not using anything but approved pods on machines it makes, so it’s brought in DRM enforcement. Try to make coffee using anything but Keurig branded pods and the machine will spell-out the word “oops” on its display and refuse to brew.

What’s worse, even some Kerug branded pods are not DRM ready, and good luck getting a refund if that turns out to be the case.

Crossing Our Fingers for a Lucky SCALE 13x

It’s been one of those years, and with 2015 being the 13th year for the Southern California Linux Expo — hence SCALE 13x — you might expect that superstition would be rearing its ugly head.

I'm going to SCALE 13xI can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.

When Linux Distros Are Abandoned

It was a hard lesson learned.

The problem was, it wasn’t just me who suffered. It was dozens of people in my organization, and had this happened a month later than it did, it could have been hundreds.

We’ve had some fairly high profile Linux distros fold up their tents and move along. Whether due to a lack of financial support or the project growing larger than a one man dev team can manage, distros do go away. It’s never for a good reason but the fact remains: When a distro ceases to exist, a lot of people get left in the lurch.

Abandoned HouseMost recently, it was CrunchBang which rang the bell. I could feel the conflict and sadness in lead developer Philip Newborough’s statement. He didn’t want to do this, but for his own reasons he did. But what struck me in the middle of my being was his statement:

“As for me, while I’m deeply sad to let go of a project that in many ways has defined my existence for many years.”

How About a Chromebook on Steroids?

Jim Anderson

There’s been a lot of interesting Linux news of late. Not just GNU/Linux, but all types of Linux, Android, Chrome OS, Firefox OS, embedded (IoT), cloud computing, cars, TVs, just about anything you can think of. But truth be told, I’d like to see more Linux on the desktop — just as Linus Torvalds said he would like to see.

The recent purchase of a Chromebook for my son got me thinking about a new opportunity for Linux on the desktop. This is not an idea for getting a standard GNU/Linux desktop to automagically replace all existing Windows desktops, but to leverage the cloud computing paradigm with a bulked­-up Chromebook-­like system that would be workable for 80 to 90 percent of personal, school, and business needs.

LQ Poll Results Expected and Unexpected

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.

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.

CrunchBang Development Halted

CrunchBang lead developer Philip Newborough released this statement on the CrunchBang forums today:

“I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love.

“When I first started working on CrunchBang, the Linux landscape was a very different place and whilst I honestly didn’t know if there was any value to it, I knew there was a place for CrunchBang on my own systems. As it turned out, there seemed to be quite a demand for it on other people’s systems too. I’m not entirely sure why this was the case, but if I had to guess, I would say that it was probably due to the lack of competition/alternatives of the same ilk. If I’m remembering correctly, at the time, there was no LXDE tasksel in Debian and certainly no Lubuntu around. CrunchBang filled a gap and that was nifty.

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