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LibrePlanet & the Sounds of Silence

By Ken Starks on March 31, 2015 |

Community and Humor

LibrePlanet & the Sounds of SilenceLibrePlanet staff

On Saturday the 21st of March, I climbed on board a passenger aircraft in order to eventually arrive in Boston that same day. It had one stop, where I had to change flights, but with 44 minutes between boardings, I was fine.

Except the connecting flight was four terminals away and I had to catch the local robo train to get to there. I had no idea where to catch it or when to get off of it. Thankfully, I was still in Texas and I spoke the dialect.

No mouthOh wait…no I didn’t.

I didn’t speak at all. I no longer have a larynx. Try flying one third of the way across the United States without having the ability to speak…

In all, it wasn’t all that traumatic. Not for me anyway. But there were some interesting observations I made while on my trek.

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Posscon: Five Talks to ConsiderPOSSCON 2015

Posscon: Five Talks to Consider

By Christine Hall on March 30, 2015 |

Community, Desktops, Hardware and Operating Systems

Columbia, South Carolina’s Posscon conference is still a couple of weeks away and already nearly sold out. We’re hearing from the conference organizers that anyone planning on attending who hasn’t gotten tickets yet should take care of that pronto, before it’s too late.

Posscon, primarily a developers’ conference, has a few talks on the schedule which might fly beneath the radar for the hardcore coders and developers who make up the lion’s share of those in attendance. Here’s five that catch my interest and which would be on my dance ticket if I was able to make the event:

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The AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…LibreOffice Online Logo 2011

The AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…

By Christine Hall on March 27, 2015 |

Distros, Hardware, Internet, Operating Systems and Software

FOSS Week in Review

Larry Cafiero’s off doing some important Larry stuff and I was told I could avoid detention if I wrote the Week in Review for him, so here I am.

LibreOffice as SaaS

This from our “it’s about time but it ain’t time yet” department. The Document Foundation, those fine folks who bring us the LibreOffice productivity suite, announced on Wednesday the unveiling of an online SaaS version of the suite, complete with the catchy name LibreOffice Online or LOOL.

LibreOffice_OnlineWell, it wasn’t exactly an unveiling. It was more an announcement of things-we-are-working-on-and-are-really-really-sure-are-going-to-happen. According to the notice on the Document Foundation blog, LOOL isn’t scheduled to pull into the station just quite yet. According to the blog: “The availability of LibreOffice Online will be communicated at a later stage.”

Continue readingThe AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…
KDE Tops PollKDE

KDE Tops Poll

By FOSS Force on March 27, 2015 |

Community, Desktops and Polls

It didn’t take nearly as long to count the votes for our desktop poll as it did for last week’s distro poll, mainly due to the fact that not as many of you voted, but also because there aren’t nearly as many desktop environments and window managers as their are Linux distros. Also, unlike the distro poll, there was a clear cut winner instead of a virtual tie.

KDEActually, of course, it’s not about winners and losers. It’s about what you like. It’s about preferences. After all, unless you’re a diehard command line person, the desktop is how you interact with your computer.

Again this year, KDE tops the list with a commanding lead, piling up over a quarter of the 617 votes cast. This is a huge drop from the 70 percent showing it made the last time we conducted a desktop poll, back in January and February of last year. In that poll, however, users were only given three desktop choices — KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon. This year, voters were served up a menu that included eight popular desktops from which to choose. As in last year’s poll, voters could also opt to place write-in votes.

Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.

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When SCO Was CoolSCO logo

When SCO Was Cool

By Larry Cafiero on March 25, 2015 |

Business and Operating Systems

The headline sounds like heresy, I know, but put down those pitchforks and torches and hear me out. By now, you’ve probably all heard the news that the zombie lawsuit brought about by SCO against IBM has reared its ugly head and has started bellowing “braaaaaaains” once again.

But the fact of the matter is this: At one time, SCO was cool.

SCO logoSCO started out here in my neighborhood, essentially, in Santa Cruz, California. It was called The Santa Cruz Operation (hence, SCO). That manifestation of SCO was founded in 1979 by Larry and Doug Michels, a father and son, as a Unix porting and consulting company which, over time, developed its own brand of Unix. In his book “The Art of Unix Programming,” Eric Raymond calls SCO the “first Unix company.”

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Google Wants to Be Super NielsonGoogle Fiber logo

Google Wants to Be Super Nielson

By Christine Hall on March 24, 2015 |

Business, Internet and News

Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks.

Google Fiber logoWell, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.

Ad buyers have been saying for quite a while that television advertising is something of a bargain these days when compared to the prices they’re paying to advertise on the Internet. Much of that has to do with targeting, which Google has perfected to a surgical science on the Internet, with a precision that pretty much hasn’t been possible on television. On TV, a company selling articles which primarily appeal to young teen age girls, for example, can buy time on a show that has high numbers in that demographic, but that’s about it — and that’s kept television time relatively cheap.

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Reglue & Sébastien Jodogne Receive FSF Awards

By Christine Hall on March 23, 2015 |

Community and News

Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.

For those of you who are new to the FOSS community, Ken Starks founded the nonprofit Reglue, then known as the HeliOS Project, in 2005 to put refurbished computers in the hands of school aged children whose families couldn’t otherwise afford them. In the ten years since its inception, Reglue has placed over 1,100 computers with children living in the Austin, Texas area, and has been both a model and inspiration for other organizations with similar goals across the country.

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Poll Results: Ubuntu & Mint End in Near Tie

By FOSS Force on March 21, 2015 |

Distros, Operating Systems and Polls

The FOSS Force Linux Distro poll is now one for the record books. The poll, which ran for a week, finishing just before midnight on Wednesday, asked the simple question, “What Linux distro do you use most?”

We figured this would be a popular poll going in. What we didn’t know was exactly how popular. By the time the dust had settled, over twenty-five hundred of you had voted — more than double the previous FOSS Force poll record, set back in 2013 for the third and final round of our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog poll. Back then, a little over a thousand of you voted, leading us to think we’d crossed the Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla.

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Fedora Seeks Diversity AdvisorFedora logo

Fedora Seeks Diversity Advisor

By Larry Cafiero on March 20, 2015 |

Community, Distros, News and Operating Systems

In lieu of a weekly wrap-up which normally appears here at the end of the work week, I’m going to report on something I think deserves its own special mention.

The Fedora Project — mythically known as the “bleeding-edge distro” which only experienced users can use, but which in reality can be used easily by anyone from kids to grandmothers — understands the unique connection between diversity and open source. They are looking for a Diversity Advisor, and they’re seeking your help.

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What’s Your Desktop Environment?

By FOSS Force on March 19, 2015 |

Desktops and Polls

The Linux distro poll is over and we’re crunching the numbers for an article to go up later today. However, first we want to introduce our second annual Desktop Environment poll.

It only seems fitting, somehow, that we would follow up our what’s-your-distro poll with a Linux desktop poll. After all, we see and interact with our desktop everyday — but we never “see” our operating systems — meaning most users actually have a better understanding of their desktop environment or window manager than they do with the underlying distro. So much so, that many users — especially outside of the *nix world, often think of their desktop environment as the operating system.

Continue readingWhat’s Your Desktop Environment?