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FOSS Force

How to Install Ubuntu on a Chromebook Pixel

Chromebooks are really nice laptops, except for one tiny problem which is…well, Chrome OS. This week, our contributing video editor found an easy to follow step-by-step guide for installing Ubuntu on a Chromebook Pixel. Problem solved.

The Video Screening Room

The Chromebook Pixel of 2013 is a lovely computer. Want to make it even lovelier? Install Ubuntu on it. This well-done tutorial video shows and explains all the steps.

In three years time, the Chromebook Pixels of 2013 will be six years old and you’ll be able to buy one quite affordably on eBay.

Why Desktop Linux Still Hasn’t Taken Over the World

The reason why use of the Linux desktop has never taken off has nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with money.

“The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas…,” said Linus Torvalds in April at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego. “I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”

Linux desktopWhy, after 25 years, is the GNU/Linux desktop still near the bottom of the “market share” list of consumer operating systems? It’s certainly not due to quality. Those of us who use Linux on a regular basis and who have experience with other operating systems as well, pretty much agree it’s the best. We also know it to be an industry leader, with features showing up in desktop Linux years before they make their way into, say, Windows. By all rights, Linux should be known by techie and non-techie alike as the superstar of desktop operating systems.

So why hasn’t that happened? One word: marketing.

SUSE Apes Oracle, Lithuania Goes LibreOffice & More…

Also included: Fedora and RHEL working for better laptop support, one new distro release and All Things Open announces tentative schedule.

FOSS Week In Review

Look on the bright side. We’re a third of the way through August, meaning autumn is just around the corner. Also, Oracle’s still having trouble getting its cloud off the ground, but I’ll let the mainstream tech folks tell you about that. This is the FOSS roundup, after all…

Fedora logoBetter Fedora laptop support on the way: Red Hat has made an announcement that should eventually have a positive effect throughout all Linux distros. Today we learned from our good friends at Phoronix (I don’t actually know anyone there, but Larabel seems like a nice enough guy) that Red Hat is looking to hire a few good men…or women. They’re needed as an addition to the Red Hat Desktop Team, specifically to test laptops to make sure they’re all supported by Fedora and Red Hat. This is good news, because as far as giant corporations go, Red Hat is a pretty good open source citizen and I’m reasonably sure we can count on them to pass what they learn on to the greater community.

$5 Omega2 SBC Beats $300K Stretch Goal

The Omega2 is a quarter of the size of a credit card with a 580MH processor, 64MB RAM, 16MB flash, built-in Wi-Fi, a $5 price and with Linux preinstalled. What’s not to like about that?

The Video Screening Room

The most exciting developments in maker movement electronics is happening with low-cost Linux devices. In case you might not have heard of it, the Omega2 is a very small, very low-cost IoT Linux computer that you can program using many of the programming languages you already know. Check out the compelling Kickstarter video here.

Easy Linux Distro Hopping with MultiSystem

Our resident Linux newbie is off and running. Not only is he single booting his Lenovo IdeaPad to Ubuntu Mate, he’s using the FOSS app “MultiSystem” as a down and dirty way to check out lite distros for his ancient resource challenged Sony Vaio. We couldn’t be prouder.

The Linux Gadabout

Running Ubuntu MATE for the past week, my Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 has so far been a dream — perhaps too much of a dream, because it’s allowed me to waste even more time playing Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth without interruption than Windows 10 ever could. But on my significantly more ancient and RAM limited Sony Vaio, Ubuntu MATE seems to be more of a resource hog than I’d like. Sure, it still runs better than the Windows XP that came pre-installed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do better.

How FOSS Influences All Aspects of Our Culture

In this fascinating interview, UNC’s professor Paul Jones explains that the concept of “free and open source” was a part of our culture long before there were computers, or even electronic technology, and that it’s actually a rich part of our heritage. As for FOSS, he makes the case that it’s now an ingrained part of the digital infrastructure.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

“Paul Jones,” according to the University of North Carolina, “is the director of ibiblio, a contributor-run, digital library of public domain and creative commons media in the Office of Information Technology Service at UNC. He is also a clinical professor in the UNC School of Information and Library Science.” He’s also been known to write erotic poetry, but we didn’t discuss that in this interview — which isn’t so much an “interview” in the traditional sense as it is a 24 minute soliloquy by professor “call me Paul” Jones on the nature of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS; his preferred term) and its relationship with other forms of human intellectual endeavor ranging from academic research to folk music.

Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

If first impressions can be trusted, Manjaro Linux would seem to be a Linux lover’s dream. But how much can you really tell about a distro on a short test drive?

Distro of the Week

Wow! It’s a good thing I never act on love-at-first-sight impulses. About an hour ago, as I’m writing this, I rebooted the old System76 laptop we use for testing after downloading and installing Manjaro 16.06.1 “Daniella.” First impressions are everything, it’s said, and I am completely wowed.

Manjaro Linux Welcome screen
The Manjaro Linux Welcome screen.

Moodle App Could Be a Game Changer for Community Organizations

Many free and open source projects put power into our hands that once was reserved for elite players with deep pockets. A great example is the Moodle mobile app, which could be a big game changer for all sorts of small organizations.

The Video Screening Room

Moodle is a very popular free and open source learning management system, like Blackboard, used extensively around the world. Back in 2004, a very smart friend of mine, Gina Russell Stevens, explained to me that Moodle is so useful it could be used for many purposes beyond education. Her comment stuck with me. When I noticed that Moodle now has a free mobile app available for Android and iOS, it occurred to me that this app could be customized for many civic communication purposes.

Five Favorite Linux Distros

Like everybody, we love “five best” lists. Trouble is, how can we come up with a five best list of anything when we haven’t even begun to look at them all? What we can do is list “five favorites,” like we’ve done with this list of five favorite Linux distros.

I’ve never been a distro hopper. Not at all. I started out with Mandrake back around 2002, and stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until 2010. When it became obvious that the distro was in serious financial dodo and wasn’t likely to be around much longer, I moved to PCLinuxOS. This move was made partly because the distro had started life as a fork of Mandrake/Mandriva, keeping me in familiar territory, but mostly because it was one of two distros I could find that supported the Wi-Fi on an old Dell laptop I was using at the time. In 2012 I moved to Bodhi Linux after falling in love with the simple elegance of the Enlightenment 17 desktop, and the next year switched over to Linux Mint Xfce edition when we finally got around to setting up a full time office for FOSS Force.

Tux Linux distros

IBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…

Also included: FCC requires TP-Link to allow users to install open source firmware on routers, five new distro releases, new releases of LibreOffice and KDE Plasma, and Microsoft releases Skype 1.3 Alpha for Linux.

FOSS Week in Review

Maybe because we’re in the last 30 days or so of real summer — as opposed to calendar summer — or perhaps because most ‘Mericans are glued to their TVs as the Clinton/Trump heavyweight bout gets underway in earnest, but this has been a slow news week in the FOSS world. However, there are some notable items worth mentioning.

Wi-FiFCC supports open source Wi-Fi firmware. For the last several months many open sourcers have been up in arms because it looked as if the door was being closed on open source on Wi-Fi routers after the agency changed it’s rules around radio interference on the 5 GHz band, making it difficult for router makers to allow users to install open source firmware on their routers. All along, the FCC claimed that shutting out open source use wasn’t part of the game plan, but we FOSSers are a suspicious lot and we weren’t buying it.

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