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Stuart Keroff Receives Distinguished Humanitarian Award for Asian Penguins

By Phil Shapiro on May 2, 2017 |

Community, Operating Systems and Video

Stuart Keroff Receives Distinguished Humanitarian Award for Asian PenguinsAsian Penguins

Asian Penguins is another illustration of giving the gift of Linux to help cross the digital divide.

Asian Penguins

The Screening Room

Stuart Keroff, a visionary middle school teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently received a distinguished humanitarian award for his work in founding Asian Penguins computer club at the Community School of Excellence. This club refurbishes computers with Linux to be used both at the school itself and to deliver to the homes of students who don’t own a computer at home. View the video made by the Minnesota State University – Mankato Campus – to learn more about this award.

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Ostatic and Archphile Are DeadArchphile, OStatic

Ostatic and Archphile Are Dead

By Christine Hall on April 29, 2017 |

Community, Distros, Media and News

OStatic ceased publication without warning or explanation in February. Archphile yesterday announced on Twitter that its “officially dead.”

Ostatic, the once popular website for news and information about Linux and open source, has disappeared from the face of the earth. Also gone, Archphile, an Arch Linux-based distro targeting audio playback quality for ARM devices.

I’ve been meaning to write about the demise of Ostatic for a month or so now, but it’s not easy to put together an article when you have absolutely no facts. I first noticed the site was gone a month or so back, when an attempt to reach it turned up one of those “this site can’t be reached” error messages. With a little checking, I was able to verify that the site has indeed gone dark, with writers for the site evidently losing access to their content without notice. Other than that, I’ve been able to find out nothing.

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Libreboot Applies to Rejoin GNULibreboot logo

Libreboot Applies to Rejoin GNU

By Christine Hall on April 26, 2017 |

Community and News

Libreboot has now officially applied to rejoin GNU, which it left in September. According to Leah Rowe, the “initial responses from GNU’s leadership seems positive.”

Libreboot logo

Last week we reported that after reorganization, Libreboot was considering rejoining GNU and was seeking input from its community to determine the amount of support it had for such a move. From reading the comments posted both on our article on FOSS Force and on Libreboot’s website, it comes as no surprise that the project’s core members feel they have the necessary consesus to proceed.

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Libreboot Wants Back Into GNULibreboot logo

Libreboot Wants Back Into GNU

By Christine Hall on April 22, 2017 |

Community, News and Software

The Libreboot saga isn’t over yet. Now the project wants back into GNU.

Libreboot logo

Early this morning, Libreboot’s lead developer Leah Rowe posted a notice to the project’s website and a much longer post to the project’s subreddit, indicating that she would like to submit (or resubmit, it’s not clear how that would work at this point) the project to “rejoin the GNU Project.”

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Bryan Lunduke Interviews Richard StallmanRichard Stallman

Bryan Lunduke Interviews Richard Stallman

By FOSS Force on April 21, 2017 |

Interview and Video

Last Friday, the Linux Tycoon (as well as the guy who’s been known to say “Linux sucks”), Bryan Lunduke, sat down for a free form interview with Richard Stallman. We figured that no dyed-in-the-wool FOSSer would want to miss that.

The Screening Room

Richard Stallman

Thanks to user friendly distros such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, PCLOS and Mageia, the use of GNU/Linux on personal desktops and laptops has been on an uptick for the last five years or so. It occurs to us that many of those who started using Linux during this time don’t know that not only is Linux and the GNU stack great technology, it’s also supported by an underlying philosophy about software freedom that is even more important.

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Using SlideWiki for OpenCourseWare

By Phil Shapiro on April 18, 2017 |

Community, Tutorial and Video

Open source is about much more than free (as in beer and speech) software and hardware designs. It’s being harnessed to do things like bring free or affordable health care to undeveloped nations, and as the underpinning for free education.

The Screening Room

Collaborative teaching and learning can theoretically occur via a text wiki, but SlideWiki looks like it goes far beyond text wikis. This Google Hangout explains the rich feature set of SlideWiki, including machine translated versions of your digital presentations.

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It’s Windows Time in Linux Land AgainLinux Tux smashing Windows

It’s Windows Time in Linux Land Again

By Christine Hall on April 17, 2017 |

Humor and Operating Systems

Using Windows. What a horrible thing to ask a Linux user to do.

Linux Tux smashing Windows

Every year at this time I have to scramble to boot into a Windows partition to do my taxes. I could do them online, safe and secure in my Linux comfort zone, but I do taxes for three people and all the online services want to charge extra for each and every return. If I download and install the software onto my own machine, there’s no extra charge. Trouble is, none of the big three tax programs supports Linux. Tax Act, the cheapo bottom of the barrel one that I use, doesn’t even support Mac.This means that every April I get a reminder of what a pain Windows can be.

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The Future of Desktop UbuntuUbuntu logo

The Future of Desktop Ubuntu

By Christine Hall on April 15, 2017 |

Business, Desktops, Distros, Operating Systems and Opinion

With all the changes happening at Canonical, you might wonder what this means for the future of desktop Ubuntu, besides the return to the GNOME desktop.

Ubuntu logo

There hasn’t been this much news about a single Linux distro in like forever. Well, maybe when Caldera, operating under the name SCO, sued IBM for a cool billion, but other than that…nada. One thing’s for sure, the announcements that have been coming out of the Isle of Man for the last couple of weeks mean that Canonical has forever changed its course.

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Dealing With Real-Life, Everyday Security Threatssecurity

Dealing With Real-Life, Everyday Security Threats

By Robin "Roblimo" Miller on April 13, 2017 |

Humor and Security

No one has ever been shot by a hacker who was breaking into their computer through the Internet. Not so for thieves coming in through the back door.

Roblimo’s Hideaway

security

I wrote a piece titled No, Evil Hackers Aren’t After You, and promptly had 17 zillion readers (by actual count) get mad at me for not taking their security concerns seriously. I still think the idea of a giant robot eyeball on a flexible stalk growing out of your microwave oven is still a little silly, and I believe there are many simple, down-to-Earth security problems to worry about before you try to spot rogue CIA agents watching your house from a grassy knoll in Dallas.

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