Do you love Microsoft? Dr. Roy Schestowitz doesn’t. He also led a “Boycott Novell” movement back when there was a Novell to boycott, and he…
FOSS Force
The continuing adventures of a new open source tinkerer this week takes him to that part of the Linux Zone known as “oh-yeah-I-shoulda-checked-that-first.” We’ll resist the urge to poke fun and give him an A for effort.
The Linux Gadabout
As I write this, my Welcome screen tells me Ubuntu MATE turns two years old this week. Happy birthday, MATE! I’ve been enjoying your company for about 1.92 percent of your lifespan, and I think we’re getting along pretty well. Here’s to another many percentages!
Some things are easier than you might think. For example, here our contributing video editor gives you an example of a way that you can give thanks to a favorite author in a useful way with nothing more than a laptop, some freely available software and a YouTube account.
The Video Screening Room
If you encounter an excellent new book and you want to thank the author, your first inclination might be to track down the author’s email address and send them a thank-you message. A more meaningful step, though, is to write a short book review on Amazon (or elsewhere) explaining why others might also like the book. You can go one step further, too, and create a video book review that can be shared via social media.
To show other people what is possible, here is a screencast-style video book review I recently created on my Linux laptop. The book I’m reviewing is titled “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” a history of autism published in 2015.
The word on the street is that gaming on Linux doesn’t work as well as on Brand X. According to our everyday Super Geek, that seems to be just another Microsoft myth.
The Heart of Linux
“Hi, my name is Joan and I live in 104B. Are you the computer guy?”
I wasn’t ready to receive visitors or company. When I am within my home walls, I’m not the guy you see in public. Neither am I the guy you see at the speaker’s podium and I’m not the guy you run into at the local bodega. There are a number of things I have to do prior to being in a public place so I don’t scare the bejeesus out of the kids, so receiving unexpected company can be clumsy.
With nothing but my head peeking around the door, I signaled her to enter and I turned by back quickly as I went into the bedroom to make myself presentable to the general population. I came back out of the bedroom and placed the electronic voice simulator to my throat.
“Who told you I was a computer guy?”
The new owners of SourceForge, once the primary code repository for open source projects, work to make good on a promise to restore a reputation that was tarnished by its former owners.
It’s been about 2 1/2 years since GIMP began what became something of a mass exodus of large open source projects away from SourceForge, which at one time had been the go-to code repository for open source projects.
The site’s reputation began to wane almost immediately after it was purchased from Geeknet in September, 2012, by Dice Holdings in a deal that included Slashdot and Freecode/Freshmeat. In July, 2013, Dice introduced DevShare, an optional profit sharing feature that included closed-source ad-supported content in the binary Windows installers and gave projects agreeing to use the feature a portion of the revenue.
Also included: Two distros with new releases, Fedora 24 due on Tuesday and Ammon, Idaho thinks out-of-the-box.
FOSS Week in Review
When karma comes to visit, the one thing to remember is that in some way — which might even seem totally unrelated — you have some responsibility for that karmic bite. The best thing to do is to accept it with grace and to move on. I tell you this because that should give you a pretty fair assessment of what my life has been like since the last Week in Review.
But it hasn’t all been bad karma. There’s been good news on the FOSS front as well…
Move over LSB, Snaps are here: Once upon a time there was hope that Linux Standard Base would bring the ability to write-once-and-install-on-any-distro capability to GNU/Linux. Most folks quit believing that would ever happen about the time that LSB member distro Caldera shut down to try to make a living suing IBM as SCO. Although LSB is still being developed, it hasn’t been widely adopted and most of us have realized that the distro repository system that now dominates Linux is actually a strength despite the inconveniences.
An open source tool, the Food Computer, is being developed at MIT that can be used to create, save, and share climates for growing crops, maximized for nutrition, yield and taste, regardless of location or season.
The Video Screening Room
MIT Mechanical engineer Camille Richman explains in this TEDx talk how open source “climate recipes” can democratize food production via her work with the “open phenome project.”
She won an award last month at OSCON, which means she really and truly is “the award-winning Rikki Endsley.”
The FOSS Force Video Interview
Rikki Endsley is modest enough that calling her “the award-winning Rikki Endsley” makes her blush. But it’s true. In May, 2016, she won an O’Reilly Open Source Award because she has “demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software.” (Those are O’Reilly’s words, not ours.)
Rikki started writing for SysAdmin Magazine back when it was all about Unix, because Linux hadn’t yet become a big deal. Her LinkedIn profile tells you what she’s been up to since then, up to her present-day position as a community manager and editor for the Red Hat-sponsored OpenSource.com website, a popular site that, Rikki claims, is operated without any help whatsoever from Red Hat marketing or PR people. It’s a good site, too, at least in part because of Rikki’s exceptional leadership.
The continuing adventures of a new open source tinkerer and his experiences with Ubuntu MATE on a vintage Sony Vaio.
The Linux Gadabout
Some folks seem to be under the impression that toying with open source operating systems is harder than rocket science. Dr. David Teter, one of the smartest cats I know, had this to say when I mentioned I was giving Linux a try:
“For the love of God, just get a MacBook. Meth does less damage than Linux.”
When I asked him if he could please elaborate, he took a deep, pensive breath (I imagine, because this was all conveyed via Facebook) and continued:
“Endless frustration. Difficult distros. Frustrations with X11 and custom drivers. Constantly wondering how/why things don’t work. I spent 15 years dealing with this nonsense before I moved to Macs. I’d rather hitchhike on acid than deal with Linux again. YMMV!”
Our writer goes to the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Instead of having a good time, however, the trip turned into a nightmare — but the fault lies with Econo Lodge, not with SELF.
What a great time I had during the day I spent at this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest. Those of you who read Friday’s Week-in-Review know that I had planned to stick around for the full three days of festivities at my favorite community oriented Linux and open source conference on the East Coast, but alas that wasn’t meant to be. But what a blast I had during the day I was there.
This, in spite of the fact that I didn’t get the opportunity to do anything or take in any of the lectures. I spent the day at the FOSS Force booth, the first ever for our site at a conference, writing Friday’s column between chatting with folks who stopped by the booth. Jeremy Sands, the events main organizer, was delightful as usual, and made sure that I got a couple of T-shirts.
An 11-year-old asks her grandfather how computer games are made and he tells her they’re created by programmers “using complex mathematical code.” The next thing he knows, she’s learning Python on her own, and getting her chums involved too.
The Heart of Linux
“Grandpa, can you fix my computer?”
My granddaughter’s face beamed back at me via the Google Hangout she triggered. She bit her lip while I finished the task I had been doing when she showed up on my screen.
“Depends baby. What did you do to break it?”
I met her gaze via the webcam and she wiggled uncomfortably, weighing the different ways she might phrase her answer.
“Well, I was sitting on the floor and when I stood up, my foot got tangled up in the cord plugged into the sockets on my desk and the black power thingy fell and broke my screen.”
Actually, my daughter had already texted me about this and told me how much Karen had cried because she broke the laptop grandpa bought her for graduating on the honor roll. She had what my daughter called “a Karen Moment.” Not breaking the stuff their grandpas buy them is important to 12-year-old-girls.
I didn’t chide or scold. I told her to tell her mom to mail the laptop to me and I would fix it. She could pick it up when she came to visit us next Sunday. As I promised, she left with it last Sunday, happy as a 12-year-old child can be and she promised not to break it again. I kissed her on the head and told her that was fine. Little does she know that her grandpa would charge the gates of hell with a bucket of water for her.