July 1, 2025
Keeping tech free
VideoLAN (also called VLC) is a very popular media player available for all major technology platforms. Work is progressing towards a 3.0 release and in this new video you can meet some of the developers working to make that happen.
“You mentioned the strength of the GPL,” Dirk Hohndel said, by now about twenty minutes into his interview of Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon 2016. “Many new kernels have shown up in the last couple of years, mostly geared towards really small devices, the IoT space: Zephyr by Intel, Fuchsia by Google and a bunch more.”
If you are who you work for now, Dirk Hohndel is VMware’s boy. But at the time of the interview, only a few weeks back, he’d been working as VMware’s chief open source officer for less than a month. For almost fifteen years before that — fourteen years nine months he’s careful to point-out on LinkedIn — he belonged to Intel, where he served as chief Linux and open source technologist. Before that he spent six years at SUSE, where he was CTO when he left in 2001, two years ahead of the Novell brouhaha.
“One of the interesting commonalities is they’re all under BSD or MIT,” he continued. “Do you think they’re interesting and do you think that one of them could grow up and become a competitor for Linux or replace Linux?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Linus Torvalds said, “we still argue. We’re not all happy people, we don’t love each other.”
“I suspect a lot of developers really don’t like each other,” he continued, “but quite often, even if there’s not a lot of happy love feelings, I get the feeling there’s a lot of respect for the technical side and things are working very well — in ways that things have not always worked.”
The summer of ’16 is all but over. Good riddance. Here in my piece of the woods we’ve seen all of the 90 plus days with high humidity I can take. Time to get out the long sleeves and sweaters.
It’s also time to look at this week’s FOSS news.
This post-lunch screencast presentation by David Beazley is so entertaining, you can enjoy it without knowing any Python programming whatsoever. The aside comments alone are worth the price of admission. I won’t tell you the topic of the presentation. Suffice it to say — plenty funny.
Did you know that MS Word on Linux using Wine works better than Word on Windows? Neither did we until we heard it from Bill…
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of August, 2016. 1. Why Desktop Linux Still Hasn’t Taken Over the…
Currently Kali Linux is the de facto OS for those looking to do security research or penetration testing, but that could be changing in the months and years to come. This month BlackArch Linux, another penetration testing OS, released new ISOs that could put it ahead of Kali. BlackArch now includes over 1,500 tools for penetration testing and security research as well as support for kernel 4.7.1. In the months to come, I’ll write about using select tools from BlackArch on the Raspberry Pi, but in order to get to that point, we first need to install it. Instead of taking any credit for the install steps or reproduce them over again, I’m simply going to provide links to the same steps that I found and followed which lead me to a successful install of both Arch Linux and BlackArch on my Raspberry Pi 3.
For all you open source data scientists out there, this hour-long recorded webinar explains the big data tools and services you can use on Amazon. I learned a lot of data science lingo watching this video.
On Wednesday, when Linus Torvalds was interviewed as the opening keynote of the day at LinuxCon 2016, Linux was a day short of its 25th birthday. Interviewer Dirk Hohndel of VMware pointed out that in the famous announcement of the operating system posted by Torvalds 25 years earlier, he had said that the OS “wasn’t portable,” yet today it supports more hardware architectures than any other operating system. Torvalds also wrote, “it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.”
“You have to realize the background is that it was a completely personal project,” Torvalds explained. “I expected other people to be interested from a theoretical standpoint. Students of operating systems might want to look at ‘here’s another operating system we can look at.’ That was my expectation, which meant that the kind of hardware I had was the only hardware that it ran on.”
