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Posts tagged as “KDE”

Fedora 21 Alpha Gets Off on the Right Foot

I say this often – a little too often – and I’ve hammered home the point in various blogs, to say nothing of calling out people who “review” alpha or beta versions of distro releases: Reviewing an alpha or a beta version is akin to sticking your finger in a bowl of cake batter and writing about how a baked cake is going to turn out.

That said, this is not a review of the Fedora 21 Alpha, released yesterday, but rather a test drive of a version that is destined to be improved upon when it is released in December.

So now you can have your cake batter and eat it, too.

First, a moment of silence for the untimely demise of the Fedora Release Name, as Fedora 21 doesn’t have one. Fedora had the best process for release names, causing spirited debate and possibly fisticuffs along the way: $CURRENT_RELEASE_NAME is a ________ and so is $NEXT_RELEASE_NAME, with the blank being filled in with whatever the current name was. Fedora 20 Heisenbug was the last of the named Fedora releases.

Maintenance–The Achilles Heel of Linux

I grew up in a farming and ranching environment. It’s not the easiest life and it can beat you down if you let it. There’s always something broken, something that needs to be fixed, and if you let it get away from you it can become an overwhelming task trying to set it right.

When my Dad decided to retire from the business, we set about the task of getting things ready for prospective buyers or their agents. One of my jobs was to make sure that the tack shed was in order and all of the tack was wiped with linseed oil and evened up on the wall racks. I was already way behind in my chores and getting to the tack shed was low on my priorities.

Linux Old BarnThe very first prospect took the tour with me and my dad. We were showing him some of the out buildings of which the tack shed was one. When the buyer pulled out one of the trace harnesses, it had a broken coupler and the leather was cracked up and down the trace.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

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