Here’s some news that should make Bodhi Linux users happy. Jeff Hoogland has returned to Bodhi in his former position as project manager/lead developer.
If you’ll remember, Hoogland stepped down from the position back in September, stating on his blog that he was leaving his post “for a variety of reasons.”
In an interview with Hoogland a couple of weeks back, I learned that despite stepping down as lead developer, Hoogland has continued to be involved in Bodhi development, primarily by helping the new development team get on track. “The build process for Bodhi was largely handled by myself previously and much of my process was contained in my head and not in documentation,” he said. “That is changing.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
We were fortunate enough to have a donated space in the expo hall at Texas Linux Fest this year. Carolyn Hulsey, who is one of our directors, manned the Reglue booth for us on Friday. She jokingly asked if I wanted her to be our “booth babe” this year. She was, indeed, all of that.
What was truly humbling was the number of people who recognized us without introduction. When someone approached, I stood and extended my hand in greeting. More often than I would have thought, the person shook my hand and told me, “I know who you are.”
Wow…just wow.
It was one of these people who later pursued a three day email discussion with me on free-as-in-beer software. And yeah…we all know the benefits. But what of the negatives?
His take on Linux distributions?
“Anyone paying for a Linux distribution is putting their money down the drain. What they should be doing is putting that money into the hands of a free distro developer so (s)he can make their distribution better.”
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
Editor’s note: As Ken Starks takes time to heal from his surgery, FOSS Force will run “The Best of Ken Starks” on Tuesday’s in his absence. These will feature some of the best articles from his Blog of HeliOS.
FOSS Week in Review
Most of you know already that my fellow FOSS Force correspondent — and my good friend — Ken Starks went under the surgical knife this week, as fellow FOSS Forcer Christine Hall reported yesterday. The short version of this story is that Ken’s surgery was successful — as successful as having your larynx and lymph nodes removed can be — and he is resting well in the intensive care unit.
From left, Ken Starks, Randy Noseworthy and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall at Ohio Linux Fest.From his articles here at FOSS Force and on his Blog of Helios, and for those who know Ken in person, he’s excellent at spinning yarns, and now he won’t be able to do that — at least not verbally. So I want to share with you a post Ken wrote last week on Google+, and a blog item he wrote here. And then I’d like to make an appeal.
My appeal is this: After reading Ken’s missives above, for those who are well-versed in text-to-speech software, I hope you can provide insights for options for Ken going forward. Go ahead and leave them in the comments below.
And Ken: Get well, soon. The Astros are making some moves in the free-agent market, and if you’re well enough in mid-May, the two-game Giants-Astros series at Minute Maid is on me.
A few days ago, I was cleaning my desk in the lab and happened upon a printout of a fake distro called Chuck Norris Linux — more commonly known as CHUX — which casually mentions that “…if Chuck Norris wrote Linux, you couldn’t boot it, it would boot you.”
It reminded me of the yes-it-really-happened Hannah Montana Linux, based on Kubuntu, which to my knowledge is still in existence, at least on Github. Following the logic that if these two can exist, even though one is fake and the other real, I started thinking about other distros based on other cultural icons which would never (thank God) see the light of day. Like…
The Greatest Generation. Those who blitzed the beaches of Normandy and faced their own death with nothing but the rifles they carried and the cast-in-stone conviction that they were our last hope to save the world. They embodied the heroism of a generation who protected us from the most vile of villains: Jack-booted thugs who would force their ideas of a perfect world upon us.
Those rifles and convictions ultimately saved our way of life.
That kind of bravery can’t be quantified or even verbally expressed. They were our moms and dads, our aunts and uncles, and our grandfathers and grandmothers. The Greatest Generation lived their lives based on ultimate truths and values. A handshake was a bond and the guy on the radio or TV was to be believed.
And that’s the problem. The Greatest Generation ultimately fell victim to their own honor and social beliefs.
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
Jeff Hoogland comes by the respect he has within the Linux community the old fashioned way; he’s earned it. He’s done so, in large part, by creating the Bodhi Linux distro, which is not only very popular with a large and loyal user base, it’s rock solid, stable and even elegant. It’s also not a “cookie cutter distro” by any stretch of the imagination — there’s nothing else like it on the DistroWatch’s list. He also likes to share his ideas with the community, which he does through his blog, Thoughts on Technology.
Jeff Hoogland, founder and former project manager and lead developer of Bodhi Linux.Unlike many Linux developers, he doesn’t earn his living in the software business — not entirely anyway. He’s a mathematician by trade, who pays his room and board as an adjunct faculty member teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield, Illinois.
In his free time, he’s a gamer. Oddly, his game of choice isn’t played with a joystick hooked-up to a computer, but something a little more retro — the 1990s fantasy trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Evidently, he’s quite good at it.
Oh yes, he’s also a family man, but more on that later…
It’s been exactly four months since Hoogland steped down as lead developer for Bodhi Linux, a move that naturally caused some concern among the distro’s users. Wondering myself about the future of Bodhi and Hoogland’s personnel plans, last week I sent him a message, asking if he’d be interested in doing an email interview with FOSS Force, which he quickly agreed to do. Not wanting to take too much of his time, I kept the interview short, at only a dozen questions.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The website Linux Advocates is no more. The site, which focused on a variety of Linux issues, went offline on January 7th with little fanfare and no advance notice. The site had been being published for two years, having gone live in early 2013.
Before taking the site down, a notice was posted by site owner Dietrich Schmitz, which can still be read on the site’s Facebook page.
First things first: Thanks to Christine Hall for standing in for me last Friday for the weekly wrap-up. As some of you know, I was pretty much in the dark for the first five days of the year after a fire in my building (nowhere near me) early on New Year’s Day morning caused the power to be shut down.
As we start 2015, with the Consumer Electronic Show in full swing in Lost Wages (more on this in a bit), let’s take a look at some of the happenings in the FOSS realm.
SCALE 13x in the starting blocks: The team organizing the Southern California Linux Expo’s 13th edition, more commonly known as SCALE 13x, has begun to ramp up preparations for the show. This year, SCALE 13x adds a day to become a four-day event running from Thursday, February 19 through Sunday, February 22 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. The speakers have been chosen and the SCALE Team is in the process of sending out acceptances and rejections — so if you’ve heard you’re in, congratulations. If you haven’t heard either way, you will soon.
I hate breakups. Even when they’re for the best, breakups have a tendency never to go well when executed — a difficult but apt word for it — and there’s always some heartbreak involved.
So it breaks my heart to tell everyone that Firefox OS and I must go our separate ways.
It’s not you, Firefox OS. It’s me. While I know you’ll go on to thrive and find digital happiness without me in the wider FOSS world, I am sorry I’m not going to be a part of your future.
For the last year, you and I have been pals joined at the hip — the hip pocket, at least — as the OS on my ZTE Open phone. You know I’m not very demanding; the ZTE with Firefox OS did what was expected of it when it comes to my very limited use of mobile devices. To me, using mobile means taking calls, making calls, and texting. That’s really it. We’ve discussed this before, and the limited-albeit-growing selection of software for Firefox OS phones and tablets is a testament to your predicted longevity and bright future.
Firefox OS, it’s just that I need a little more dependability. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Last Wednesday, when Larry Cafiero published his story negating the rumors of Xfce’s demise, a few snarky commenters on Reddit said the rumor might as well be true, given the snail’s pace of development at Xfce. I paid these comments little mind. Over the years, I’ve learned to expect Reddit readers to be glad to find fault with software projects, almost without exception.
Here on FOSS Force, the comments were a bit more thoughtful and a lot more mixed. Most of our readers agreed that the development process at Xfce is slow, but most seemed to think that despite the mantra “release early, release often,” sometimes a slow release cycle is a good thing.
A reader calling himself “woolie” maybe put it best:
“hey, chill off people, Xfce is perfect as is today, why would one add stuff that is not necessary? just to prove to some insecure, unstable person, that it is ‘still in development’?… preposterous!”
Woolie, I concur 100 percent.
Continued development on a project for the sake of continued development is often counterproductive. Sometimes a project arrives at a point where it’s time to take a rest and just concentrate on fixing bugs and staying on top of security issues for a while.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux