Posts tagged as “Linux”

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2014 |

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

Sometime overnight, the Hello World educational video project, which has been trying to raise a little money through an Indiegogo campaign, reached its goal — with twelve full days still to go in the campaign. The funds will be used to purchase new equipment.

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As of 11 a.m. EDT, the organization’s Indiegogo webpage is showing that it’s so far received donations totaling $2,145, nearly $100 over the goal of $2,048. The organization had chosen to take an “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach to this fundraising effort by choosing the “fixed funding” option. This means that if the goal hadn’t been met, no funds would be received and all donations would be returned to the contributors.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com

Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not

Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not

By Ken Starks on October 7, 2014 |

Hardware, Humor and Operating Systems

Exactly three weeks ago today I caught myself before hitting the “share” button on my Google Plus stream. My intent was to complain about some thing or another. I believe it was an out loud groan about a USB wireless device not working out of the box with Linux. I think I was going to triangulate on Broadcom’s insistence on making wireless a real headache.

And yeah, it doesn’t take that much to get a Broadcom chip working in most cases. Unless you are installing Linux at a friend’s house or another place that doesn’t have a wired connection. Then you’re pretty much sunk. The popup says that the wireless will work once you connect to the package manager. Uh, what if I am not located near a wired connection? That’s kinda why I wanted to connect to the web anyway you friggin’ ijit.

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Let’s say it together…you’re pretty much sunk. Still. In 2014. Sunk.

There are a lot of other things that are deserving of our collective ire. Wireless shouldn’t have been one of them for me. I chastised myself for throwing my own little private snit concerning something so trivial. If you count back the years with me, the kernel update to 2.27 saw wireless go from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Or it did for the most part anyway. It was an important mile marker for desktop Linux.

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

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

‘Tux Machines’ DDOS Attack Moves to ‘TechRights’

By FOSS Force on October 4, 2014 |

Media, News and Security

Editor’s note: This article was updated 9/4/2014 at 5:15 p.m. EDT to include latest update from Tux Machines publisher.

The DDOS attack that has rendered the popular Linux site Tux Machines virtually unreachable for nearly two weeks, now seems to be affecting sister site TechRights. Roy Schestowitz, publisher of both sites, told FOSS Force that the attack on TechRights began at about one o’clock Friday afternoon GMT.

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“…an hour ago I got some automatic reports and some messages from readers saying that Tech Rights had gone offline,” he said. “I then checked logs, grepped on ‘NT’ (all the zombies are [running different versions of] NT), and saw pretty much the same pattern as on Tux Machines.”

As of eleven o’clock this evening EDT, both site were reachable from FOSS Force’s offices in North Carolina, but we’ve been unable to determine if this is because the attacks have ended or if this is only a temporary reprieve.

Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

By Larry Cafiero on October 3, 2014 |

Desktops, Distros, Mobile and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

Other than the continuous scrambling to fix Shellshocked — if nothing else we in the FOSS world are both quick to respond to fixes and quick to come up with great names for epic bugs — this has been a relatively quiet week on our side of the digital street. Yeah, we can laugh at Apple for releasing an update that wasn’t really an update and at Microsoft for losing the ability to count, jumping from Window 8 to Windows 10, now with the improvement of having — wait for it — a command line.

But here are a couple of morsels in the FOSS realm this week, answering a few questions, like:

Hold the phone? Remember the Ubuntu Edge, the smartphone for which Mark Shuttleworth went, hat in hand, begging for $32 million so the wider digital community could fund his pet project?

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

By Christine Hall on October 2, 2014 |

Business and Community

A little over two weeks ago, I told you about the Brothers Nielsen, Jared and JR, who produce short educational videos which teach Linux and other tech skills to nine to thirteen-year-olds under the “Hello World” banner — a name which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a “programming for dummies” course.

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At the time of that article, the Nielsens were just a few days into an all-or-nothing Indiegogo fundraising campaign, hoping to raise the small amount of $2,048 to replace worn-out equipment. That’s it. They aren’t trying to raise money to cover a year’s worth of expenses; they’re not trying to get the public to finance their salaries for the next year; all they want is a little bit of cash for camera’s, lenses, lights and the like. When that article went online, they’d already raised $680, nearly a third of their target amount.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

What Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS

What Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS

By Larry Cafiero on October 1, 2014 |

Community, Distros and Operating Systems

On a monthly basis — on the last Saturday each month — members of the Felton Linux Users Group drag their collective butts out of bed at the crack of 9:30, or possibly earlier, and make their way from various points in the sleepy little town just northeast of Santa Cruz to the solar-powered Felton Fire Station for their meeting.

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It’s a good group with core regulars hosting meetings since the Lindependence Project held three open houses to introduce the town to Linux in the summer of 2008. In those open houses, various distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva, along with hardware maker ZaReason, and even an open-source stuffed penguin maker called Open Animals based in Phoenix, appeared to show their wares to the curious in the San Lorenzo Valley area. Around 600 people appeared over the three days and more than 300 live CDs went out the door.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Early Morning Linux Voodoo at Denny’s

By Ken Starks on September 30, 2014 |

Community and Operating Systems

Three a.m. can be an interesting time to be in a 24 hour Denny’s Restaurant. The clientèle can range from graveyard shift workers on their lunch break to people who have spent all night partying. I never did understand the “Let’s go to Denny’s” mindset after a night of drinking. Why would I want to ruin a $100.00 drinking spree with a $4.00 pancake breakfast?

Of course, the closest thing to alcohol I put in my mouth most days is mouth wash. I honestly don’t miss the hangovers. Neither do I miss the round of apologies I usually had to make the next day for the dumb stuff I had done the night before.

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So, sitting at the counter at 3:20 a.m. working on my third cup of coffee, I watched an older gentleman grow more and more frustrated with the laptop in front of him. After a bit, he pulled an old flip phone from his shirt pocket and left a message when the party did not answer.

“James, this is Ed. Give me a call when you get up. This laptop is going blue screen again.”

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Secure Linux Systems Require Savvy Users

By Christine Hall on September 29, 2014 |

Community, News, Operating Systems and Security

Linux security Patches are available to fix the bash vulnerability known as Shellshock, along with three additional security issues recently found in the bash shell. The patches are available for all major Linux distros as well as for Solaris, with the patches being distributed through the various distros.

After the patch is applied, there are a couple of commands that can be run from a terminal to ascertain that a system is no longer vulnerable. For details, see the article Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written for ZDNet. As yet, there is no patch available for OS X, although Apple says that one is on the way, while assuring its users that Mac systems aren’t vulnerable except for the most advanced users.

The good news about all this is that it demonstrates how quickly the Linux community can get the word out and then rally to engineer a solution when a security problem is discovered. The bad news is that not all Linux users listen. Too many users believe that the security features that are baked into Linux offer complete protection, no matter what. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It never was, nor can it ever be.

My friend Andrew Wyatt, who spent time some years back as the founder and lead developer of the Fuduntu Linux distro, attempted to address this fact recently in a comment to an article on FOSS Force:

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

You Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?

You Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?

By Larry Cafiero on September 26, 2014 |

Desktops, Distros, Humor and Operating Systems

Earlier in the week, my FOSS Force colleague Ken Starks wrote a very poignant column on these pages about how there’s no room for the kind of bullying and other varieties of douchebaggery which seems to appear all too often in forums.

That’s something that really bugs me. Not the fact that Ken brought it up, of course, but the fact that people don’t have the common decency to act with civility in the public realm. When someone responded they way they did to Ken as he describes, I’m grabbing some popcorn because Ken has the unique ability to use words like a Ginsu knife to slice and dice such hapless assclowns before they know what hit them.

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But back to my point: The lack of civility and reasonable goodwill that some malcontents show in the FOSS realm bothers me.

Do you know what else bothers me? Glad you asked.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Is Oracle Using Canonical to Counter Red Hat?

Is Oracle Using Canonical to Counter Red Hat?

By Christine Hall on September 25, 2014 |

Business, Distros and Operating Systems

Penguinistas now have another reason not to adopt Ubuntu as their operating system of choice. Canonical and Oracle have each announced, in separate blog posts, that the two companies are working together to insure the compatibility of each company’s Linux offering on the other’s OpenStack cloud implementation.

Such a collaboration isn’t surprising. To be successful in the cloud, Canonical will need to support any Linux distro that potential enterprise customers throw at them, just as they’ll need to support Windows, and to a lesser degree, OS X. What is surprising is that Canonical thought it best to advertise the fact that they’re now holding hands with Oracle, if not in fact dating.

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In a PR piece posted on Tuesday, Ubuntu stated, “…Canonical will support Ubuntu as a guest OS on Oracle Linux OpenStack, and Oracle will support Oracle Linux as a guest OS on Ubuntu OpenStack. Canonical will test Oracle Linux as a guest OS in its OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) program. This gives customers the assurance the configuration is tested and supported by both organisations.”

Again, this isn’t surprising, but it would seem to be an ill advised move of desperation by Canonical. Indeed, if the two companies’ relationship has already moved beyond hand holding and the two are contemplating going steady, Canonical would be well served to determine whether Oracle is truly interested in forming an alliance with Ubuntu, or whether Ubuntu is merely a way for Oracle to get around Red Hat.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

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Posts tagged as “Linux”

‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not

‘Tux Machines’ DDOS Attack Moves to ‘TechRights’

Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

FOSS Week in Review

‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

What Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS

Early Morning Linux Voodoo at Denny’s

Secure Linux Systems Require Savvy Users

You Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?