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Posts tagged as “open source”

In Search of a Linux Calendar

CalendarOne of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.

The Year Ahead for Reglue

The Heart of Linux

I’ve never been a big believer in luck. Some of us believe that in some cases some sort of predetermination takes place: one thing happening to allow another thing to happen that in turn produces something significant in one or more lives. Not all the time, but often enough to make it something to ponder when we’re in a position to ponder such things. But I don’t make predictions, whether for a new year or a new place or a new time. I simply no longer predict anything. I’ve been wrong too many times.

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

You Might’ve Noticed a Few Changes Around Here…

If you’ve been visiting FOSS Force for a while, you might have noticed some changes around here. Nothing serious. We didn’t do anything drastic like change our layout or put our content up in twenty page slide shows or anything like that. But we’ve expanded, and I think, improved our content. We’re offering more coverage of FOSS than ever before, while also expanding into territories of free tech that lie outside the arena of software and Linux.

FOSS Force beggingYou might have also noticed that the expansion began just after our May fundraising campaign in which you gave us $2,300 to improve our site. Thanks to you, we have been able to pay our writers — not much mind you, truthfully a small fraction of what they should be paid — which has been a key element to our improved coverage.

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

Ubuntu’s Magical Abacus, New Linux Releases & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Ubuntu's abacusThere was a time, back when FOSS Force was young, when we called the weekly round-up Friday FOSS Week in Review. Sometimes we’d get so far behind in our work that the Friday column wouldn’t get published until Saturday, sometimes late in the afternoon. To solve the problem that caused with the column’s title, we pulled a page from an old ABC playbook, from when they owned the Monday Night Football franchise, and called these late roundups “Friday FOSS Week in Review — Special Saturday Edition.” We didn’t change the header, but always made the “Saturday edition” mention in the text of the column, just as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

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

Poll: You’re All About the Raspberry Pi

We didn’t let it get us down after our server hiccuped and lost our active poll results last week. We just turned around and put up another poll. Unfortunately, our rebooting-the-reboot poll (we were only three polls into a reboot of polling on FOSS Force after an absence of a year or more) wasn’t as popular with our visitors as the two we lost, but hey, that’s life.

[yop_poll id=”42″]

For this poll we focused on the Raspberry Pi. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of you who read The Raspberry Pi Report, Isaak Carter’s bi-weekly coverage of the Pi machines here on FOSS Force, so we thought we’d see just how far into the Raspberry Pi phenomena you dwell.

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

A BSD Wish List for 2016

Larry the BSD Guy

FOSS Force editor Christine Hall beat me to the punch — that’s the luck of the draw (or lack thereof on my part) in my having a column appearing later in the week — on what she hopes to see in 2016 in the FOSS realm. So I’m taking a page from her playbook and, as a new PC-BSD user, I have a wish list for what I’d like to see on *BSD going forward into the new year.

Google Hangouts iconFirst things first: I know that the wide number of variants in the BSD family are primarily aimed at servers. That said, it’s clearly understandable that with the exception of PC-BSD and BSD variants like GhostBSD, desktop/laptop users are not the primary focus in the BSD constellation.

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

Linux Predictions 2016, FreeNAS Logo Contest & More…

FOSS Week in Review

FreeNAS logo
Artists, can you improve on this? Get on it, then…
This week’s wrap-up needs no introduction, with an art contest to redesign a logo for a BSD-based OS, predictions for 2016, a new release from CentOS, shenanigans from our friends in the Isle of Man, and multiple reasons to use FOSS.

Oops.

FreeNAS Logo Contest: Okay, artists, get those colored pencils sharpened, those brushes cleaned and ready, because you have an assignment — that logo isn’t going to design itself.

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

Plotting Out the BSD Year

Larry the BSD Guy

FreeBSD's Beastie BSDFirst things first: Remember when I said I didn’t have access to Michael Larabel’s fine set of Phoronix tools to do diagnostic hardware comparisons? Well, while looking around for something else in BSD’s very cool AppCafe, I found them — Phoronix tools available for BSD users. So while I go sit in the corner with a pointy hat, I will apologize for that error.

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

Linux Foundation’s Deal With the Devil

Last week when Microsoft and the Linux Foundation separately announced a partnership that would see Redmond issuing a Linux certification called Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate Linux (MCSA), Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols felt the need to add the words “not a typo” to the headline of his coverage on ZDNet. A couple of days later, when the story made the pages of The Register the headline included, “Do not adjust your set. This is not an error.”

Linux Foundation LogoWe were just as surprised here at FOSS Force, and Larry Cafiero pulled no punches when breaking the story in Friday’s Week in Review. “There’s the argument that because Microsoft ‘loves’ Linux…we should be more inclusive,” he wrote, “but this is the company that considered Linux a cancer and has fought FOSS for decades. Rather than throw the Microsoft that is treading water a life preserver, I still think throwing it an anchor would be more fitting.”

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

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Linux Gaming

Just in time for the holiday season comes some exciting gaming news. There’s good news, not-so-good news,and bad news this week.

The Good News: The wildly popular game Rocket League is expected to be playable on GNU/Linux soon. Rocket League is a multiplayer physics based Soccer game played with fast booster, rigged vehicles in place of athletes, and is the sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars! Since its release last year for Playstation 4 and Windows, Rocket League has gathered a huge following, which has only increased the demand for a Linux version.

Anticipation has only been building since the SteamOS icon appeared briefly a few weeks ago on the Rocket League store, though to the disappointment of Steam users everywhere it isn’t ready for installation. The news was officially announced in August via Twitter that the game would soon makes its way to SteamOS/Mac after celebrating a million sales on Steam, and last week the news was broken by Steam forum moderator Volodesi that the game should be available before the end of the year. There’s no solid release date yet — the year’s end date isn’t official — but it sounds as if the release is in its final stages.

Hunter Banks

Hunter Banks has been a part of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) Family for the past 13 years. When not writing about open source gaming, he’s working on creating his own games. Follow him on Twitter @SilvrChariot

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