With the death of yet another open source/free software/Linux-based mobile platform, Ubuntu Touch, clearly it is time for us to sit down and have a frank discussion about what we in the free software world can reasonably accomplish in a mobile platform. One of the biggest issues—if not THE biggest issue—with Ubuntu Touch was that it simply had goals that were far too aggressive to reasonably achieve. It suffered from the all-too-common malady known in software development as feature creep. Ubuntu Touch was not simply a project to bring the existing Ubuntu system to mobile hardware and add functionality specific to that hardware (such as phone dialing, cell data, etc.). The project also contained: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution), announced his company would not only be abandoning their custom desktop environment (Unity), but also halting development on their phone/tablet operating system, many questions were left unanswered.One of those questions: What happens to the existing phones and tablets running Ubuntu Touch that have already been sold? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This is a good time for open-source communication systems.The decentralized, free software, Twitter-esque social network Mastodon seems to be doing rather well. And now Wire, the end-to-end encrypted instant messaging platform, is releasing the source code for its server.The source for the Wire client was already available. But now the company is releasing the server source code, as well—up on GitHub and licensed under the AGPL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
My life is filled with conundrums.One of those conundrums is the fact that I spend a huge amount of my time promoting and advocating free and open-source software. Yet in order to reach a large audience with that advocacy, I end up needing to use social networks (such as Twitter and Google Plus) which are—not free software.If I'm going to be speaking at a conference about GNU, Linux and other free software-y topics, I announce it on Twitter. And, perhaps rightly so, my freedom-loving friends toss a little (usually good-natured) mockery my way for doing so.Over the years, a few social networks have sprung up that are a bit more free software-based—or, at least, open source. Yet none of them has really captured the interest of the broader public—something necessary for what I do. Diaspora is a great example of one that showed great promise but never really took off. (It still exists, but without the audience numbers and/or growth that is needed.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few days ago, I was down at the Starbucks in my local bookstore—sipping on a hot chocolate, using the free (but rather pokey) Wi-Fi, and getting some work done.This is pretty typical for me. Since I work from home, it’s nice to get out of the house and shake things up a little bit. Working for a few hours at a coffee shop tends to be just about right. I’m not the only person in the world who uses coffee shops as short term offices—it’s become so normal, it’s almost a cliché.The one thing that typically sets me apart from the other people working from any given coffee shop is my computer. I run Linux (currently openSUSE with GNOME). And often, I’ll have some sort of unusual Linux-powered gadget with me (such as my PocketCHIP or my trusty old Nokia N810). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What follows is all about Linux podcasts—something I’ve spent a fairly ridiculous amount of time on over the last decade or so. So, this post is basically inside baseball—for Linux podcasts. You’ve been warned.--------------------------------------------------This past Sunday, Jupiter Broadcasting announced the Linux Action Show—one of the longest-running podcasts in the Linux world, which has aired almost continuously since June 10, 2006—is coming to an end and closing down production.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve been a fan of the work of the GNOME team for quite some time. They put together one heck of an excellent Linux desktop environment. But of late, I’ve found myself gravitating towards some of the more lightweight environments. MATE (which is a forked version of GNOME 2) and xmonad. I like my systems to be light on resource usage and highly responsive—those are two absolutely critical things for the way I use my computers. With this week’s release of GNOME 3.24, I decided to jump back into the world of modern GNOME desktops and kick the tires again. In order to give it the best possible shot, I did a clean install of openSUSE Tumbleweed (the rolling release version of openSUSE) and then installed GNOME 3.24 on top of it. (Side note: 3.24 was not yet available in the default repositories when I wrote this article, but it should be shortly.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I can be a pretty pessimistic guy. I’m fairly convinced that the Internet of Things spells certain doom for mankind, and I’ve made a habit of standing in front of large rooms full of people simply to tell them how much I think “Linux sucks.” If you were to call me a Negative Nancy, you wouldn’t be far off.To make matters worse, I’m about to publish three new articles—each of them extremely pessimistic and gloomy—over the next week. otal “sky is falling, we’re all gonna die” sort of stuff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interested in producing your own podcast or video series entirely from a free software-fueled, Linux-powered computer? Here’s how I accomplish that task.Feel free to copy my exact setup for your own use. Or take some of my recommendations. Or ignore everything I say here and do things better than I do. Either way, hopefully this proves useful in your Linux-fueled media production endeavors.Podcasting and video hardware
The hardware setup for my daily recording is fairly simple. More often than not, I utilize a Blue USB Yeti microphone. It has exceptionally good sound (especially for the roughly $100 price tag) and functions as a sound device on every modern Linux distribution I’ve encountered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I miss the Old Internet.Call me a fuddy-duddy. Call me nostalgic for ye olden days. But I’ll say it right now, and I’ll stand by it: The internet was (in almost every way) better 15-plus years ago than it is today. And I’m not talking about just “the World Wide Web” either. All of it. It’s getting downright crummy. Let’s walk this through step by step. System resource usage
If you go to CNN.com today, the front page of their website will take up just shy of 100 MB of RAM while it is loaded. By comparison, the same page from the year 2000 takes literally 1/10th that (thanks Archive.org). CPU usage is even worse. The idle CNN.com from the year 2000 just sits there. Happily eating just about 0% of even the slowest CPUs. Today’s version gobbles up a good 10% of the i7 sitting in front of me—while sitting idle. For a single page. Displaying a few news headlines. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
My home is my sanctuary. My computers (and handheld devices) all run free software systems that have been (fairly) tightly buttoned down and secured. My online documents, messaging and emails are handled either on my own servers or by companies dedicated to open source and security. Is my personal information 100 percent safe and unhackable? No, but it’s pretty good. And it’s about as good as I can get it without making significant sacrifices in the name of privacy. But eventually I need to leave my home. And that is where things get much more difficult. Let’s talk, briefly, about the challenges faced when trying to maintain a certain level of personal privacy when traveling around your city. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
My home is my sanctuary. My computers (and handheld devices) all run free software systems that have been (fairly) tightly buttoned down and secured. My online documents, messaging and emails are handled either on my own servers or by companies dedicated to open source and security. Is my personal information 100 percent safe and unhackable? No, but it’s pretty good. And it’s about as good as I can get it without making significant sacrifices in the name of privacy. But eventually I need to leave my home. And that is where things get much more difficult. Let’s talk, briefly, about the challenges faced when trying to maintain a certain level of personal privacy when traveling around your city. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I get a lot of questions on how to perform various tasks from a Linux shell/terminal. In the interest of making a simple cheat sheet—something I can point people to that will help them get rolling with terminal powers—what follows are my recommendations for how to perform various types of communication from your shell. I’m talking about the normal sort of communication most people perform via a web browser (or a handful of graphical applications) nowadays: Email, instant messaging, that sort of thing. Except, you know, running them entirely in a terminal—which you can run just about anywhere: in an SSH session on a remote server, on a handheld device, or even on your Android phone/tablet. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
7 features Linux distros should addImage by LinuxLinux (or, GNU/Linux, if you prefer) distributions are absolutely amazing—stable, fast, flexible. Your average Linux-based system is a veritable powerhouse of functionality—a tour de force of what computers can accomplish. But from time to time, other operating systems have some pretty great ideas. Here are seven of my personal favorites that Linux distributions might want to consider “borrowing.” Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Right now, as I sit here typing these words, it is February of the year 2017.The words of which I speak? They are entirely about DOS. Yes—that DOS. The one that powered so many computers throughout the 1980s and a chunk of the 1990s. The one with a big, low-resolution “C:>”. The one you installed with floppy disks often onto a hard drive measured in megabytes. DOS. You see, back on December 25, something miraculous happened. Something that changed the world forever: FreeDOS 1.2 was released. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This week, Wine—the project that allows you to run many Microsoft Windows applications on non-Windows platforms—hit a rather huge milestone: version 2.0. From the Wine 2.0 release notes:
“This release represents over a year of development effort and around 6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013 and the 64-bit support on macOS.”
I’ll be honest. The Mac OS tidbit isn’t all that interesting to me. But the support for Microsoft Office 2013 is, almost certainly, of interest to a number of people. (I don’t use it personally, but I know plenty of organizations that do.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the past several years, I have been completely free of smartphones and cell phone. For a variety of reasons (mostly privacy related), I have simply avoided them.
My life really hasn’t been worse because of it. I still have portable computing devices (tablets, UMPCs, PDAs and the like) that allow me to communicate with the world while on the go—I just need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot to do so. A minor annoyance, to be sure, but it seems like a reasonable trade-off for the increase in personal privacy and security.
Then again, it’s been so many years since I’ve had a cell phone. What if my understanding of the value of having a good smartphone is outdated? What if smartphones have improved so dramatically that their value would outweigh the privacy concerns?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Free and open source software is an absolutely critical part of our world—and the future of technology and computing. One problem that consistently plagues many free software projects, though, is the challenge of funding ongoing development (and support and documentation). With that in mind, I have finally settled on a New Year’s resolution for 2017: to donate to one free software project (or group) every month—or the whole year. After all, these projects are saving me a boatload of money because I don’t need to buy expensive, proprietary packages to accomplish the same things.+ Also on Network World: Free Software Foundation shakes up its list of priority projects +
I’m not setting some crazy goal here—not requiring that I donate beyond my means. Heck, some months I may be able to donate only a few bucks. But every little bit helps, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Portable, pocket-sized computer. Runs Linux. Has a good battery life. Bonus points for a physical keyboard, and full-size USB port. Double bonus points for being cheap. That’s sort of my ideal “carry with me” device. If I can have a Linux device, with a proper shell that I can work entirely from, I’m a happy camper. Over the past few years I’ve been able to hobble together a few devices to accomplish this Utopian goal—more or less. At one point, I hobbled together a makeshift Raspberry Pi case (with a screen that I powered with an external USB power supply) using a whole lot of electrical tape. That was great except the “case” was just—well—tape. And I couldn’t find a tiny physical keyboard that fit with the size of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back in May of 2016, I reviewed the (then current) Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. At just a bit over $2,000 it wasn’t the world’s cheapest machine, but for a Linux user looking for a high-end (but very portable) notebook, that XPS proved to be a remarkable rig. Well, Dell has a new model of the XPS Developer Edition. And I pestered them until they sent me one to test. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bryan Lunduke