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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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Coaching the next generation of FOSS developers
1 month, 1 week ago
"Each year it seems that there are more and more grumblings about how commercial Open Source conferences are moving further and further away from Free Software and Open Source communities..." -
Fly the Linux Skies
1 month, 1 week ago
"How many Linux desktops are there? It's like flying on a cloudy day... before GPS was around .... " -
Lessig gives up on Free Culture
3 months, 2 weeks ago
"Aims Ivory Tower at 'Corruption' ... Well, that's it. You'll never have to listen to Stanford professor Larry Lessig talk about Free Culture again.Lessig is moving on - to fight the good fight against "Corruption". The technology-leaning lawyer announced this last year, but has continued to discuss Wikipedia, the Creative Commons and the like. That is until yesterday, when he delivered a "last lecture" on Free Culture at Stanford University."
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The rise of the FOSS spinmeister
3 months, 2 weeks ago
In August 2003, a little more than three months after the SCO Group had filed a lawsuit against IBM, seeking damages for alleged breach of contract, I had an email exchange with Blake Stowell, who was then the public relations manager of the former company. -
Paul Frields to be Fedora project leader
4 months ago
Outgoing Fedora leader Max Spevack has sent a goodbye letter of sorts from FUDCon and announced that the new project leader will be Paul Frields. "Many of you already know Paul. He has been part of the Fedora community since 2003, not long after the Red Hat Linux Project officially merged with the original Fedora.us. Paul has worked with Fedora's documentation, packaging, marketing, news, and artwork teams. He also served as one of the inaugural members of the Fedora Project Board." -
Linux users answer the call: Ubuntu wireless-adapter glitch resolved
4 months ago
"The sage advice of Linux community members gets my Linksys wireless adapter working in Ubuntu 7.10 in just a few minutes." -
Voting for the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is Now Open
4 months, 2 weeks ago
LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that voting for the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 27 categories this year, including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on February 21st. This is the seventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Last years winners include Ubuntu, Firefox, KDE, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. -
Stallman: students should be taught to share with the class
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"Richard Stallman, in receiving an honorary Doctorate from Italy's University of Pavia, brought back memories of the basic primary school principle that students bringing cookies to class should bring enough for everyone .... " -
Collaboration: best reason for government open source?
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"Ask a software vendor why governments need open source, and the answer will likely be collaboration. But public agencies may be more interested in the bottom line .... " -
Fabricators descend on Maker Faire Austin
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"AUSTIN, Texas--If you've never seen a machine that makes 3D models out of sugar, you should. But unless you're part of a relatively small group of people who went to the Maker Faire in California in May, or are one of a few other people who know the machine's creator, you probably have never even heard of the device. " -
Building a community around your open source project
7 months, 3 weeks ago
"There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically." -
How to sponsor an open source project?
7 months, 4 weeks ago
"I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project. An upfront caveat -- this is not an actual offer. It's totally hypothetical. If I make the offer it will be done in some other more formal way.The project: I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux."
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Schedules Direct meets membership goal, lowers price
7 months, 4 weeks ago
Schedules Direct, the non-profit service providing electronic program guide data to users of MythTV and other free software TV projects, has met its membership goals and lowered the price of its data service to $20 per year. -
Fifth LinuxChix Brazil conference
8 months, 2 weeks ago
"This year it is the turn of Brazilia, the capital of Brazil, to host the 5th Linuxchix Brazilian Conference. The conference runs from the 7th to the 8th of September, and once again open source professionals and enthusiasts will convene for two days of talks, tutorials and debates .... " -
Is free and open code a form of infrastructure? How about the humans who write it?
8 months, 2 weeks ago
"Here in the free software and open source (FOSS) worlds, we're used to making, and employing, building materials that are products of human mentation. There are dependencies here, and the primary ones are on the human beings who write code. And patch it. And rewrite it. And continue to improve it, making it more and more useful .... " - More News
Linux.com : Community
Ask Linux.com: detecting drives, scripting bash, and distributing documents
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This week in our semi-fortnightly stroll through the Linux.com forums: working with external hard drives, configuring all those extra mouse buttons, bash scripting help, and advice on finding software for the hearing impaired.
Bdale Garbee: A fascinating 'open source celebrity' (video)
Let's get the first Bdale question out of the way right now: no, he didn't sell half the vowels in his name. His birth name was Barksdale, later shortened to B'dale, then to Bdale. The next thing you notice (in person) about Bdale Garbee is his size. He's a very large person. But all that aside, look at his personal home page and Wikipedia entry and you'll realize that this man is one of the most prolific contributors to Linux and open source in the world. Besides all that, he's nice (and often funny), too.
Ask Linux.com: Prepping for updates, GRUB versus LILO, and forum tools
In this week's peek inside the Linux.com discussion forums, we find some advice on safely updating your Linux distribution, and how the GRUB and LILO bootloaders differ, along with a primer on the built-in tools that you can use to get more out of forum participation (hint: look in the top right corner of each page).
Ubuntu Open Week unites community and developers
What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams.
Free Flash community reacts to Adobe Open Screen Project
From the presentation, you might imagine that Adobe's announcement of the Open Screen Project was major news. According to the news release, the project's goal is "to enable a consistent runtime environment" by relaxing some restrictions on the Flash format and releasing some specifications. However, in the free Flash community, the small group of developers dedicated to producing non-proprietary Flash tools, the reaction to the news was polite at best -- and serves as a much-needed reality check to the over-enthusiastic announcement.
Ask Linux.com: Startup commands, cloning, and anti-virus software
In this week's peek inside the Linux.com discussion forums, we'll learn how to schedule commands to run every time at system start-up and what the Linux equivalents are for the disk cloning powers of Symantec Ghost. We'll also see a discussion about anti-virus software options for Linux, and whether or not they are worth the trouble to install. Plus, you'll get your chance to chime in with answers to tricky unsolved problems with virtual consoles and distributed filesystems.
Bradley Kuhn makes a better world through software freedom
Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.
Portrait: Luis Villa, from Bugzilla to bar association
In 10 years, Luis Villa has seen his career expand side by side with free and open source software (FOSS). Starting as bugmaster at Ximian, one of the companies that shaped GNOME as we know it today, he has been a mid-level manager at Novell, the coordinator of testing with the GNOME project, and a frequent member of the GNOME Foundation Board. More recently, Villa has been a student at Columbia Law School. When he graduates, he hopes to use his knowledge of how FOSS and business interact to benefit both.
Ask Linux.com: partitioning, creating a mountable disk image, and how to post productively
In this week's look at the recent activity in Linux.com's forums, we explore a couple of questions from new Linux users about how their new OS differs from Windows, how to create a directory archive that you can mount like a disk image, and how answering your own forum question can actually help somebody else.
Bruce Perens tells how he got involved with Linux and Free Software (video)
You've probably seen quotes from long-time Linux and Free Software advocate Bruce Perens, and you may have even have seen his picture a few times. Now, in this exclusive Linux.com video, you have a chance to "meet" him in a little more personal way, and to learn how Bruce got interested in Linux and FOSS -- and why he stays both interested and involved.
Commentary: the Linux Foundation and the future of Linux
I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation.
Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin talks to Weekly Wire about the group's goals and plans (video)
AUSTIN, TEXAS -- The Linux Foundation is just over a year old. This week, here in Austin, it held its second annual Collboration Summit, a "by invitation" event for about 300 core Linux developers and corporate sponsors. In this video, Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin talks about the group's current activities and future goals.
Libre Graphics Meeting raising funds for developer travel
The annual conclave of free graphics software developers, users, and artists known as the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is set for May 8-11 in Wroclaw, Poland, this year. LGM organizers are holding a fund-raising campaign this week to help volunteer developers travel to the event.
Ask Linux.com: Choosing a distro, working with external hard drives, and learning how to write
Some questions keep coming back in recent threads on the Linux.com forums, such as how to choose the right Linux distribution. If you are a longtime Linux user, it's easy to forget how perplexing it is to get started.
Ask Linux.com
Last week we took a look inside the Linux.com forums to see what readers were talking about and what questions needed answering. Since that visit led to answers for some threads and spawned several new forums users, we thought we'd come back with questions that range from why you have to type in your password for sudo, to how to work with the DjVu scanned image format.
Ask Linux.com
Got a question about Linux or free and open source software? You've come to the right place. In the left column of every page, directly below the Distributions link, you'll find a link labeled "Get Linux help" that will take you to the Linux.com discussion forums -- your best bet for getting Linux-related troubleshooting and advice, whether the issue involves hardware, software, or neither. Here are some examples of threads from recent days -- some with answers, and some still looking for solutions.
GNOME focuses on accessibility -- with a little help from Mozilla and others
The GNOME Foundation has turned its attention to accessibility for people with disabilities. To help improve both Web accessibility within GNOME and the project's long-term direction, the Mozilla Foundation is joining the GNOME advisory board, and plans to help improve integration of the XUL development platform with GNOME. Even more significantly, the GNOME Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Google, and Canonical are jointly sponsoring a $50,000 outreach program to help improve accessibility in GNOME.
New Fedora Chair plans to remove obstacles for volunteers
"The job is to remove obstacles in the way of the community," says Paul W. Frields, speaking about his new position as Fedora Chair. After only a few weeks in the position, Frields is still learning his way around and getting to know his colleagues, but already this vision is a common refrain in his comments, underlying all his comments about what he hopes the Fedora project will achieve while he is coordinating its efforts.
Evangelist: Mozilla has "historic opportunity" to advocate for users
Recently, Linux.com had the chance to ask Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard his thoughts about the past, present, and future of Mozilla, the force behind the successful Firefox browser and Thunderbird email application.
Interview with LinuxFund cofounder Scott Rainey (video)
LinuxFund.org is back -- with a new bank and some new people running things. Scott Rainey spoke with Linux.com at the Florida Linux Show on February 11 after a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, where he'd been touting the resurrected LinuxFund credit card program at SCALE 6X.
