Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

What does your home computer lab look like? Do you have a dedicated office, a corner of the living room, a lounge-in-bed setup? Maybe you're set up more like an old-fashioned terminal server, with a big workstation in a closet and several remote PCs. Maybe you have whittled your computing herd down to a single sleek laptop.

All in all, I think Free Software users know from practical experience how to question and why to question; we also have learned about freedom in a way that most people don't get to--as a practical reality, an experience, not just a slogan.

Using computers doesn't require any kind of special geek talents, just study and a mind open to letting some actual knowledge in. Anyone can learn anything, despite the tireless efforts of the astrofudsters to persuade us otherwise.

The common wisdom is to have a shared home directory in a multiboot setup, but this has its own set of potential problems because it mixes data files and configuration files. So when you're trying out different distributions, your desktop settings may not translate gracefully across all of them. So what's the answer?

CentOS is not dead or going away. The signers of the Open Letter are fully committed to continue the CentOS Project. Updates and new releases will continue.

What will happen as Linux continues to grow, and especially as it reaches increasing numbers of unsophisticated users? Doesn't common sense dictate that it will suffer increasing levels of attack and compromise?

Here is a collection of short videos starring Linux: from IBM, Novell, and random creative people doing random creative acts like taking Tux skydiving, running 165 Linux applications at once, and making movies with Blender. Enjoy!

Juliet Kemp is one of my favorite authors. She writes a regular "Tip of the Trade" column for Serverwatch.com, and a regular monthly howto column for LinuxPlanet.com. Today I have assembled some of my favorite Tips all in one handy-dandy article: the magic sysreg key, proc and processes, fuser, cracking passwords, iptraf, UUIDs, and more.

This was a real breakthrough, because for the first time little notebooks were actually priced small. Put Linux on them and you had an inexpensive, acceptably-performing, very portable machine plus the vast world of Free and free-of-cost software at your fingertips. But then the rot set in, as it so often does in the commercial, proprietary computer world, and especially when Microsoft is involved...

The Chrome OS story is truly frightening, far more terrifying than Mono gaining a solid foothold in Linux distributions--- because the news is simply an announcement that the Chrome OS project has been officially launched. There is no OS yet. What levels of hysteria are going to be reached when the actual code is released? Rioting? Suicides? Looting?

Most computer users don't want an inflexible little Internet machine that runs only a Web browser, especially not for three or four hundred dollars or more. Something like that should come free in a box of cereal. Most want all the functionality of a full-sized notebook, only smaller, lighter, and with significantly longer battery life.

I'm not embarrassed to have ideals, I am proud. Ideals elevate us above situational ethics. Ideals guide us into trying to be better people, and give us strong bases for making difficult decisions. (Such as No, little Bill, it is not OK to do anything in the name of making a buck.)

Does the idea of "advocacy" make you nervous? It does sound a bit scary, doesn't it, like those annoying door-to-door religious people. But it's not that way. If you're interested in helping people learn to speak Linux, here are a few easy, non-scary tips.

Since the torrents of IANALs have been filling the Internet tubes with passionate arguments on Mono/No Mono, it seemed a good time to weigh in with an article written by an actual lawyer on the possible risks and dangers. "Without that explicit patent license, we certainly should prefer the community-driven and Free-Software-developed languages over those developed by companies (like Microsoft) that have a history of anti-Free Software practices."

One Distro To Rule Them All. One interpreted language, one compiled language, one mad good rapid development platform, one killer office suite, and so on. Put all that fragmented energy behind a select few projects, and in no time we'll conquer all.

Taking it further, Mono on the whole also enables easier migration - for both developers and users - from legacy CLR frameworks such as Microsoft.NET. Students who learn Visual Studio.NET at University can take their skills and directly apply them to creating or improving Free Software on their shiny new Ubuntu installations, without the need to learn a new language. Businesses with investment in .NET-based applications can look at replacing their servers or desktops with Free Software. Whilst providing .NET compatibility has always been a secondary goal, it is an extremely popular one, which has prompted a lot of input and development work from assorted people into the Mono codebase.

Reader Mark Scott submitted this interesting variation on Linux OEM netbooks: this one is bundled with Symantec's Norton 360. No, it doesn't run on Linux.

I used to want something like a Toshiba Libretto because it was close to the perfect size. But it had three drawbacks: too expensive, an uncomfortable keyboard, and no integrated mobile phone. Now in this excellent new netbook era, I think my dream machine is finally at hand.

"You're never too old to try something new; computers are a heck of a lot of fun; and anyone can learn to do anything." I still believe that, and most of the time it's true.

The Moblin project started out in life as an operating system targeted at the Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform but has morphed into a prime candidate for the Netbook world. Paul Ferrill tests Moblin on a Lenovo S10e; hits some bumps, has some fun, and reports on his findings.