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GNU/Linux, of course, is the most obvious difference between Ubuntu's mobile offerings, phone or tablet, and those from the usual suspects. The upcoming tablet, however, has a big feature that's been MIA from the phones so far, and depending on how well it's implemented and how savvy the marketing folks are, it could completely change the mobile market.

It’s a sad, sad day in Germany as openSUSE 13.1 Linux has reached the end and has been removed from support. Evergreen, the hospice care workers for terminal operating systems, will be keeping the patient supplied with a minimal number of patches until it finally falls into that good sleep and is carried off by penguin angels.

Long before the end of the twentieth century, the antivirus guys were fighting whack-a-mole battle — and that was in the days before the bad guys had the sophistication to write malware that could hide, constantly rewrite itself to avoid matching a definition, or to return seemingly by magic after being deleted. There is just too much malware being created for even a hard drive loaded with definitions to handle. For a while it seemed as if heuristics were the answer, until it became obvious that much of what we do on our computers looks like bad behavior to a halfway effective heuristics program.

If you’ve been waiting for a tablet offering the full GNU/Linux experience, your wait is almost over. Ubuntu announced today that a tablet offering the full “convergence” experience will be available to the public in March. The 10 inch device, dubbed the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition, will be built by the Spanish company BQ, which currently manufactures two Ubuntu phones, and will be sold through BQ’s online store. So far, no information on pricing seems to be available.

Would you like to test your knowledge of the people of FOSS? Take our quiz. We have eighteen questions, each concerning a person considered to be a leader in the FOSS world. Have we left anyone out? You betcha — starting with you. The way we see it, each and every one of us, whether we merely use FOSS at home, work to keep FOSS software maintained or fight the good fight to keep free tech free, is equally as important.

“And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to mention viruses and security problems.”

First up for the big tent events for this spring will be Great Wide Open in Atlanta. Although the event will take place March 16-17, which is actually a few days before spring’s official arrival, it’s a good bet that Atlanta will be in full bloom by the time the conference opens its doors at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in the city’s midtown area.

SourceForge’s new owners aren’t exactly what you might expect to be purchasing a site that for all intents and purposes revolves around free and open source software. The new owners, SourceForge Media, is a subsidiary of BIZX, and while that may sound like some huge and gigantic mega corporation, it’s an LLC owned by Southern California residents Roger and Logan Abbott, who are probably either father and son or brothers, we’re not sure. What we do know is that their background is in telecommunications, not exactly the sort of business experience you’d expect for someone entering the share-and-share-alike world of FOSS, where there’s no such thing as vendor lock-in.

Inquiring minds wanted to know, so we asked. When choosing what to run on a machine — we’re talking computing machines running GNU/Linux here — what’s more important, the choice of distro or which desktop environment to run? We began asking the question among ourselves several weeks back when we were running our “best distro” poll and a few commenters observered that the desktop might be a more important metric for most users, since it’s the desktop that supplies the interface with which the user interacts. Good point, we thought.

This afternoon I exchanged a few emails with Logan Abbott who is one of the owners of BIZX and the president of the SourceForge Media subsidiary which he said “was formed for the purposes of this transaction.”

BSD had itself its own row of booths in the expanded expo hall — FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, and OpenBSD were all neighbors on the exhibit floor. As is common for all the conferences we attend, Dru Lavigne and I — she moreso than me — got to catch up on things, and I took the time to drop in on her “Doc Like and Egyptian” presentation (though, burdened with a radio, I was called away to put out a minor “fire,” rhetorically speaking, in the press room).

To start the conference off on Thursday morning, Jorge Castro gave a speech regarding “Gaming on Ubuntu” as part of UbuCon. In only 15 minutes he was able to deliver a State of the Union address on gaming on Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu. He covered the pros and cons of such, Steam, and Linux getting next gen titles. Most helpful was a reference to multiple Personal Package Archives for the Linux gamer for controllers and new drivers, as well as the proper hardware to use to complement Linux gaming. This was followed by a presentation by Didiers Roche discussing Ubuntu Make, a command line tool for developers of many kinds.

So armed with some information and just as much misinformation, I set out to study the options open to us Linux users. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t think that virus and malware threats are near as prevalent on Linux as they are on Windows, but it turns out that several antivirus companies did not agree, to the point that they created antivirus programs for Linux too. And just about the time I began to despair at the number of choices I had and the amount of research that would be necessary to get the best protection available, it came to me….

It’s not the distro that’s important to most users, they said, because most users don’t interact with the distro itself as they work and play on their Linux machines. Instead, the average user’s direct interaction with a computer is primarily through the desktop environment, whether that be KDE, GNOME, Unity or something they rolled on their own on a Friday night instead of having a boys’ or girls’ night out.

Are you a distro hopper? Are you one of those people who knows what day of the week it is because of which distro you’re using? If so, this quiz for you. But even if you’re one of those people who finds a distro you like and sticks with it until it becomes as comfortable as a well worn shoe, you’ve probably done your homework, and that’s why you were able to find the distro that was a perfect fit for you. In other words, you’ll probably do well on our quiz too — because it just might be a tortoise and hare sort of thing.

Is world peace next? GNOME and KDE are neighbors at SCALE 14X, and for all intents and purposes that was by design. Thank, or blame, SoCal SUSE, which arranged for the two desktop rivals — both available on openSUSE and other major distros — to share a large booth at SCALE 14X.

This is the second time in three years that IT-oLogy’s longest running conference has been cancelled. In 2014 the event was cancelled, evidently due to logistical problems as IT-oLogy was in the process of launching the first Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. Last year there was no Atlanta event, and POSSCON was successfully rebooted in Columbia, attracting around 850 atendees.

One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.

The Linux Foundation’s board has always been weighted heavily in favor of corporations and money, with a large majority of the foundation’s board being elected by member corporations. The nine platinum members, who pay $500,000 yearly in membership dues, elect up to ten board members (or one each for up to ten directors), the sixteen gold members elect three, and the more than 250 silver members elect only one. Until last week, individual members, who pay $99 in annual dues elected two members to the board, not enough to influence foundation policy in a vote, but enough to give the community some say in the decision making process.

Shuttleworth’s keynote kicked off a busier-than-expected day at SCALE 14X. Sessions on Thursday throughout UbuCon and the rest of SCALE 14X seemed to have more than adequate attendance, especially in the larger rooms at the Pasadena Convention Center. In fact, the Chef Training was standing room only, and some of the attendees had to be turned away.