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The usual suspects were in attendance this year, plus some I had never seen before. Conspicuously missing were my friends at ThinkPenguin. They were more than generous in giving us perks for our last fund raiser and I was a bit bummed I wouldn’t have a chance to see them in person again this year. The Ubuntu table was busy as always and the focus, at least for those visiting the exhibit, was the Ubuntu phone. No matter who I heard introducing themselves, the main topic or questions asked was about the Ubuntu phone. Many of us might have thought that the interest in the Ubuntu slabs was exaggerated or astroturfed, but from what I could tell the Ubuntu Phone most certainly is on the minds of many Ubuntu users.

In case you weren’t paying attention, there’s a new Linux file system on the horizon, thanks to a former Google engineer.

That engineer in question, namely Kent Overstreet, posted a message on LKML.org last week promoting the progress of Bcache File System, or Bcachefs, the first Linux file system written specifically for solid state disks. The purpose of the new file system is to ramp up the speed in the way Linux stores data on servers.

Many of you may remember that in 2005, Sony tried a similar method of stopping music “theft” by including a back door or rootkit via music CDs released under the Sony/BMG label. The main reason for planting this nefarious code on your computer was so it could phone home to Sony and report your proclivity for sharing certain Sony/BMG label CDs. It was also supposed to stop the copying of CDs, although Linux ignored the sneaky bytes and copied CDs anyway. When caught, Sony had the absolute and pure audacity to claim they had every right to insure the security on their investment by planting a rootkit on your computer.

In 2014 and 2015, Linux became home to a list of popular commercial titles such as the popular Borderlands, Witcher, Dead Island, and Counter Strike series of games. While this is exciting news, what of the gamer on a budget? Commercial titles are good, but even better are free-to-play alternatives made by developers who know what players like.

Out-of-the-box, Bodhi installs hardly any software, only just enough to get the user up and running. At first boot, there’s a lightweight browser (Midori), a file manager (PCManFM), a text editor (ePad), an image viewer (Ephoto) and little else. This is in keeping with the Bodhi team’s minimalist philosophy, based on a belief that users should make their own software choices and not have them made for them.

Gameranx reported this week that Steam has 1,400 Linux titles ready to go two months before the hardware’s launch. “In less than a month, Linux has seen the number of compatible games rise from 1,300 to 1,400 games,” the article states. “Among the recent editions are Shadow of Mordor, DiRT Showdown, Terraria, and Don’t Be Patchman, the first Steam game that launched on Linux first.” Although Steam’s total market share also remains low at 1 percent, the article also says, “this promises to change when Valve finally launches their Linux based Steam Machines this coming October.” We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

For those who don’t know, since its inception back around 2011, Bodhi Linux’s biggest reason for being is as a showpiece for the Enlightenment desktop. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was really Enlightenment version 17 that was on show, and when Enlightenment moved on to 18 about a year and a half ago, and in subsequent releases, the Bodhi team began to realize that the desktop wasn’t going in the direction they would have hoped.

Now in its sixth year, Texas Linux Fest is an annual community-run conference for Linux and free/open source software users and enthusiasts based in the Lone Star State. Much like the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, and LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, Wash. — and an ever-growing list of successful regional shows — Texas Linux Fest is a weekend event geared towards individual users, rather than an expensive multi-workday expo that caters primarily to sponsored attendees.

It’s already been proven that our anonymity online is a myth. Even with tools like Tor and anything else short of a high quality VPN, finding who we are and where we live requires just a little bit of work. The Internet is forever, up until the movement for “the right to be forgotten” came about. But even with that, none of us are really safe from discovery if someone wants to find us.

The project’s original purpose, in large part, was to keep free software free. KDE had begun development the previous year using Trolltech’s then proprietary Qt framework. GNOME was built using the GTK+ toolkit, which had been created for GIMP and was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The GNOME desktop was released under the LGPL, with most of its applications licensed under the GPL, making GNOME and its apps totally free software.

Canonical is banking on the solution being the Snappy package manager, which includes all of an app’s dependencies in a single compressed package, “so in theory, there should be no compatibility problems.”

Last October, we published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.

Another thing the Mad guys and dolls have been working on is getting tons of free publicity through news articles placed on content hungry news sites. Well, actually, this publicity isn’t exactly free, since Redmond spends big bucks advertising on most of these sites, which is something that must cross editors’ minds when deciding to go ahead and make important news out of what should be merely a product release.

Let’s set things straight: The ThinkPad is no longer a laptop, according to the Lenovo press release. The first paragraph of the press release says the company “unveiled the beginning of a new family of mobile workstation innovations.” So I guess that’s what we’re calling them now – mobile workstations.

On one of the back desks there was a stack of Lenovo R-500s. We love supplying Lenovo laptops because they are the most durable machines we’ve given away. Pete was working on them in order to make them ready for this school year. As we passed that table on the way to my desk, our visitor jerked his head in that direction and asked, “Are those being prepared for recycle?”

There was a time years ago when Linux and gaming weren’t fit to be in the same sentence. I first made the jump to Linux around the late ’90s with a copy of Doom II. There were glitches at times: the occasional crash, loss of sound and lack of some features. The flaws of the Linux version in contrast to its Windows counterpart turned me away from Linux gaming at first.

While my own priorities were shifting, the state of political discourse was going through huge changes. Activist communities were slowly moving most of our political conversations and many of our personal interactions to the web. At some point it hit me that I had no idea who built any of the tools we were all using or what that entity’s end goal was. Of course, large corporations rarely value individual freedoms unless they happen to align with their profit-driven goals.

With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.

It didn’t take me long to figure out something I should have snapped-to long before: You can dress a Linux system up to look like Windows as much as you like or as much as you can, but once the clothes hit the floor the whole façade crumbles and it doesn’t at all resemble Windows. Not even close.

Back in the early days of the 21st century, Dotcom seemed to have overcome his checkered past and to have developed the Midas touch with the popular online storage site Megaupload. Like Midas, however, he was to discover that gold is an overrated commodity, the ownership of which often creates as many problems as it solves. For one thing, you can’t eat it. For another, lots of people want to take it from you.