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Linux was born and grew within an ecosystem of norms, not laws. Those norms were those of programming (C), operating systems (*NIX), command shells (bash, etc.), e-mail (SMTP, etc.) licenses (GPL, etc.) and Internet protocols (TCP/IP and the rest).

We initially set out to produce The Hello World Program entirely with free and open source software, which presented us with a variety of challenges. Not all professional media production software has a FOSS equivalent, requiring a bit of flexibility and ingenuity on our part. We advocate FOSS because it enables anyone of any age, background, or budget to create professional media with minimal equipment and a handful of craft supplies.

When I was 13, our school was hooked up to the Internet—a 28.8 kbps U.S. Robotics modem was all that stood between us and the vast expanses of the Web. As I grew to understand more and more about the fundamentals of HTML and websites over the next couple of years, it seemed to me that you needed to use special tools like FrontPage or the legend that was DreamWeaver to make anything of any real merit. read more

LEGO bricks: To a parent, they're a virtual minefield, hidden away in the carpet to inflict unimaginable pain from a seemly innocent barefoot step. But to a child, they are a tool for creatively engineering anything the mind can imagine. And for many, they are our first foray into open source. The instructions with a LEGO set start out as rigid rules, and become merely guidelines as children learn to remix, adapt, and extend the "code" which defines the object being built, and then be shared with anyone nearby. read more

LibreOffice is the best free office suite around, and as such has been adopted by all major Linux distributions. Although LibreOffice is already packed with features, it can be extended by using specific add-ons, called extensions. The main LibreOffice extensions website is extensions.libreoffice.org. Extensions are tools that can be added or removed independently from the main installation, and may add new functionality or make existing functionality easier to use. read more

You get to play with a T_SPACESHIP operator, and much, much, more PHP 7.0 was launched today, so we've asked @sydphp organiser and #phunconf convener Jack Skinner to explain its significance. Over to you, Jack ...…

The bane of containers is securing them, but CoreOS has a soup-to-nuts answer for this worry: Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing.

The Open Organization concludes with an invitation: "Join us on our journey by engaging in the discussion on Opensource.com," Jim Whitehurst writes. "We look forward to hearing from you there."

You've Got Questions? This is a fun issue of Linux Journal, with a big focus on who we are as a community. We include all the bits and pieces you expect from an issue of Linux Journal, and if you're interested in being an active part of the Linux community, you couldn't pick a better issue to read.

The bane of containers is securing them, but CoreOS has a soup-to-nuts answer for this worry: Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing.

Kdenlive is one of those applications; you can use it daily for a year and wake up one morning only to realize that you still have only grazed the surface of all of its potential. That's why it's nice every once in a while to sit back and look over some of the lesser-used tricks and tools in Kdenlive. Even though something's not used as often as, say, the Spacer or Razor tools, it still may end up being just the right finishing touch on your latest masterpiece. read more

Unless you ask Uncle Sam, our new source of data to track desktop OS trends Windows 10's market share growth slowed in November, according to the two tracking outfits The Register has tracked for the last couple of years. But a new source of desktop OS share data has Redmond's latest doing rather better.…

Last year, Kenton Varda and I ran a successful fundraising campaign that let us build Sandstorm. During the campaign, he published a treatise on how open source and indie software has proliferated on desktop and mobile, yet stagnated on the web because decentralized hosting has historically been so difficult. read more

This tutorial shows the steps to install an Ubuntu 15.10 (Wiley Werewolf) server with Nginx, PHP, MariaDB, Postfix, pure-ftpd, BIND, Dovecot and ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a web hosting control panel that allows you to configure the installed services through a web browser. This setup provides a full hosting server with web, email (inc. spam and antivirus filter), Database, FTP and DNS services.

Hotfix posted online to shore up Raspbian key generation Raspberry Pis running Raspbian – a flavor of Debian GNU/Linux tuned for the credit-card-sized computers – apparently generate weak SSH host keys.…

Today, online privacy and threats like invisible tracking from third parties on the Web seem very abstract. Many of us are either not aware of what’s happening with our online data or we feel powerless because we don’t know what … Continue reading

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the serious business of stickers in open source culture. I shared the Rules of Sticker Club, criteria stickers must meet to make it onto the limited space of a laptop. read more

Variscite’s rugged, 50 x 25mm “DART-6UL” COM runs Linux on an i.MX6 UltraLite SoC, offers NAND, eMMC, and wireless, and starts at $27 in volume. In April, Variscite announced the world’s smallest i.MX6 computer-on-module with its 50 x 20mm, Freescale i.MX6-based DART-MX6. At 50 x 25mm, the DART-6UL doesn’t quite match those dimensions, but it […]

Rolling releases keep on...rolling.

Birthdays mark time. They ask us to look back—at our accomplishments and stumbles, our histories and their invaluable lessons. They also encourage us to look forward—to our dreams and goals, our futures and the promise they hold.