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It seems as though every year or two some hack comes along to recommend a single package management solution. This time we have the talking heads suggesting a single app store API. I think all of this ridiculous.

It seems as if most UNIX and Linux users honestly believe that they are secure from day one of installation/purchase. This is simply not true. Any network connected system stands the risk of attack, and beyond that any data transfer from an outside source to a non-network machine is also a risk. Beyond that, there are always exploits than can be done from the physical location. Preventing these attacks is not always easy or convenient, but in an increasingly risky metaverse-like world it is necessary. After all, your entire existence is verified through a computer database somewhere.

It seems as though every time someone sees me at my desk reading my mail, they ask what it is I am doing. I tell them I am reading my mail, and they're shocked. They see me pull up image attachments, and office and all this, and they think I am some kind of wizard. "How is it that you can do that in command line?" they ask. "I use Mutt," I reply. I have done an article on Mutt before, and I will do it again for clarity's sake.

One of the strangest things that I have heard recently is that Microsoft is porting their Windows operating system to the ARM platform. By itself, that wouldn't seem all that strange. ARM is clearly an up-and-coming platform for which many different companies are writing a ton of software. The strange thing about this move by the Redmond Washington giant is that the port is almost completely unnecessary.

To be honest, I am one of those troglodytes who hates KDE4 and GNOME, and I prefer some good ol' KDE 3.5.x. Until recently, I had been using XFCE4. It came closest in offering me the features I was wanting, but something still rubbed me the wrong way. I had known about the Trinity project for some time. Trinity is the continuation of KDE 3.5 and they've made a release. KDE 3.5.12. It's relatively stable and feature complete.

We all know that Microsoft doesn't like people messing with their stuff. For example, Microsoft really hates the amount of piracy that surrounds Windows and Office. The company frequently releases updates that make piracy of those products harder and harder. This is completely legal considering that only Microsoft owns Windows and Office. You pay about 300.00USD to have MS Office and MS Windows, and those would be introductory versions of each. Now, apparently, the company wishes to control things even more.

X11 has been with us (the Linux/UNIX community) for quite some time. Well, quite some time depending upon your age; it was released in 1984. In computing terms, this is the equivalent of saying that you have been using the original black and white Mac OS for the past 26 years. When software reaches this kind of age, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain.

Over the passed few months there has been a lot of chatter about former Sun Microsystems' projects. Many have been lamenting Oracle's decisions on how best to steward these projects, and forks have surfaced. I used many of the products in question when they were maintained by Sun, and I find myself looking into a future that seems better rather than worse.

So, in an article at PCW, Robert Strohmeyer argues that the dream of desktop Linux is dead. I disagree. I strongly disagree. I don't disagree because I have some hope of Linux out-pacing Windows or Macintosh OSX. I don't disagree because there is some new distribution that is going to sweep the market. I don't disagree because of how easy to use Ubuntu, Mint, and Mandriva are. I disagree because the Linux community will never rest.

There are several different ways to make backups of data for any operating system. In the "glory days" of UNIX people would usually write a cron job that would create a Tape ARchive of their system and write that TAR to a tape drive. Well, those days are long gone, as are those scripts. What is here? dd. Dd is very powerful and rather under appreciated tool.

In the city of Gainesville, which is the majority of Hall County Georgia, open source software is starting to make an impact. For the past two weeks, I have been taking note of the software installed on machines that come in for repairs. The results, so far, have been rather astonishing...

In the Autumn of 2004, I was searching the net and came across this new Linux distribution called Ubuntu Linux. It was based on Debian and was supposedly easy to use. It promoted these seemingly humanitarian concepts and touted itself as shipping with over 1000 pieces of software. Overtime, the colors of the site remained odd, and the default color scheme of the desktop did as well. The word "Linux" was made less and less a part of the website through the few years I followed it closely. By 2009, Linux was only one word in relatively small font size as part of the description of Ubuntu. One of the coolest things about Ubuntu was that you could the install discs for free via snail mail. This also stopped. Over the 6 years of life that Ubuntu has had so far, it has changed drastically. At first, it was just a quick and convenient way for me to install Debian. It started becoming more and more popular, and then was like a tidal wave through the Linux community. Today, it is the world's third most popular operating system. Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, then everything else. There is, however, an untold story.

In the beginning, there were a few different distributions. From a handful came hundreds. We are currently living with several hundreds. Many say that this is a bad thing. Many claim that the myriad offerings confuse people. Many claim that these distributions are often redundant. What's the deal? I have often talked about the lack of innovation in many distributions. The fact that people respin someone else's stuff and call it their own is somewhat unavoidable. It's going to happen. That aside, plurality is good.

If you have not yet noticed, I am a nerd. Not just your garden variety, everyday, commonplace nerd, but a big nerd. With that cleared up, I could not help but purchase an ARTiGO. Over the past month (maybe longer), I have been testing different operating systems on it, and I think I can confidently declare a winner for best fit, and another for best performance. I did not have the Wifi Kit or the SD card reader installed for the tests. I am using 2GB of Crucial DDR2 800mHz RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA for the HDD.

For some reason, people consistently feel that one operating system is more difficult to use than some other operating system. To me, this is a load of dingos' kidneys. I fail to see how Linux is more difficult to use than is Windows, or how DOS is more difficult to use than is Windows, or how Windows is more difficult to use than is a Macintosh. In all of these systems the setup is rather easy, software management is rather easy, just about everything is rather easy. The perceived difficulty is in the differences that exist.

The GNU project developed some of the 21st century's most important software. The GNU Compiler Collection is used on Linux systems, BSD/OSX systems, and on Windows. GNAT has, for the most part, replaced any other Ada compiler ever created. The list could go on, but you get the idea. The sad thing about GNU is that it is so ideologically bent that I can no longer support it.

So many people out there just love to talk about how Linux is now a "drop in replacement" for Microsoft Windows or Macintosh OSX. This isn't the case. The sad truth is that there are no "drop in replacements" for most software, and especially so for operating systems.

Currently, Linux systems take the very high end machines (any machine more powerful than a fully tricked out MacPro {read supercomputers and mainframes}), and the very low end machines (phones, routers, palm-tops, PVRs). In both cases, someone is missing. Microsoft. I do not hate Microsoft. Many people would think that I did (being a Linux fan, and to a lesser extent an Apple fan), but I really don't. I just think that they have failed to adapt to a changing market place, and I feel that they are stifling the progress of IT. Apple, on the other hand, has been aiding. Apple didn't reinvent the phone. Apple showed the a Blackberry/Palm styled phone could be made for the average person. They made it, and they sold it rather well. The iPad has shown that tablets actually are in demand, and for once someone has proven that Windows is not a requirement for consumer computers. The reality is that most people think of a computer operating system as inseparable from the computer itself. So, where are we headed?

In my last post, I discussed reasons why an open source government would be a good thing. Now I will tell you my plan for how an OSG would operate (using the USA in model). It is essential to understand that this is not a left vs right issue. The idea here is simply to empower the people of any given country, and allow those people to rule their own lives. Using the same methodology we use in open source software development (slightly modified), we can achieve that one simple goal.

When we think of open source we normally think of software. We (freetards, freediots, open source fanboys) have often been described as a type of new hippie movement. In some ways this may be true. We favor open collaboration instead of top-down empiricism. This is somewhat liberal in nature. At the same time, this breeds fierce competition, this breeds explosive markets, this lowers the bar of entry into the market place, and more than anything it models the idea of a republic.