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There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the seventh of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

I want to consider a list of possible distributions that are not only outstanding candidates but also easy to use, and that can serve many functions within your business. In some cases, my choices are drop-in replacements for other operating systems, whereas others require a bit of work to get them up to speed.

The speed and agility of open source projects benefit from lightweight and flexible governance. Their ability to run with such efficient governance is supported by the potential for project forking. That potential provides a discipline that encourages participants to find ways forward in the face of unanticipated problems, changed agendas, or other sources of disagreement among participants. The potential for forking is a benefit that is available in open source projects because all open source licenses provide needed permissions. read more

I'd like to talk a bit about one of the more problematic models out there, the open core model, because it's much more prevalent, and it creates some perverse incentives that run counter to Free Software principles.

Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. This tutorial shows how to compile Brotli compression library from source on Debian 9 (stretch).

Fedora had an amazing 2018. The distribution saw many improvements with the introduction of Fedora 28 and Fedora 29. Fedora 28 included third party repositories, making it easy to get software like the Steam client, Google Chrome and Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Fedora 29 brought support for automatic updates for Flatpack. One of the four foundations […]

Picture this: you are all ready to pack up and head home after a tiring day at work, but just as you are about to shut down, this pops up: read more

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the sixth of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

VIDEO: Windows 7 has less than a year of supported life left. If you really, really don't like Windows 10, it's time to consider running Linux Mint instead.

News briefs for January 18, 2019.

I'm always looking for new projects to create with my 3D printer. When I recently saw a new design for a computer numeric code (CNC) milling machine that mostly uses 3D printed parts, I was intrigued. When I saw that the machine works with open source software and the controller is an Arduino running open source software, I knew I had to make one. read more

Fedora Classroom sessions continue with an introductory session on Fedora Localization (L10N). The general schedule for sessions is available on the wiki, along with resources and recordings from previous sessions.

A few months prior to celebrating the 30th birthday of the Bash command language interpreter, the GNU Project has released Bash 5.0, featuring bug fixes and new shell variables. As we look forward to the release of Linux Kernel 5.0 in the coming weeks, we can enjoy another venerable open source technology reaching the 5.0 […]

'They used to be seen as the good guys, and Oracle was the bad guy'. So that means... everyone is the bad guy now? Open-source vendors that haven't already switched to less permissive licences will do so this year as the move to the cloud threatens their business models, a senior Oracle exec has said.…

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a free and open source web analytics application for web servers. This tutorial will show you how to install Matomo on a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system using Nginx as the web server and we will secure the website with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

Long ago, the Linux kernel started using 00-Index files to list the contents of each documentation directory. This was intended to explain what each of those files documented. Henrik Austad recently pointed out that those files have been out of date for a very long time and were probably not used by anyone anymore. This is nothing new. Henrik said in his post that this had been discussed already for years, "and they have since then grown further out of date, so perhaps it is time to just throw them out."

Microsoft introduces the Schrödinger Linux Subsystem. (It might work. It might not.) Hot on the heels of a patch for the version of Windows 10 that Microsoft hopes will undo the woes of 2018 comes a fresh insider build to break stuff just a few days before the company's bug bash.…

It can be daunting to get started with Kubernetes and OKD (a Kubernetes distribution formerly known as OpenShift Origin). There are a lot of concepts and components to take in and understand. This tutorial walks through creating an example Kubernetes cron job that uses a service account and a Python script to list all the pods in the current project/namespace. The job itself is relatively useless, but this tutorial introduces many parts of the Kubernetes & OKD infrastructure. read more

Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.15.

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the fifth of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more