Showing headlines posted by AwesomeTux

GNOME 40 is finally out and I'm happy to say a small contribution of mine made it into the release. My contribution adds a new feature to GNOME System Monitor version 40. Few articles about GNOME 40 mention it, but some power users might find my contribution useful.

Today I am announcing the release of a personal project of mine. A GTK+ interface for PHP's built-in web server. It lets you choose the executable, IP address or hostname, port number, root directory, and INI file graphically. I have used this software for testing purposes for many years, since at least 2014.

Save color values from transparent pixels? You may have seen it in your favorite image editing program. What does this option do? Well, it does what it says. If you leave this option checked when you export your image, any pixels you erased will be saved in the exported image. They will not be truly erased, just made fully transparent. This option has privacy implications. With it enabled, what you erase from an image may still be present in transparent pixels.

"There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. ... Many articles are calling this `Linux on Windows`. This is a fallacy: the kernel Linux is not at all involved! What we are witnessing is the GNU operating system running with a Windows kernel instead of Linux."

GNU World Order is an internet audio/ Video show about GNU, Linux, UNIX, and other technical and geeky topics. In the free Ogg Vorbis and Speex audio formats. In this episode Klaatu talks about Everything You want to know about hard drives and filesystems.

The GNU Manifesto is characteristic of its author—deceptively simple, lucid, explicitly left-leaning, and entirely uncompromising. Richard Stallman, who published his manifesto in March of 1985, has been known to say that, "with software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."

"A friend of mine, Blaise, once told me not to introduce myself as “... what you would call a radical...”. He had listened to me talking to a person who were questioning what a Free Software activist does. My friend's rationale, to which I totally agree, is that you must let the other person decide whether she thinks you are a “radical” or not. In other words, if you say you are a “radical” from the beginning, it will probably induce the other person to a pre-judgement about you, which is not good for you and for her."

This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefitted from his contributions, and many have benefitted to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth that people made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. Now that the world is done taking from him, they are heading to the next step of villifying him as incompetent.

I speak of Richard Stallman, progenitor of the free software movement and creator of GNU (as in GNU/Linux, the most widely deployed operating system in the world, and GNU bash, the tool that has caused so much shellshock lately).

"A major security vulnerability has been discovered in the free software shell GNU Bash. The most serious issues have already been fixed, and a complete fix is well underway. GNU/Linux distributions are working quickly to release updated packages for their users. All Bash users should upgrade immediately, and audit the list of remote network services running on their systems."

[If you're concerned about the Shellshock bug, please consider donating to the GNU Project.]

"Firefox's feedback shows a huge spike in negative feedback immediately following Brendan Eich's resignation. However, with that said, user feedback doesn't mean anything."

One way or another you're actually using Linux every day. Linux is the dominant platform on web servers, including the one you're on right now, and it is also the core of the Android operating system that you're tapping away at all the time if you own an Android smartphone or tablet. Besides that it's also running everything from top supercomputers to small specialized devices, like that ADSL router you're probably connected through to the internet.

The truth is that while Linux isn't for everyone there are most certainly a lot of people out there who would be a perfect fit for it if they only knew. Here are the 10 signs Linux may be a perfect fit for you. If you recognize yourself maybe it's worth giving it a go.

"The past week I decided to put Sublime in the drawer and only use Github’s new Atom for my coding. As great as Sublime is, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about software is that you gotta try new stuff out. That’s how I discovered Firefox (then called Firebird), Foobar, and even Sublime itself (after having been using Notepad++ for a long time). New stuff has the advantage of learning from the mistakes of all it’s older brethren, as well as filling in the gaps for missing things. So, out of sheer curiosity I forced myself to only use Atom to see how it went."

"The ousting of Eich, the DRM problem -- all those imbroglios have tarnished the image of Firefox," said Google+ blogger Alessandrom Ebersol. So, on one side, "agnostic users left Firefox because they were told its new CEO was a conservative bigot. The folks who care about freedom, privacy and open Internet left Firefox because of the DRM module to play Netflix."

"Has Firefox's popularity really waned? The answer is a definitive 'Yes.' No matter how you look at it, Firefox's popularity has declined somewhat, but it certainly has nothing to do with "adding ads to the web browser" nor "continuing CEO problems" as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks."

"I've always liked PHP's default syntax highlighting. I've often found myself easily grokking code examples on PHP.net, only to suffer some frustration once going back to Gedit."

"Five years ago Debian and most derivatives switched from the standard GNU C Library (GLIBC) to the Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC). Debian is now about to take the reverse way switching back to GLIBC, as EGLIBC is now a dead project, the last release being the 2.19 one. At the time of writing the glibc package has been uploaded to experimental and sits in the NEW queue."

"If your phone can be connected to your computer with an USB cable you can do a lot more through this connection than just recharging it or transferring files to and from your phone's storage. For example, you can make phone calls, read and send text messages, and see a bunch of other information from your phone, right on your PC. There is a number of Free Open Source software applications that allow you to do this, and you don't even need to have a smartphone for this to work, just a phone that can connect to USB."

"One of the great things about Linux, especially for web developers or server administrators, is that all of the basic tools you need to get set with your remote server and files tend to be included and well integrated into the system from the get go. You don't necessarily need to install an FTP client, a code editor or a special terminal emulator."

"People have been complaining about gEdit 3.12, which recently moved into Debian's "testing" repository. Specifically, they're complaining about the GUI. Many have lamented the old-style icon menu, which was removed, as is similarly being done to Totem (Videos), Nautilus (Files), and Disk Utility (Disks), among others. Personally, as a programmer, I honestly never used the old menu, I used the keyboard."

"Say 'goodbye' to Disqusting third-party comments with HashOver, a free and open source PHP comment system under the GNU Affero General Public License. HashOver adds a "comment section" to any website, by placing a few simple lines of JavaScript or PHP to the source code of any webpage. HashOver is a self-hosted system and allows completely anonymous comments to be posted, the only required information is the comment itself."