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On a personal note, some of you know that I inherited an old PowerBook G4 — yep, PowerPC 32-bit — now with limited options regarding what distro to put on it. It wasn’t like that when I started back in ’06 with Debian on an iMac, but I digress. I tried what few options are left on the PowerPC side, from both Linux and BSD, and the winner — drumroll, please — is Xubuntu.

When I first started using Linux, back in the mid-late nineties, a typical Linux installation was roughly four to five CDs and wound up installing applications geared toward scientists, programmers, HAM radio operators, and more. The kernel was built for a small sub-section of hardware it actually had support for (which included a lot of hardware most people didn't have). The typical resources needed to run Linux were quite small. The first machine I ran Linux on was a Pentium II 75 Mhz processor with 56 MB of RAM and an unsupported WinModem (which was eventually swapped out for a US Robotics 36.6 external modem).

Folks who follow news about FOSS, OSS and Linux who also watch the “talking heads” shows the TV networks serve up on Sunday mornings might be excused for not noting that David Boies, the lawyer speaking for Sony on this week’s “Meet the Press,” has on several occasions been involved in news stories affecting Linux. Over the years, he’s played the role of both friend and foe, but it’s been a while since his and the FOSS world’s paths have crossed.

The media has been abuzz with stories recently about how the Marriott hotel has blocked Wi-Fi access in a desperate attempt to get its customers to pay the hotel for Internet access. Yes, the Marriott – a billion dollar corporation – has been attempting to gouge its customers by blocking private Wi-Fi connections, and now the company wants the FCC to give them its blessing.

Wikipedia is one of the most frequently visited websites in the world. The vast online encyclopedia, editable by anyone, has become the go-to source for general information on any subject. However, the "crowdsourcing" used by Wikipedia opens their doors to spin and whitewashing–edits that may be less than factual in nature. To help journalists, citizens, and activists track these edits, TWG (The Working Group) partnered with Metro News and the Center for Investigative Reporting to build WikiWash. read more

In January 2014, Github removed the rug in its office's waiting room in response to criticism of its slogan, "United Meritocracy of Github." Since then, the criticism of the idea of meritocracy has spread in free software circles. "Meritocracy is a joke," has become a slogan seen on T-shirts and constantly proclaimed, especially by feminists.

As of December 19, the European Space Agency (ESA) is now sharing all of its images and videos from the Mars Express mission under CC BY-SA. ESA is using the intergovernmental organization (IGO) port of CC BY-SA 3.0. ESA is one of several intergovernmental organizations to use the IGO port since we introduced it last year. read more

SinoVoip is prepping an Banana Pi “M2″ update built with a quad-core Allwinner A31 SoC, while LeMaker has begun shipping a competing A20-based “Banana Pro.” It appears that the Banana Pi project has forked into two rival groups that are now pushing their own Banana Pi updates: SinoVoip’s “Banana Pi M2,” which is announced but […]

A new release of this venerable Linux distribution is always good news - and if you want to avoid systemd, this PCLinuxOS release could be your new best friend!

Recently Filip Krikav made a fork on github and created a Juno branch using the latest commit + fixing the problem of loading an image from glance.

One more prediction: Upon sailing through the Post-PC era, there will be a post-Post-PC era, after the advent of the pre-post-Post-PC era, where people will start thinking, “You know, I had a laptop (or desktop…or both) once where I didn’t have to strain my eyes on such a small screen, and where I actually got stuff done rather than just wasting time.” Or something like that.

Two years on, switching from a MacBook Pro to a Chromebook was the right answer for this geek.

Luis Ibanez is a senior software developer at Google. In this short talk he explains what he means by "unmanagement" and "unleadership" and how they can change the course of a project. read more

There was great news and there was awful news in the world of Linux and open-source software during 2014.

Microsoft's stats for developers advise them to aim low … in Russian or Spanish Microsoft has revealed a new batch of data about Windows Phone's fortunes, and it seems Redmond's mobile efforts are doing best at the low end of the market.…

In today's open source roundup: Download the latest version of PCLinuxOS. Plus: Is Linux any different on ARM processors? And Android Studio 1.0 has been released.

Written by Alisha Green It was another year full of encouraging news on the open data front in states and municipalities across the country. New open data policies were approved in municipalities of all sizes from coast to coast, existing open data programs matured and sparked new innovations, and there were numerous other open government wins as a result of advocacy efforts. Here's a look back at the year's highlights: read more

Devuan has been created as a clone of Debian minus systemd. Is forking such a massive project such as Debian really a good idea?

BlazeRush had confirmed they were going to do a Linux version, and with no announcement it has landed. BlazeRush is a dynamic arcade racing survival game with no health, no levelling and no brakes!

“Orange Pi,” a new hacker SBC and RPi clone, is available in two models using Allwinner’s dual-core A20 SoC, and a third model that’s based on the quad-core A31. Just in time for our upcoming year-end hacker SBC roundup, Shenzhen Xunlong Software unveiled an Orange Pi board that shares a number of characteristics with the […]