The Creator 120 and the Raspberry Pi 2 are single-board computers designed for developers and hobbyists. The Creator C120 was announced in late 2014, but started shipping at about the same time that the Raspberry Pi 2 was announced/starting shipping, ...
Manjaro’s graphical installer
Manjaro is a new desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch Linux is known for its text-based installation process, so a feature I'm always looking for in any distribution based on it is a graphical installer. While there are many good graphical in ...
Pre-release Ubuntu 12.10 has partial support for manual LVM and disk encryption
About three weeks ago, I published automated LVM and disk encryption in a pre-release version of what will become Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal. Shortly after, the state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity was ...
LibreOffice: A fork of OpenOffice.org
Exactly ten days after Mandriva was forked, another major Free Software has also been forked. And this time, it is OpenOffice.org, the free suite of office applications similar to Microsoft Office. The fork, or the new office suite, will be temporarily known as LibreOffice. It has the backing of community heavyweights, and its development will be overseen by a newly created foundation called The Document Foundation.
Part of the announcement follows:
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Forking Mandriva Linux: The birth of Mageia
Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked, and the new distribution is named Mageia. With the well publicized mass exodus of developers and contributors, this does not come as shock. I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons:
- Mandriva's management has done a very lousy job with the resources they have. It is pretty appalling. Mandriva was supposed to be to the desktop space what Red Hat is to the server market. But no, the company got stuck somewhere between 1998 and 2005. There were no new ideas. They could have done what Steve Jobs did with Apple, if only they had the vision and a good understanding of the technology and community they had at their disposal.
- The other reason I am pretty happy with this development is with the announcement by the new distro developers. Here's an excerpt: ...
China’s supercomputer will run Linux

Linux is top OS on supercomputers


Switching to Linux: A Windows developer’s view
A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now.
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What Microsoft Doesn’t Get – And What I Hope You Do
You know what Microsoft doesn't get? -- For one thing, the Internet.
Microsoft doesn't control it. What it used to be able to do in the dark now falls out of its noxious bag of tricks into the Internet's bright light, stage front and center. And there stands Microsoft in the spotlight, with its pants down, and let me tell you, it's not a pretty sight.
Take the failed patent hustle of a couple of days ago, apparently maneuvering to enable proxy patent trolls to sue Linux. The idea, I gather, was to damage Linux, but without any way to trace it back to Microsoft. Thank you OIN and AST for foiling the plan. And by the way, are courts supposed to be used like this, to attack the competition? The court system is designed for adjudicating conflicts that are real. If you get damaged, you can go to court and try to be made whole. And so far as I know, there is no definition of abuse of monopoly that would exclude what just happened from being part of what antitrust law covers.
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Is this the new face of Tux?

So 2.6.29 isn't quite out yet, but I've merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009....