Notes from The Jungle Room

Next up: OSCON. Get there if you can — it’s starting today — and give them my regards because I can’t make it this year

The new apartment has what is considered by my family a sort of study, but it’s quickly becoming the computer lab that I lost when I gave up my commercial space. That lab, of course, was dubbed “The Jungle Room,” after the man cave at Graceland. The study has been dubbed the same.

[Yes, if he had done nothing else, Elvis would have earned my respect and admiration for inventing the man cave decades before the concept existed on cable TV. Uhthankyouverymuch]

Before I continue, allow me a mea cupla: In my last item, I wrote about Openbox and referred to a “desktop” in the same paragraph. Technically, Openbox is a window manager, not a desktop environment, as I was so dutifully reminded by an astute commenter. True. However, when using the term “desktop,” I was actually referring to what one sees on their screen as opposed to a specific desktop environment — my bad for being unclear.

Nevertheless, as the last moving boxes are being punted out the door (Oh, I will take them down to the recycling bin shortly), I wanted to drop off in today’s blog a couple of items worth mentioning in FOSS news over the last few days, like . . . .

Mac hardware to get that shiny Chrome look? The VAR Guy drops an interesting hint in a column late yesterday outlining the proposition that Google’s Chrome OS has been compiled for the MacBook Air, thanks to a blogger/hacker named Hexxeh. “It’s a unique utopia, and one that won’t likely exist anytime soon,” he writes. “But the alleged smoothness in which the MacBook Air runs Chrome OS is worth watching.” Indeed, and the VAR Guy promises a review of Chrome OS in the near future. Watch that space.

Matt Hartley gives us the business: On a couple of rare occasions I’ve crossed proverbial swords with Matt Hartley, but for the most part his articles are informative and newsworthy. Special mention goes to yesterday’s Datamation item about choosing the right distro for your business. In the wrap-up, Matt writes that, “Everyone is going to have different needs. A company’s decision may range from weighing what type of support is needed down to selecting a community-based option over a highly specialized Linux distribution. With every example presented above, the common theme is that Linux offers plenty of choices.” Amen to that.

At ease, soldier: You find developers of Linux in the most interesting places; like, oh I don’t know, the U.S. Department of Defense, for example. The DOD brings us Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux, which is a live CD focusing on privacy and security. It boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. From the screenshots at Unixmen, it looks surprising like . . . Windows. Now if that’s not great camouflage, I don’t know what is. I haven’t tried it yet — I might soon — but if it runs off a CD and has all the tools I can use, it might replace the Ultimate Boot CD and Knoppix CD that I usually carry and often lose.

Last, but not least . . .

An extra chair at the dinner table: Until recently, Lubuntu was an independent project based on Ubuntu — Ubuntu with the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, or LXDE for short. Starting with Ubuntu 11.10 in November, however, Lubuntu will join the Ubuntu family as an official variant, according to this article on the Liliputing site. Welcome to the family, Lubuntu.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software in his new home office. Watch this space.)

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