In a state of Flux

In lieu of the meeting at Cabrillo College at which the Cabrillo College Linux Users Group was supposed to get the school’s blessing, I instead am in the computer lab. The ICC meeting was cancelled because it’s — surprise! — Halloween, so Cabrillo LUG gets to wait another week before the college give us their imprimatur.

So now I’ve got nothing to do for a couple of hours. Good time to blog, no?

This would be a good time to bring up a random set of thoughts, like:

In a state of Flux: Fluxbuntu released it’s version 7.10, and it’s a great system. The Fluxbox desktop environment is one that can grow on you, and it makes you wonder why the general populace has been brainwashed into expecting icons on the desktop as a standard. What’s more appealing — to me as well as the thousands (maybe millions?) of PowerPC Mac users abandoned by Apple — is that Fluxbuntu will also be releasing a PowerPC version shortly.

Nigeria picks Mandriva: Mandriva gets a pretty peachy account — powering school computers in Africa’s most populous nation. The Nigerian government has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running on Mandriva Linux for educational use in nationwide pilot, with the project’s aiming to improve the quality of technology delivered to students — as well as to help teachers and parents. Mandriva’s a good choice in that regard. More on the story, as we say at Open Source & Free Software Reporter, from Mandriva can be found here.

Santa Cruz Sentinel: There, I said it — Marc DesJardins, the copy chief at the Santa Cruz Sentinel, has his Google news search set to the name of the paper for which we both work. This blog always pops up — thanks, Google! Since I’m on vacation from the paper, I’m just wondering if the news desk is enjoying the silence in my absence — so are ya, Marcus me ol’ buddy?

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source and Free Software Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

Miscellaneous ramblings

Shameless self promotion: Okay, so Open Source Reporter has a store at Cafe Press and I made up some “Sue me first, Steve!” FOSS-wear at various prices — mostly T-shirts, but also some other items (no, I opted out from the thong underwear, unless the demand for “Sue me first, Steve!” underwear picks up . . . ). So help me out so I can print the magazine by buying something and send Darth Ballmer and Microsoft a message in the process.

Distro du jour: With two Indigo iMacs, the trusty Power Macintosh G3 minitower (with the Sonnet G4 upgrade) seems to be somewhat expendable these days. So . . . it now has Yellow Dog, but it doesn’t have to. I’m thinking about trying one more time to get Debian up and running on it (after all, I did take the time to burn 15 CD-ROMs — sheesh). But I keep hoping Fluxbuntu will have its PowerPC version up and running — a visit to their site had some PowerPC screen shots that were pretty impressive. All of which is to say, “watch this space.”

Here comes the Sun: Sun Microsystems brought its world tour to UC Santa Cruz this week, and on the whole it was pretty impressive. During the presentation about Sun’s open source offerings (the Java part was pretty interesting), they said that they were releasing one of their items under GPL v.2. I asked about whether they had planned to adopt v.3, but I ended up getting a very roundabout answer from the presenter — a member of the audience straightened both of us out, though.

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

Protect your freedom!

A day in the life

Invariably, someone will ask me, “How’s your day going?” Most of the time, it’s a family member, but whomever is asking, the answer is usually “great” because, for the most part, it usually is. But what I do during the course of the day, in my capacity as editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter can be revealing.

Or not.

For those of you keeping score at home (and I don’t know why you would, to quote a San Francisco Giants announcer), this is what I do:

Turn on Computers 1 through 3 (eMac running OS X version 10.4; Indigo iMac running Xubuntu 6.10 and PowerMac G3 minitower with Sonnet G4 upgrade running Yellow Dog 3.0).

From behind the iMac, visit — usually in this order — Linux News, Distrowatch, Free Software Foundation, Open Source Reporter, Mad Penguin, and News Forge, before visiting the forums at Ubuntu (for any developments on Xubuntu), Linux Questions to get most of my questions answered (mostly on GNU/Linux) and gNewSense (which is a distro I don’t yet have because I don’t have the hardware for it, but I like the concept of a completely “free-as-in-freedom” distro).

Repeat the previous step throughout the day and contribute where I can and pass on the information I find out on OSR.

On another note . . .

While visiting the Fluxbuntu Web site, I noticed that they had a screenshot for an Old World G3 PowerBook Wallstreet, just like the one I just sold (argh!). So I asked when the PowerPC version of this distro would be ready and I was told that it will be ready within a couple of weeks. I also learned that when you’re in an IRC chat, you don’t have to ask “Can I ask a question” (Duh! Sorry guys, that was me).

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)