I know just yesterday I wrote that I would not be updating my blog for a bit, but with two recent announcements in the Ubuntu-sphere, I felt obligated to chime in with my own two cents. For those who haven’t heard the news, Ubuntu last week announced that it would be shipping version 11.04 with its Unity interface, dropping the traditional GNOME shell that it has used for… ever.
I watched the Celtics vs. Lakers game. Well, if you want to call it “watched.” I loaded up ABC.com in Firefox and had two chats going with some friends back home. ABC.com has a nice text-based play-by-play feature, but it all runs in this hideous Flash instance. The reason I call it hideous is not because I have anything against Adobe or Flash as a company or plugin, but because being a Linux user, I am inherently biased against Flash due to shallow support for my operating system. All was going well.
Filed under A Category Other Than Uncategorized
It is the dream of every open source enthusiast to have a problem of theirs nearly perfectly solved by a pre-existing piece of FOSS software, especially one that sits above the version 1.0 marker and has a degree of polish one would expect from a paid-for, closed source project. As a Peace Corps volunteer teaching basic intro to computers, one of the most important topics to teach is typing skills. There exist many typing programs, but the FOSS world only has a few worth mentioning, and after trying a couple, the one I found to be most complete and conducive to my teaching style is KTouch (easily available in most major Linux Distro repos).
This entry is the third in a series covering GNU/Linux, an Operating System consisting of the Linux Kernel and applications from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, with an emphasis on its connections to the developing world. These articles assume at least a moderate understanding of the Linux and FOSS communities. For more information regarding these, I would direct interested parties to Linux.org as well as the Free Software Foundation and finally, for the truly interested, the GNU Manifesto. With all of this knowledge now in hand, I hope you enjoy the series. If you have not already done so, I suggest you go ahead and read the first and second posts in the series: Linux: Not Ready for the Big Time and Linux: It’s Everywhere and Nowhere.
This entry is the first in a series covering GNU/Linux, an Operating System consisting of the Linux Kernel and applications from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, with an emphasis on its connections to the developing world. These articles assume at least a moderate understanding of the Linux and FOSS communities. For more information regarding these, I would direct interested parties to Linux.org as well as the Free Software Foundation and finally, for the truly interested, the GNU Manifesto. With all of this knowledge now in hand, I hope you enjoy the series.
Many an article has been written regarding how, “Linux,” is not ready for the big time. It seems every year, and with every new iteration of a major distribution such as Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora, yet another computer pundit decides to come out and emphasize why Linux is not ready to even attempt at replacing Windows as the dominant Operating System for home computer use. I am going to continue in this trend, and I won’t even try to sell my reasons as different, or more profound from these other articles. Instead, I am hoping the article is simply able to stand under its own weight as well as provide groundwork for future articles in this series. Continue reading
Filed under Linux
One Computer at a Time 