Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

Here is the latest hot trend in anti-Linux baloney: supposed Linux fans and advocates who really really love Linux and have been using it for years, but can't recommend it for anyone else because "It's not ready."

We all know that healthy eating and moderate exercise are key to living long, healthy lives. Unfortunately the ability to type 90 words per minutes without errors, or to sit and work in deep concentration for hours at a time, while strenuous in their own ways, don't do much for our physical fitness. But even the busiest Linux geek can painlessly fit pleasant, healthy exercise into a daily routine; so here are my best 5 fitness tips for busy geeks.

"Linux desktop roll out is easier than expected for properly targeted end-user groups." OK, so you're probably throwing your hands in the air and going "Well duh!" The concept itself is common-sense, and folks like me who administer mixed networks have already been doing it. The revelation is expressing it in a sentence, and then going on to describe some useful ways to figure out which of your users are good candidates to migrate to a Linux PC.

I don't believe that the desktop Linux market share is barely 1%. I think it is a lot higher. I have no good data to share; I base my assessment on experience and knowing the industry. There is something else that is even more persuasive, and that is how Microsoft behaves. If Linux is so insignificant, why do they pay so much attention to it?

I love to poke fun at tech vendors who continually boast of their innovation, when in fact they're scared to death of real innovation, if they could even recognize it. Today I poke fun at the anti-malware industry: Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Symantec, F-Secure, and the rest of the usual suspects. Their existence depends on Microsoft Windows and the entire leaky MS application stack never ever getting fixed. I would die of shock if any of them ever grew a spine, demonstrated some real innovation in honesty, and announced "To cure your malware problems, don't use MS Windows."

Now you know it's hogwash, and I know it's hogwash, and the silly people emitting all this nonsense have never even touched a Linux computer, except to poke it with a stick. Rather than wasting time countering this tired, moldy old baloney let's move on to my Common-Sense Easy-Peasy Guide to Adopting Linux

I ran into an odd gedit bug on various versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu; it won't save to an SSHFS mount and says it's a permissions error. But the error message is in error, because it isn't a permisssions error. But before we get to that, here is a quick SSHFS howto. I use SSHFS all the time because it is a great fast way to securely mount a remote directory locally.

It already is. It already has been. It will continue for the forseeable future.

One of the most powerful and popular Python graphical programming tools is Python-GTK, or PyGTK. In today's Python programming installment Akkana Peck shows us how to create pushbuttons and windows, and guides us past common mistakes and pitfalls.

In the last article in this series Juliet Kemp looked at how init (the system we've all been using for years to start up our services) works, and how upstart, the new replacement for init, works instead. This article looks at upstart and its scripts in more detail.

Digital storage is fragile. I'm sure this not news to you. If you have any computer files from the 1990s can you still read them? Are they on a readable medium? In a readable format? It is a chronic problem for businesses, but I think it's a more significant problem for normal, everyday people. Is the history of you and your family going to survive beyond the latest fad file format or storage widget?

Zimory's Linux-powered "cloud" services offers both great flexibility and frugality-- you pay only for what you use, and there are no long-term commitments or penalties. Paul Ferrill examines this vendor of "Cloud computing for the masses."

There seem to be more arguments over usability in Linux than efforts to improve usability. Mark Shuttleworth doesn't argue, but pushes ahead. Some critics think that Ubuntu's relentless forward pace is too unilateral, not cooperative enough, and essentially a fork of Gnome. Bruce Byfield takes a look at the controversy.

A PC desktop market share analysis of questionable reliability is being eagerly swallowed by Redmond's tame battalions of "tech journalists." Folks, if you're getting paid to be gasbags who are not required to publish anything of substance you're doing fine. If you're being paid to be real journalists, you're not succeeding. It's like you all have Alzheimer's and have forgotten the previous stories that you dutifully parroted stating completely different figures, like "Linux desktop market share to reach 6% in 2007."

The Free and Open Source software world has responded enthusiastically to the introduction of netbooks and created or modified dozens of applications and drivers for netbooks. Cynthia Harvey introduces us to a sampling of 24 FOSS applications for netbooks.

It's bad enough having to deal with torrents of mis-spelled Viagra and weight-loss spam. It's bad enough digging out from under torrents of Windows email malware. It's bad enough getting bombarded with phishes. Now I'm seeing an increase in yet another type of spam: desperate businesses getting suckered into dumb spam schemes.

Before building anything you have to have a design, a plan, because if you don't know where you're going you won't get there. What drives the plan? The needs of the user. Oh I know, this is anathema to the "scratch your own itch" philosophy. But that particular philosphy has been misrepresented and distorted into something self-centered, a "If you don't like it then don't use it" attitude, when in fact it isn't:

"7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."

I think the confusion that is rampant in all of this nostalgia for the old days illustrates a major problem with traditional journalism-- they're confusing the form with the function. The point of news reporting and journalism is not using up tons of paper and ink, it's the content.

The geek world is full of exciting drama and conflict if you know where to look. We're going to take a look at "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" by Travis Swicegood, which I believe is the first printed Git book by a major publisher. But before we look at the book, let's take a quick stroll down memory lane because the birth of Git is a fascinating story, all full of thunder and drama.

A general rule of marketing is "The more noise they make, the less they have to crow about." Who makes the most noise about "innovation"? I bet you can guess....