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After being a two day event for its first two years, this year the event, which is staged by the Columbia, South Carolina based nonprofit IT-oLogy, will expand to take place over a three day period. In addition, the event is moving from midweek to the beginning of the week, and is scheduled to begin on Sunday, October 18th and run through Tuesday, October 20th.

Canonical trumpets its partnership with Microsoft — yep, Microsoft — this week at the Open Compute Summit, where the Isle of Man reached across to Redmond to demonstrate how Canonical and Microsoft are working together to create scalable, OCP-compliant architecture.

With nearly 50 hardware vendors exhibiting and with over 30 sessions over two days — not to mention a wide range of keynotes including one from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth and Rackspace’s Aaron Sullivan — nearly 3,000 attendees took in the event on an usually warm March week in the capital of the Silicon Valley.

After taking a year off so that the nonprofit behind the event could concentrate on launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta, the POSSCON developer's conference will return to Columbia, South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 14th and 15th. Last year, regular attendees of POSSCON were urged to attend the Atlanta event instead. This year's event will take place at various venues in the Vista, Columbia's arts and entertainment district.

The thing is, here in the FOSS world we have absolutely no way of knowing how many people might be using a particular distro. There are no licenses to sign, and companies using Linux aren’t required to take inventory to make sure they’re staying in compliance. So while Microsoft and Apple can give us a pretty accurate figure for the number of times their operating systems have been legally installed in the last few months or so, we can’t. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t require users to sign draconian EULAs. Unlike Apple, our distros aren’t performing all of the installs themselves on machines they manufacture.

Like many distros these days, Bodhi is built on top of a Ubuntu base, in this case using version 14.04 LTS as its core. However, Bodhi is anything but just another cookie cutter distro. From it’s inception back in 2012, the main purpose of the project has been to offer a Linux distribution that fully takes advantage of the lightweight but full featured and elegantly beautiful Enlightenment desktop environment.

Sunday, March 15, marks the third anniversary of the arrest in Damascus, Syria, of Bassel Khartabil (Bassel Safadi), a computer engineer who was Creative Commons lead in Syria and who started a hackerspace, Aiki Lab, in Damascus in 2010. This is only a small part of Bassel’s resume, which includes numerous other open source and free culture projects.

Evolution, not revolution, to match users’ needs: That is what’s behind the process the Xfce team uses in developing their desktop environment. So, despite what some consider a long time between releases, Xfce released version 4.12 last week, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.10.

When I first decided that I wanted to use text to speech on a daily basis, I began researching and testing the available applications. The Mint/Ubuntu repositories showed much promise. The first thing I did was become acquainted with the KDE app Jovie. It’s appeal was that it’s built to work right in KDE, but right out of the gate I ran into a such a high level of complexity and gaping holes in usability that I just shut it down and began searching for other solutions. Apparently, Jovie depends on other voice “synthesisers” to get working.

There’s a new player in the preinstalled Linux world offering computers with with Ubuntu preinstalled for $89, and although this price might suggest bottom of the line specs, the machines are more than powerful enough for most users. They’re also green — very green. They weigh in at 50% less than the average desktop, meaning they use less fossil fuel to ship, and are built in a case made of 100 percent recycled ABS plastic. They’re also shipped in packages completely made from non-virgin fiber.

Was that former Linux Outlaw Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly 326 earlier this week? It most certainly was. Dan joins regular host Randall Schwartz in talking about the Open Source Initiative with Simon Phipps and Patrick Masson in this particular episode, which is well worth a watch. It’s always great to see Randall on his show, and it’s great that he has such fantastic “guest help” from time to time.

Those who’re new to Linux want the best distro out there for new users, which means simple things like ease of use, productivity, speed, and security. But which distros are the best for new users? Actually, there is probably no “best,” but there are many distros that are designed keeping the needs of the inexperienced Linux user in mind.

Okay, so you’ve probably heard more than you want from me, word-wise, when it comes to SCALE 13x. So I’ll shut up now. But while I wait for the applause to die down, I will say that, from most standpoints, SCALE 13x was a remarkable success. That said, here are some photos from the four-day event.

There are many reasons why people use Bodhi Linux. Some use it because they really like the Enlightenment desktop, and Bodhi has pioneered the integration of Enlightenment to create a distro that is both beautiful, elegant and functional. Others use it because they want an operating system that stays out of their way. Again, although Enlightenment offers plenty of whistles and bells for those who need or want them, it can also be configured to be highly minimalist and use a very small amount of system resources.

That, of course, was followed by a series of sessions that were, for the most part, once again standing-room-only, like Alison Chaiken’s systemd talk, where I understand no gunfire was exchanged. One track, SCALE: The Next Generation, is one where teens organize their own FOSS track and that did not disappoint, from wunderkind Justin King and his 65-year-old computer to Keila Banks’ talk on starting a FOSS-based business to Levente Kurusa talking about the Linux desktop and when it will be “our year.”

Attendance for SCALE looks like it may break previous records. Steve Bibayoff, who works the Free Software Foundation booth, asked me Friday evening if his badge number was any indication of how many people have registered so far. His badge number is a number just south of 3100; by a factor of less than 10. The answer to his question is “yes.”

As midnight Wednesday becomes Thursday morning, SCALE Team members continue to put in hours, doing everything from wiring the rooms to stuffing swag bags, getting ready for 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when registration opens.

Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

“You’ve done enough Ken. Maybe it’s time to let someone else have a go at this. What’s the point of struggling through your recovery while manning Reglue. It’s not like you have any obligation to anyone to do this further. No one would blame you for taking your retirement and enjoying it.”

There are about 130 sessions at SCALE 13x and a great majority of them are of interest to the beginner and/or intermediate user. A rule of thumb in attending a session is that if you’ve never heard of the software and/or you’d never have a reason to use it, you’re probably not a sysadmin and don’t need to attend. That’s of little consolation to most, because of the packed schedule.