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Ruth Suehle added to Ohio LinuxFest keynoter lineup: Yep, the Raspberry Pi queen and ruler of all she surveys in the realm of Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards group, Ruth has joined the list of keynoters for the October event in Columbus. Ruth participates in the Fedora Project and is co-author of “Raspberry Pi Hacks” (written with fellow Red Hatter Tom Callaway). She also leads discussions about open source principles at opensource.com, and serves as a senior editor at GeekMom.com.

Most distros are based on other distros, basically making them modifications of their parent distros. In most important ways, these child distros behave like their parent distros. They mostly use the same package management and packages can usually be easily installed from the parent distros repository. Configuration is also usually the same, or nearly so, among these derivatives.

Don’t get me wrong, Android is a beautiful operating system if ever there was one – and dumbed down to the max, which makes it even more beautiful in the minds of many mobile users. Indeed, you can play on an Android device all day without ever even realizing that you’re working with an operating system or even a computer. Just swipe away and see what they’ll try to sell you next.

It’s hard to believe the official story coming out of Raleigh, that CTO Brian Stevens abruptly resigned his position at Red Hat on Wednesday “to pursue another opportunity.” The company is being mainly mum on the subject, only offering a terse three sentence announcement on their website.

In those days, the Linux community was pretty much a private club for uber geeks. Newbies from the Windows world were not always made to feel welcome on the forums, especially if they were foolish enough to wonder aloud why Linux was so different from Windows. To get help, a newbie often had to grovel, praise Tux and acknowledge the superiority of those offering help. Dyed-in-the-wool Linux users were a pretty smug lot back then.

The journalist in me could give you just the specifics of the new Tux Paint release: Tux Paint 0.9.22 was released this week, thanks to the efforts of 170 contributors worldwide. This new version comes with a wide range of additions, like 14 new tools, 40 new template pictures, nearly 200 new stamps, SVG and KidPix support, an enhanced text tool, and accessibility improvements.

I don’t mean system stability, that is a given with Linux, but developer stability. Can I depend on this distro to be around in two years…in five years? How is the project funded? Does this innovative project have a large development community that can step in should the lead developer become ill or takes a lengthy sabbatical?

With the success of Chromebooks, it’s only a matter of time before the OEMs start pushing well designed laptops and desktops with customized versions of Linux installed. It’s bound to happen. Computer makers pay a fortune to Microsoft every year for the privilege of installing Windows. But Windows’ luster as a brand has faded, making this is no longer money well spent.

Everyone who submits a kernel patch, everyone who writes a system call to fix a broken link, everyone who answers a question in a Linux forum, everyone who creates the artwork that makes desktop Linux shine…at the end of that line we, as users, are direct beneficiaries of those efforts. I visualize this as a river, rolling along and adding things as it makes its way to ultimately empty into a much larger sea. A sea of knowledge that wouldn’t exist without the river; a sea of knowledge from which we benefit.

I opened the desktop configuration GUI, expanded the number of desktops to eight and then started flipping between them as I opened different applications on each environment. By then, everyone at the table was trying to get into position to see the Acer. They were talking about how nice it would be to encapsulate a number of tasks and leave them in various states of completion without worrying about losing their work when they switched between them.

When I first started using Linux twelve years ago, no one I knew, other than folks on the local LUG, were interested in giving Linux or FOSS a try whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong; my friends were nice. They supported my enthusiasm for this Linux thing I’d discovered, but were politely uninterested when I suggested they might want to give Linux a try too. That didn’t surprise me at all. Hell, I’d been trying to get people to give Star Office a try since the turn of the millennium and they wouldn’t go for that either, even though they were paying through the nose for MS Office.

If the owner can disable a phone with nothing but access to a computer or another mobile device, so can Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple. Google and Apple have already demonstrated their ability to remove software from all devices using their respective operating systems. If the designers of a phone’s operating system can brick a phone, guess who else can do the same? Everybody from the NSA to your friendly neighborhood police force, that’s who. At most, all they’ll need is a convincing argument that they’re acting in the interest of “public safety.”

You can shuffle, bend, shape and manipulate the statistics all you want. There is no way to gauge or even identify the one single moment when having a computer changes the course of a young life. For that to happen, however, there needs to have been an “aha!” moment. A moment when the light illuminates the child’s awareness. A moment when the kid realizes that (s)he is in control of what her computer does. The moment when she understands that all she needs to do is learn how to speak to her computer in a language it understands.

At first glance, it might look as if there’s very little for what blogger Gary Newell calls the Everyday Linux User, those who have adopted free software at home or in a mom and pop business. To my eyes, there is barely enough — but that still qualifies as enough.

That’s great for those tied to Windows, but doesn’t offer much help to those using Linux or OS X. As for the call for users to use good computer hygiene, most of us are doing that anyway — it’s not like this is the first security risk that’s arisen around the USB port.

Eventually, you come to realize that there’s more to life than Bash scripts and LAN parties with your Linux geek buddies. Well, maybe you do…or maybe not. If you do, you might decide to put yourself back on the dating market. Where do you start? I think we can all agree to rule out LUG meetings, Linux Foundation events and the laundromat. The ratio for men to women at these locations is bleak.

During that age of the dinosaur, Mandrake was considered to be the cat’s meow of easy-to-use Linux distributions. It installed easily, some said easier than Windows, and it’s partitioning tool made cutting up a disk easier than slicing a piece of mincemeat pie. Indeed, Linux oldtimers sometimes openly laughed at Mandrake, insinuating that ease-of-use somehow made Linux less Linux.

Every now and then, you get the opportunity to show others what your Linux computer looks like. Some of those people will want to give Linux a shot on their computers as well. I can’t think of anything as gratifying as teaching someone how to use desktop Linux. On a personal level, I do it because I am sick of fixing friends’ and family’s Windows problems. On a professional level, well…that’s my job.

It’s official. The All Things Open (ATO) conference that had it’s inaugural run in Raleigh last year wasn’t just a flash in the pan. As event chair Todd Lewis promised at the end of last year’s event, ATO is returning to the Raleigh Convention Center on October 22nd and 23rd. Again this year, FOSS Force is an official Media Partner of the conference.

Since at least the Maya 13 release we’ve had fits with the Nvidia driver and fonts in KDE. Sure the recommended driver installs fine, but upon the mandatory reboot, all is not well in Linuxland. While the actual desktop and the bottom panel display properly, anything that has anything to do with fonts is wonky. They are huge.