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It turns out that we like cookie cutter distros, except when we don’t. We like a newly adopted distro to work exactly the way the one we were using before worked, except when we don’t. We want to be able to move back and forth between Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian with ease, without having to learn slightly new ways of doing things on each distro, except when we don’t.

We are not referred to as “The Linux Community” out of hand. Yes, we can be a loud community. We are often an argumentative community, coloring outside of the lines into larger reaches of the Internet. But we are a community nonetheless. We’re people like Alan Dacey, who stops what he’s doing to write a script to solve a vexing problem for Reglue. People like Clem Lefebvre, who’s devoted to creating a safe and fantastic Linux environment in which to work.

Here at FOSS Force we’re proud to be associated with Ken Starks. We’re proud because of the great articles he writes advocating Linux. We’re also extremely proud that he was chosen to be a keynote speaker at this year’s Ohio LinuxFest. But most of all, we’re proud because of his big heart, which he expresses through his work through Reglue, the nonprofit he founded in 2005 to give Linux computers, and training on how to use them, to financially disadvantaged school children in and around the Austin, Texas area where he lives.

Linux is more than an alternative operating system. It’s an entire culture of sharing, of learning…and learning how to share. The torch will be passed from graybeards like Jon “Maddog” Hall to the young who are now making their talents known. Guys like Michael Schultheiss and Warren Moore…and I am just breaking my brain trying to remember the java programmer who Randy Noseworthy and I had lunch with. It’s these people that will lead us to Mars, cure diabetes and make cancer an inconvenience and not a death sentence.

I thought perhaps it was a one-off mistake, made by a marketing department flunky who had too much Red Bull while writing a press release. Being the responsible company that Canonical/Ubuntu is, and being the good FOSS community member it portrays itself to be, I assumed they’d fix the error right away and make sure that ludicrous hyperbole was not the order of the day.

Because of automatic upgrades at the point level, standalone WordPress users whose sites aren’t hosted by WordPress may be less likely to see an exact repeat of the current Drupal situation, but that doesn’t mean they can ignore security. Along with gee-whiz new whistles and bells, every WordPress upgrade will include new security fixes — and you definitely want to have them firmly in place.

A biennial tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, MeetBSD 2014 uses a mixed unConference format featuring both scheduled talks and community-driven events such as birds-of-a-feather meetings, lightning talks, and speed geeking sessions. MeetBSD can be traced back to a local workshop for BSD developers and users, hosted annually in Poland since 2004. Since then, MeetBSD’s popularity has spread, and it’s now widely recognized as its own conference with participants from all over the world.

Mint had already made upgrades a bit more difficult by making you choose all apps with a ctrl+A command and then right click to update all apps. But now, you can’t do even that. The Mark All Upgrades button is completely missing. It wasn’t stripped out; from my understanding, Synaptic had been replaced by Mint’s version of Synaptic. You can search and install applications with it…you just can’t upgrade your system with it.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this year’s All Things Open conference. There were a few glitches, as might be expected, but not enough to matter. Was it perfect? Probably not. Perfection at a conference would probably be pretty boring — and boring would be a fault keeping it from being perfect, if you’ll excuse a little circular logic. Let’s just say say that ATO was more than good enough — and then a lot more.

Everyone is either at Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, Ohio LinuxFest or All Things Open, so there’s no one around to bounce off some ideas regarding what’s happening this week. Besides, if you were at any of those three events –- and if not, why not? — you probably know more than I do at this point.

The problem here is that this lack of civility, this absence of open-mindedness, and this departure from decent behavior scales in an enormous way in FOSS: from the new user warmed in the glow of their new-found FOSS enlightenment thinking their first distro is “the Holy Grail,” to some of those who got the ball rolling back in the day and are responsible for the world-altering digital movement in which we now find ourselves.

Ohio LinuxFest isn’t just another excuse to travel. It’s a means for us to fulfill ourselves, and to get honest, tangible feedback for what we do and for what others are doing. It’s a place where ideas are sounded, bent, crumpled and turned until they either come out of the crucible perfect…or useless.

A legitimate question might be: why? Why invite companies that have spent years putting roadblocks in open source’s path or that callously use open source licenses to sell proprietary software? Lewis believes this to be part of the “open” in open source, that if we truly believe in “openness’ then we should put our money where our mouths are and be as open as the proprietary crowd is closed.

As it turns out, neither rumor was correct. A few days back, Todd Lewis, the Executive Director-Columbia for IT-oLogy, told FOSS Force that both events are very much on the slate for 2015. “We’ll be doing POSSCON and Great Wide Open in 2015,” he wrote in an email. “We’ll announce dates at All Things Open [(ATO), another open source conference hosted by IT-oLogy] and both will take place in the spring. The Call for Speakers for both events will be open and we encourage anyone with an interest to submit a talk and participate.”

Glaringly left out, of course, is one of the better Linux hardware makers, ZaReason, a long-time FOSS manufacturer of a wide range of hardware, from tablets to servers. Truth in advertising: I have a long history of using ZaReason hardware, and every laptop and desktop that I’ve had — whether for review or purchase — has been outstanding. The laptop I once used on a daily basis was absconded by my teenage daughter, who now puts the hardware through some pretty rigorous paces for an out-of-production model (an Alto 3880).

I’m an advocate of free “as in speech” software — which includes the freedom to choose. If there’s a FOSS solution for something I need or want to do, I’ll take that every time, and encourage my friends to do so as well. However, if there’s something I need or want to do with no FOSS solution available, I might use a proprietary solution, depending on the depth of my need or want.

Apparently, working for a free and open Internet also caught the attention of the Syrian government, which sadly wasn’t as enamored with Bassel’s work as was Foreign Policy magazine. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus, Syria.

Time Warner is already beginning to hemorrhage customers due to Google Fiber rolling-out in two large areas of Austin. Not to be outdone, AT&T also polluted the airwaves in an attempt to make us believe they have already stepped into the age of gigabyte, with an advertising campaign that was misleading at best. Their gigabyte service only covers a few square blocks.

It’s that easy. Just open Chrome, go to Netflix, open up an account (if you don’t already have one) and voila!, in no time at all you can be catching up on all of the episodes of Burn Notice and The Shield that you might’ve missed in over-the-air syndication (oh yeah, I also refuse to pay for cable). I have Netflix working now on two Linux Mint boxes, so it should be working on all Ubuntu derivatives. On Friday, Swapnil Bhartiya reported on The Mukt that according to his tests, Netflix is also working out-of-the-box on openSUSE and Arch Linux as well.

The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.