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“Our production value continues to improve with each video and tutorial we create,” Jared wrote. “‘Superusers: The Legendary GNU/LINUX Show’ is leagues ahead of our first episode, ‘What is a Robot?’ The ten computer science videos proposed in our Indiegogo campaign will only be better. We will focus on improving our script writing, fine-tuning the balance of education and entertainment, incorporating more animations, and refining our audio/visual production techniques.” So far, they’ve created videos under the subject headings Computer Science, Linux, Web Development and Python.

Jeff Hoogland, the lead developer of Bodhi Linux, said in a blog post on Friday that “for a variety of reasons,” he is stepping down from the leadership of his “labor of love.”

Bodhi Linux, based on Ubuntu, is a lightweight distro leveraging the Enlightenment Desktop. A note on the Bodhi Linux web page says, “We regret to inform you Bodhi Linux is no longer being maintained,” and has a link to Hoogland’s blog page.

Wednesday’s Internet Slowdown action generated just over 300,000 calls and nearly 2.2 million emails to Congress by Thursday afternoon. Facebook shares of the spinning “loading” icon topped 1.1 million. In addition, 722,364 filed comments Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission, bringing the total number of comments since March 1 to 7.7 million.

This year, we at “FOSS Force” are expanding our coverage of Linux, FOSS and OSS conferences. This got us wondering, in a self serving sort of way, how many of you regularly attend conferences?

I don’t know how much Google’s paying him, but it has to be more than plenty. As the Triangle Business Journal reported on August 29 when he walked out the door for the last time at Red Hat’s Raleigh headquarters, he left behind a boatload of cash.

To illustrate the point of the “fast lane/slow lane” approach proposed by the Federal Communications Commission, some of the biggest tech players today are leading a symbolic “Internet Slowdown” on their websites in what could be the largest virtual political protest since the 2012 blackouts in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

To test this theory, I went to HTML5test, a web site that scores how well browsers support HTML5 standards and specifications. Since The Register reports that two of the browsers affected are Opera 12.X and Safari 5.1.x, I compared those browsers’ HTML capabilities against the browser I had open at the time, Chrome 36.0.1985.125. In addition, I compared the results with Opera 22 and Safari 8.0, the latest versions of these browsers with stats available on the test site.

My personal opinion is that Firefox OS has a stronger privacy and security model than Android and iOS. I think Mozilla continues to be a champion of user privacy and security in everything it does and Firefox OS is no exception to that. In the Mozilla community, we are always stepping back and thinking about how we can better protect our users’ privacy and make sure the products we produce are as secure as possible.

On a Monday last October, Tennessee based publisher and writer Susan Linton decided her plate was too full and put the website Tux Machines up for sale. That Friday, October 28, she announced that she’d found a buyer in Roy Schestowitz, known in FOSS circles as the publisher of TechRights, a site which focuses on the political side of free tech.

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.