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The poll asked the question, “If your hosting company offered a choice of the following operating systems, which would you choose?” Those taking the poll could choose from CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Scientific Linux, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

I’ll admit, the last time I got up close and personal with a Dell advertising flyer was years ago. Again, they usually go straight to the rotary file. But I distinctly remember noticing, quite a few years back on a day when I had nothing better to do than study junk mail, that “Dell recommends Windows XP” was plastered all over the thing. Right now I’ll willing to bet that a year ago it was “Dell recommends Windows 7.”

When was the last time masses of consumer computer users decided to migrate to a new operating system by installing one on a machine they already owned? I think “never” would be a pretty close to exact answer. Consumer computer users don’t install new operating systems, even on machines that’ve become obsolete by Microsoft standards but which could have new life with a Linux install.

Here at FOSS Force, we haven’t changed our online habits one ort since the NSA news broke. Part of that is fatalistic. What’s the use? If the faceless “they” wants to know where we’re going online or what search terms we use to get there, they’ll find out. We might as well just hand it to them and save them the trouble of planting some sort of trojan on our computers–which would be a lot of work to only discover we’re just a bunch of old hippies who still hate the government but who are too tired to do anything about it but complain.

In Part One we learned that installing Debian 7 definitely isn’t rocket science–anybody can do it! Now that we have our Debian system installed and our computer is booting into the world of Debian Linux, let’s take a look and discover our new computing environment. The default desktop environment in Debian 7 is GNOME version 3.4. Although it’s a pretty simple to learn interface, it might be a little confusing at first for new users used to working only in Windows. Let’s take a look at the major aspects of the GNOME screen, to help you learn your way around.

First of all you need a installation image (ISO file) which you can download from http://www.debian.org. I recommend the small network install image. After downloading the file, copy it to a blank CD, DVD or USB memory-stick. For information on creating a bootable USB memory stick, see the article "Create a Bootable Live USB Thumb Drive or Rescue Drive Using UNetbootin."

To some the GPL is merely a really cool model for developing software. It’s a way for many people, or many organizations, with a shared need or interest to develop software by spreading-out the cost through shared ownership of a product. Although that could also be accomplished with proprietary software, the open source license allows the use of different parts of the code in different applications, which might not be easily done under the proprietary model.

Texas? Did you really say Texas? The state that leads the world in the number of executions–that Texas? Well, la-di-da, who would’ve ever thought the folks down there in the Lone Star State would be the first to stand up and protect our inboxes? Does this mean that the spirits of Ann Richards and Maury Maverick, Jr. are looking over the Texas legislators?

Novell, which we expected to be near the top of the list, came in as a relatively trusted company by our readers. With an eighth place showing, only IBM scored fewer votes. We have little doubt that five years or so ago, Novell would’ve probably been right behind Microsoft as one of the least trusted companies in the FOSS world, due primarily to their dealings with Microsoft in support of their SUSE Linux distro, which many people thought was both underhanded and designed to spread FUD.

Back in olden times when I was growing up, in the days before cell phones, when a vacuum tubed Univac computer with enough RAM to hold a thousand words filled an industrial sized room, when telephones were absolutely always land lines and were nearly always connected to the Bell System, you had two major choices when you ordered phone service. You could either get a private line, which is what everybody pretty much has today, or a party line, which means you shared your phone service with who knows how many of your neighbors.

I suspect the issue will be returning to the table, now that they realize what they really needed to see wasn’t source code but security vulnerabilities and Microsoft’s policy for dealing with them. Many government clients are obviously going to see this as a betrayal of trust. Here they’ve been trusting Microsoft with their most sensitive data only to discover that their trusted friend Steve Ballmer has been handing over the keys to their computers to the U.S. spook community.

I’m a sucker for every kind of “Top Five” (or Top 10 or Top 20) list there is. I love reading them and I enjoy writing them. There’s just one thing I’ve learned, never take them seriously. They’re just a way to have fun. They never speak anything like the whole truth, unless they’re listing something based on quantity, like the five best selling brands of soda. Even then, pay attention to who’s counting the quantity. Pepsi would probably come up with a different list than Coke.

Then there’s that other great first, that first look at some of the great free and open source software that ships with Linux distributions, opening a world that had up until then been nonexistent. Remember the rush, when your first installation was complete and you watched your computer boot into the strange new world of whatever desktop environment was the default on your new chosen distro? How exciting it was, searching through the menu, clicking on this, clicking on that, having a first look at GIMP, AbiWord, Evolution, KMail, Konqueror, Galeon and more. Wow! How weird it was to discover browsers not branded as Internet Explorer or Netscape, full featured photo editing without the Adobe imprint, and office suites that had nothing to do with Microsoft or WordPerfect.

Speaking of Groklaw, it was déjà vu all over again this week, with PJ once again reporting on the case of SCO v. IBM. Yup, they’re back in court. We’re reminded of the early days of Saturday Night Live when week after week Chevy Chase on “Weekend Update” would reassure the audience that Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco remained dead.

I first placed music online in 1996, a WAV file recorded through a microphone to promote the sale of an album I had under license on my indie BeanBag label featuring Georgie Fame and Van Morrison. I cheered for other music industry executives like Larry Rosen of GRP Records when he launched Music Boulevard online around 1997. I licensed songs by Jesse Colin Young (founder of The Youngbloods) to music publishing expert Bob Kohn’s eMusic.com for a cash advance against future royalties that had us partying like it was 1999.

Last week’s FOSS Force poll was only up for a few hours before we had to take it down. It dealt with the issue of community distros. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to take a gander at the article that accompanied the poll. Mainly, it sought to determine what you considered to be a community GNU/Linux distro. There had been quite a bit of discussion on the subject here on our site, so we decided to put it to you in a down and dirty poll, just to see if we could come to any kind of consensus.

It appears as if the folks in Redmond are being given the opportunity to learn some valuable lessons these days. For one thing, they’re learning that while owning 90 plus percent of the PC market is well and good, indeed it’s made them the big bad wolf that we all know and loathe, it also means the PC is theirs to lose.

I did a cursory search and was amazed at how easy it was to come up with search engines that don’t keep records or track their users. One of them, DuckDuckGo, I’d forgotten but had played around with it some time back and knew it had a good reputation among people I know in the San Francisco bay area.

Even within the tech industry, there are opposing views as to whether corporate surveillance is a good thing. The American story of the web begins with “Father Of The Internet” Vint Cerf when he was at the U.S. Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He’s now Vice President and Internet Evangelist for Google and told Wired in an April 2012 interview, “We knew what we were unleashing on the world.”

According to our “Newbie” Distro Poll, someone considering moving from Windows or Mac to Linux should consider taking Linux Mint for a spin. The poll asked the question, “What Linux distro would you be most likely to recommend to a new Linux user?” Evidently this was a subject that interested many of you, because a whopping 1,339 votes were cast in this poll, making it the most number of votes one of our polls has ever received.