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We interrupt this weather report with a very important announcement. Despite our best efforts, your local TV station has not yet upgraded to Windows 10. We warned them that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.

Before 16.04 was released, Ubuntu MATE was already setting the pace for what an operating system for the Raspberry Pi should and could be. Prior to Ubuntu MATE, if you wanted to experience all the Raspberry Pi had to offer, then Raspbian was the only game in town. Although Raspbian is Pi’s official OS, it has never really had the look and feel to make the Raspberry Pi seem like it’s a desktop alternative.

The Mozilla Foundation has hired Simon Phipps to examine and evaluate options for the Thunderbird desktop client, which is seeking a new home. His initial report was made public on Monday.

When Pennsylvania's Penn Manor High School launched the state's largest free software learning program, they did it a little differently than most schools. As click-baity ads on FaceBook like to proclaim: You won't believe what happened next.

One out of six people who are told by me that their computer will be running Linux have at least an idea of what Linux is. One out of 30 have used it, or do use it outside of the home, whether at school or work. Maybe three out of 100 clap with glee, fully jacked up that they won't have to blow away a Windows install and replace it with Linux.

Taking advantage of the hole requires the use of regsvr32, a Windows command line utility for registering and unregistering DLLs and ActiveX controls in the Windows Registry. Use of the exploit is difficult to trace, as it doesn’t require administrator rights or alter the registry.

Some things are so counterintuitive that they seem just plain wrong, like a crime against natural order. Things like running Windows on a System76 machine, which is something that would never have occurred to me to do, not even if it was the only computer available and I absolutely had to boot into Windows. It would be like putting ketchup on a delicately seasoned and perfectly grilled spencer steak.

It was only a couple of years ago that the FOSS world was proclaiming that Microsoft was a dead company walking. The king was dead. Sales of new Windows releases were flat and Android was seriously kicking its butt in the mobile marketplace. FOSSers were sure they wouldn't have Redmond to kick around for much longer.

I’ve chosen this one partly because it’s in Norwegian and reminds me a lot of Lilyhammer, the fish out of water show that got me hooked on Netflix. Mainly, however, I’ve chosen it because its three minute and 16 seconds is almost entirely spent poking fun of users of a certain proprietary company’s products.

For over a decade and a half, LinuxFest Northwest has flown the flag literally in Microsoft’s backyard, an annual open source event held the last weekend in April in Bellingham, Wash. LFNW features presentations and exhibits on various free and open source topics, as well as Linux distributions and applications. It usually has something for everyone from the novice to the professional.

There are more than a few things that are unusual about Escuelas Linux. For one, although ultimately derived from Ubuntu, it’s not a first generation descendant on the Ubuntu tree, but traces it’s *buntu roots by way of Bodhi Linux. The distro also uses the Moksha desktop, which Bodhi developed after becoming unhappy with the direction that Enlightenment was taking.

The lead developer of a new text-to-speech app based on MaryTTS talks about what's been done and what remains to do.

These days, GitHub is pretty much the warehouse district where nearly all open source projects are stored and maintained. There are some tricks to navigating the site, which can easily be mastered by watching tutorial videos.

In recent years software patents haven’t been nearly as much in the news as they once were. This is partly due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank which took a slew of patents off the table. Also, thanks to the efforts of companies such as Newegg to duke it out in court instead of rolling over and settling, many patents that had been successfully leveraged by the trolls for years have been invalidated.

A lot of the presentations will be made by knowledgeable local talent, from Bellingham, Seattle and even Portland, but there will also be some big shot FOSS names there too, just in case you think its only a show for the home team. MySQL’s community manager Dave Stokes will be there, talking about the open source database’s native JSON data type. Also on hand will be Ilan Rabinovitch, who many of you will recognize as the chair at SCALE and the cofounder of Texas Linux Fest.

Cayenne can support multiple devices as well. Beyond adding as many Raspberry Pis as you want, you can select from a range of sensors, extensions and actuators that will be wired to your Raspberry Pi. Once the device is wired, you can then assign it to the GPIO pins. With your GPIO pins registered to certain devices, you can now set alerts or triggers to occur on schedules that you create through the dashboard.

The studio quality 2D animation software, OpenToonz, which was recently open sourced continues to find adopters. Luckily for those trying to figure out how to use it, there are plenty of videos.

My inclination was to go back to school and get the certs I needed to work in the Linux administration field. I already had the base knowledge and experience; it was just a matter of jumping through the hoops to get a piece of paper saying I already knew what I was learning. Not that I wouldn’t learn a thing or two along the way.

Software patent abuse would seem to be on the decline if the amount of ink being given to the subject in the open source press is used as a metric. But as the old TV commercial used to ask: Is it live, or is it Memorex?

Bubbling beneath the headline in this week's FOSS news review: ownCloud gets a new release, the Linux kernel grows by a half million lines since January 1, a new OS for the Pi 3 and FOSS Force welcomes a new columnist.