Author: grantbow

The Linux Journal covers an iTunes shiny red fruit alternative Juice (homepage) providing cross platform access to podcasts.

A key suite of software many people require when using a computer is word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation software. The first cross platform one that comes to my mind as a solid alternative to commercial offerings is Libre Office though I don’t know what the state of The Document Foundation vs. Apache Foundation OpenOffice incubation might be to bring the OpenOffice name back to this excellent software product.

What apps do you find people must have when coming to Linux from other platforms?

P.S. As a reminder, our 4th Sunday meeting at Bobby G’s is this Sunday, April 22nd. I hope you can join us. As we skipped the 2nd Sunday due to Easter it’s been quite awhile.

P.P.S. Mark your calendars for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin release party coming up this Thursday at 7PM in SF at the Thirsty Bear and the Ubuntu Developers Summit May 7-11 in Oakland.

Happy Holidays!

Is Linux so inconceivable that it is hard for users to say thank you? In her podcast Why don’t more people say thank you?, Cathy Malmrose does a great job telling her own story as an analogy for trying to understand the Linux user community. Cathy is the CEO of Zareaon right here in Berkeley and a supporter of BerkeleyLUG. Please let her know your thoughts and/or comment here.

Research is beginning to show that gratitude is a learned skill that can be improved with practice. I think this hour long 2009 Google Tech Talk by Richard J. Davidson is worth the effort. The Charter for Compassion focuses on the global scale.

As it is the 4th Sunday of the month I hope the meeting from noon – three at Bobby G’s Pizzeria goes well today. The second Sunday of December is the 11th. As the fourth Sunday falls on Christmas day I think it’s safe to say that the meeting is canceled. After the 11th we will next see you on Sun, Jan 8th.

Across the bay the OLPC SF Community Summit 2011 started Friday evening, Oct 21st. The main sessions were Sat, Oct 22nd and (still going today) Sun, Oct 23rd. A panel is live streaming now. Tweets come from @olpcsf on twitter and identi.ca

After the Christmas programs of 2007 & 2008 that offered a laptop for a child and a laptop for the buyer, 2009 and 2010 saw a hiatus of the Give One, Get One now give One or Many offer by Amazon. There are more laptops shipping each month to children all over the world, 2.1 million as of Jan 2011. The project is going strong. A community map olpcmap.net shows information contributed about deployments.

Hardware wise, the second revision of the OLPC 1.0 hardware, the OLPC 1.5, is shipping now and the OLPC 1.75 in the same green and white form factor using an ARM processor is being tested in very limited quantities right now. After four years, OLPC blogged about the progress that every child between the ages of 6 & 12 in Uruguay has an OLPC. This is due to Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal.

I just heard on the live stream about a new manual bookmarked at Help_Activity_Refresh (was j.mp/xomanual), an update of the FLOSS manual previously published lead by Carol and Christophe which goes into the Help Activity of every OLPC.

The OLPC Contributor program meetings on Fridays are a great way to network and meet people.

Already underway, as it is the 4th Sunday of the month the meeting at Bobby G’s Pizzeria is already underway. Please join us.

One of the biggest challenges when becoming truly proficient with computers of all kinds is getting started with a command line interpreter. The “prompt” can feel intimidating at first. GUI programs can not always predict all possible needs. Though not as visually appealing text-based programs have powerful features that GUI programs do not. Simple new commands can be added almost instantly.

I have tried many times to explain or teach how to get started with a command line to an interested, eager and otherwise resourceful person. What I have been missing is a useful & concise list of resources to help them. There are many excellent resources already available to help during such “teachable” moments. There are different guides for different kinds of people depending on one’s familiarity & computer brand. To help people I have started collecting Learning the Command Line resources which I will be enhancing from feedback and additional research.

I would be thrilled to collaborate with berkeleylug.com regulars, beginners and professionals alike. Please comment below with your favorite resources or with feedback about the ones I’ve already listed. You may also join me and others in the #berkeleylug IRC channel. My computer is always online and I hope happen to be looking when you try. If you leave a message there I should get it. I look forward to people sharing their stories of how they learned to use their command line. I will try to highlight the best resources available in a way that is accessible to newcomers.

I would like to find a better collaboration platform for this effort but as I need Learning the Command Line now I will write an HTML page until something better is used. It’s a work in progress and could use some additional appeal and organization, particularly focusing on helping those curious to try a command line on Linux, Mac or Windows computers for the first time.

As it is also the 2nd Sunday of the month I hope the meeting at Bobby G’s Pizzeria goes well. I look forward to some pizza when I return.

Yes, Android is a Linux distribution as well as a telephone operating system and apps. Android is a great success story for consumers and for Linux! Some people don’t know these simple facts but they are true. Android users, please inform your friends that using an Android phone makes them a bonified Linux user. Linux is turning up in consumer devices all over the world. Two devices i want to talk about today are the Nook Color Tablet & Huawei IDEOS phone.

First, I hope the 4th Sunday meeting today at Bobby G’s pizzeria in Berkeley goes well. I am sure a wrap up of the Solano Stroll that coincided with our 2nd Sunday meeting will be top on the agenda along with our usual sharing of Linux related news, events and answering questions.

I find it sad that consumer electronics companies try to lock out innovation from their users but rooting consumer devices is possible most of the time with a little time and effort. Some companies are better at encouraging this than others. We would be happy to try to help users getting started with Android by responding to your comments below.

Several of our members have purchased Barnes and Noble Nook Color devices for our own uses. When rooted they make a great $250 tablet with reasonable performance. While the specs are modest (like the price) this is an adequate way to get started. Let us know your experiences.

As I am traveling and since I needed a new phone I picked up the Huawei IDEOS U8150. I had heard of it and tweeted about it before I arrived in Kenya. Of course I rooted it immediately with CyanogenMod 7 and it’s much faster than my almost three year old Google G1, the first Android phone. I’m happy with it so far but it’s only been a few days.

I am almost three weeks into my 13 week stay in Nairobi, Kenya in East Africa working with dreamfish.com. We have made quite a bit of progress already designing and assembling open source software for the next website with a group of Nairobits graduates. I have to say I do miss the yummy pizza there at home. While ugali and sukuma wiki (kale) are wonderful it is not a fair comparison to me!

There are quite a few revision control systems available these days. For open source people CVS is no longer the only game in town as it was for quite a long time after it launched in 1990. Subversion’s goal was to be a better CVS however distributed version control systems have inherent advantages and becoming more common.

I think an inflection point in revision control systems was when the Linux kernel development changed from Bitkeeper. Linus Torvalds implemented the first version of Git, Matt Mackall created Mercurial and in parallel at around the same time Bazaar was created by Canonical which is heavily used in the Ubuntu Community. There are some good comparisons of the strengths and weaknesses of each. FLOSS Weekly, the audio podcast, has covered both Git (twice) and Mercurial.

The most popular free hosting sites allow the use of different tools. Sometimes supplementary tools like GUI interfances or tools like github-cli (command line github.com issue tracker API access) can make a big difference in adoption rates for some coding groups.

Coders, what version control systems do you prefer and why? Sysadmins, when you need to look at source code what version control systems do you find projects most frequently use?

You don’t think there’s a war over freedom going on? That’s what they want you to think. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Oracle and Microsoft could cash in big on Android

Microsoft’s Android Shakedown

Do you think that patent issues and all this money changing hands has nothing to do with Linux? Just follow the money. While most of the legal attention focuses on Dalvik, the Android implementation of the Java virtual machine, the public perception of Linux is also tarnished to anyone who understands that Android is a Linux distribution. I can only imagine what cyanogenmod.com people think about what is going on. News like this is concerning because Android is otherwise the most visible success for open source software. Thanks to Android more people than ever before now use Linux in the palm of their hands (whether they know it or not) than traditional Linux desktops. Fundamentally I think the patent system is what is really broken and all this activity is the most visible symptom of the underlying problem. What do you think? Please comment below.

We are having fun at our meeting today. We hope you join us before we leave Bobby G’s today. For full details see the meetings tab to the top left.

Tomorrow begins Ubuntu Developer Week. If you are interested in Ubuntu development please join the IRC sessions. They are always informative and entertaining.