A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post [...]

You know what Microsoft doesn’t get? — For one thing, the Internet. Microsoft doesn’t control it. What it used to be able to do in the dark now falls out of its noxious bag of tricks into the Internet’s bright light, stage front and center. And there stands Microsoft in the spotlight, with its pants down, and let me tell [...]

from the Free Software Foundation We maintain this free software definition to show clearly what must be true about a particular software program for it to be considered free software. From time to time we revise this definition to clarify it. If you would like to review the changes we’ve made, please see the History section below for more information. [...]

By Richard Stallman: When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not [...]

One of the advantages of using Free Software applications and operating systems is choice. Plenty to choose from. Not satisfied with one, switch or pick another one. If the switch involves different flavors of Linux or BSD operating systems (distros), it’s called distro hopping. When it comes to picking a firewall and router, you want to limit how often you [...]

IPFire is a source-based, Linux firewall/router distribution with a modular design, with one of the easiest installation and setup routines of the group of Linux- and BSD-based firewall and router distributions listed on this site.

Note: This post features two, long tables. Unless you want to scroll from here to Burkina Faso, it is highly recommended that you do not try to view this (post) on a single page, that is, do not click the “View All” link above or below this post. There are more than a dozen distributions listed under the Firewall and [...]

Pardus (official home page: Pardus.org.tr) is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). It is an original Linux distribution, that is, unlike most Linux distributions, it is not based on another distribution. It is a desktop-oriented distribution based on KDE, [...]

by Richard M. Stallman Debian’s decision to include Mono in its principal way of installing GNOME, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of [...]

On April 1st, the Conficker worm, perhaps the most wide-spread malware program in history, is set to activate. We don’t know what Conficker will do, but it’s a safe bet it won’t be anything nice to the hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs that have been infected with it. Will it strip out every credit-card number within these PCs? Launch [...]

Is there such a thing as a perfect Linux or BSD desktop distribution? If so, what features and functionalities would such a distro have for it to have attained that high state – of perfection (on the desktop)? And perfect for what group of users? Geeks or non-geeks? In order to answer these questions, we set out here the most [...]

PCLinuxOS is an APT-ified, Mandriva-based Linux distribution. It is a Live CD distro, with the option to install to a hard disk once you’ve decide that it meets your computing needs. While it is based on Mandriva, PCLinuxOS distinguishes itself from its parent distro by offering an installation image for every desktop environment available.

The uncertainty surrounding Net Neutrality has given rise to a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that offers Internet service providers unprecedented control over Internet content, according to a new paper released today by Free Press. Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It? argues that the use of DPI technology by Internet service providers [...]

This afternoon, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate. Here’s the resolution the faculty approved (thanks to Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee to formulate it):

Join the Free Software Foundation and FLOSS Manuals March 21st-22nd book sprint, “Introduction to the Command Line” The Free Software Foundation and FLOSS Manuals are joining forces in a sprint to write a new textbook introducing GNU/Linux newbies to the command line. Join us as we sprint to release a new book by Monday March 23rd!

Linus Torvalds (you know him, right?) has this post on his blog: So 2.6.29 isn’t quite out yet, but I’ve merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.