Linux? What's That?? -- Soon No more

Today, my mother showed me an article she read in a local newspaper.  It was about Linux, free software, and how students from a private university (probably the biggest private university here) were using FLOSS.

The article mentioned the benefits of FLOSS in educational contexts and how those students were using GIMP, LibreOffice, and Linux, of course.

I still recall that, four years ago, if anyone mentioned Linux, all people would ask "What's that?".  To the dismal of some company in Redmond, more and more people are getting to know about Free Software and its advantages.  Why cracking a video player if you have tools like VLC right there to take care of all your video playing needs?

It seems that the strongest weapon of privative software against FLOSS, that is, making it invisible, is working less and less each year.

Soon, most people will know about FLOSS and they will realize they do have choices.

Pynagram: Fun with Words!

Pynagram is a small and simple anagram-typing game that may lack fancy features...but it offers a quick, challenging, and addicting gameplay to make up for that.

It basically presents you seven letters that you may use to type as many words as you can in a 5-minute span. Two-letter words are not allowed.

When you type a new word and it is correct, it appears in the blanks below your available letters:

Any correct words will appear in green when you type them.  Repeated words will be yellow, and inexistent words will be red.  When your five minutes are over, the game will show you all the words.  The ones you got right will be boldfaced:

Even if this game is somewhat modest, its educational value is enormous. It gives you a fun way to test your vocabulary skills --and polish them-- whenever you have five minutes to spare!

Where to get it?  I got it from Debian repos, but you can visit Pynagram in Launchpad for more downloading options:

My Top 3 most Creative Linux-related April Fool's Jokes

April 1st. is a day in which computer users and developers have fun creating the most awkward stories and articles.  Linux jokes are especially creative, and the funniest part is that there is always someone who actually believes these "articles."  I learned to be on my guard because I used to be one of these poor victims!

Now, what happens when the jokes are taken to the developer level?  Let's see three of the most creative examples:


Number 3:  There has been lots of discussion about the volume sliders on KDE. Fortunately, a solution was finally reached. The KDE Volume Slider Compromise.

Number 2:  What happens when it is the developer of a distro himself the one who fools someone? This happened at the antiX ranks.  Anticapitalista, the developer of antiX Linux told an unsuspecting antiX user that a big company wanted to deploy this little distro to all their systems...with two conditions that could cause antiX substantial disturbance:

Number 1:   A big distro's whole site becomes a joke:  DEBIAN.ORG:

Do I need to say more?

Pardus 2013 Is Here!

Finally, the big Turkish cat woke up from its sleep and now it arrives in four flavors:  KDE and GNOME, both for 32 and 64 bit computers.

The problem is that the distro is only available in Turkish for the time being.

Still, I am downloading it to check it out.  Hopefully, I can get to test it in spite of my nonexistent Turkish skills.

If you want to give it a try, you may visit this page.

¡Felicitaciones Hispalinux!

Hoy leí con mucho agrado que la agrupación Hispalinux formuló una queja ante la Comisión Europea (por medio de su oficina en Madrid) por la forma en que Microsoft forzó el uso de UEFI y Restricted Boot con Windows 8.

Aunque Microsoft insista en que todo es legal y que es por el bien de los usuarios, ya está más que visto que el Restricted Boot (al que les gusta llamar "Secure" sin razones de peso) solamente le aporta seguridad a la empresa de Redmond...le aporta la seguridad de que va a ser mucho más difícil instalar otro sistema operativo en esos equipos.

Agradezco a Hispalinux por su valor.  Espero que les vaya bien en esta batalla legal y que la Comisión Europea analice seriamente la cuestión.  ¡Felicitaciones Hispalinux!



 

Waiting for MEPIS, AntiX 13, and PiSi 1.0!

It seems that a new testing release of Mepis is pretty close.  The community is eagerly waiting for it.

Also, I'm waiting for antiX 13.  The beta release pleased me a lot. If you want to try it out, please remember that it is not a finished product (although it ran flawlessly on my laptop).

Of course, I cannot forget PiSi LinuX 1.0.  This little cat seems capable of great accomplishments!

So Long, Pardus-Anka! Welcome, PiSi LinuX!

Yesterday, Mechatotoro gave me a very surprising news:  Pardus-Anka, the fork of the Turkish distro named Pardus, is gone.

That news was shocking!  How come the Phoenix Pardus ("anka" means "phoenix") died?  And so soon?

Well, actually, what happened (as explained in Spanish here) was that Anka community decided to drop the name "Pardus" altogether to follow a totally independent path.  Since they kept PiSi, the packaging system that made Pardus unique, they adopted PiSi as their distro's new name (and identity).  in other words, Pardus-anka died to give birth to PiSi LinuX!

Now, "pisi" means "kitten"...thus, the logo of this renamed distro will be (I think) the logo of the very packaging system: the little cat.

I celebrate this change.  With Pardus-Anka, I felt a bit of confusion and perceived a lack of consistency, visually speaking, among its name, its logo, and its identity (the packaging system).  For the old Pardus, everything made sense: "Pardus" means "leopard/panther", its logo was a leopard, and its packaging system, PiSi, was a little cat.  For Anka, things were not quite as consistent: its logo was a phoenix, its name meant "phoenix panther", but its packaging system (and the marker of its true identity) was a little cat????

Now, the change to PiSi Linux solves everything: The name, the logo, the packaging system, and the distro's very identity work as one.  This may be trivial to some, but it actually speaks volumes in terms of forging a distro's identity from its very start.

I'll be waiting for PiSi LinuX then!