Dissociated Press

The deadline is rapidly approaching — the Ohio LinuxFest folks are looking for speakers for this year’s OLF.

I went last year and had a blast, and I fully expect this year’s to be even better. If you know a lot about Linux and open source, I would encourage you to submit a presentation. Deadline is July 10, so get on it!
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Since Dapper is no doubt attracting a whole bunch of new Ubuntu users, I thought it’d be a good idea to write up a piece addressing some common new user questions. It’s up on Linux.com now, if you have any questions about Ubuntu, have a look and see if it helps out any.

This has already been touched on, but I figure it’s worth saying again: Saying that something is “open source based” is pretty much meaningless. I’m seeing this term a lot in press releases, and I just want to clarify — this doesn’t buy you any interest from open source pubs. Open source based could mean “appliance that runs Linux + a proprietary package” to “fully open source, anyone can get, modify, and redistribute the source.”

If it’s the “appliance” category, big deal. Stop trying to use open source to hype the product, because you’re just going to alienate the users and buyers who care about open souce — and it won’t win any major points with users and buyers who don’t care about open source.

If it’s in the “fully open source” category, I’m all ears.

I have a review of the Flock beta (0.7) up on NewsForge this afternoon. It’s Friday, I know, but don’t let that stop you from heading over and giving it a quick read.

I tested Flock on Ubuntu Linux — AMD64 and x86 — and was happily surprised to how well it works, particularly on AMD64. For the first time in… probably two years, I’ve gone pretty much all day without using Firefox, using Flock instead. It’s stable, fast, and has added goodies — like the Blog Post feature, which I’m using to write this very post.

I’m really looking forward to Flock 1.0, assuming the beta is reflective of the final product, it should be some damn good software.

This is some interesting stuff, the GNOME project is trying to bring more women into the project (and free software development in general) by hosting the first Women’s Summer Outreach Program (WSOP).

This was spurred on by the fact that GNOME received 181 applications for the Google Summer of Code — not a single application from a female developer. Not one.

So, the GNOME folks are trying to do something about it. It was started by Hanna Wallach and Chris Ball, and lasts through September. It will be interesting to see how successful the program is. I don’t think that it will singlehandedly take care of the problem, nor do I think the organizers expect it to either, but it might be a turning point in bringing more women into FOSS development.

I wonder if this will motivate other projects to follow suit?

I have an article up on Linux.com today, “Synergy: One keyboard (and mouse) to rule them all,” that looks at using the Synergy software as kind of a software KVM — minus the M, anyway.

I get a great deal of use out of Synergy now — I use it to connect my main and secondary desktops, so I can control both systems using the same keyboard and mouse, but have two distinct systems so that I can use KDE on one, and GNOME (or something else) on the other. Right now, both systems are running Ubuntu Dapper, but I could run Ubuntu on one, Fedora on the other, or even use a Mac and Linux, etc.

Synergy is some pretty nifty stuff. I strongly recommend it if you have more than one system on your desk.

I have a short article up on NewsForge today about creating VMware images using VMware Player. This might be useful if you don’t have the money for VMware Workstation, and don’t feel like messing with a full-blown VMware Server install.

For me, it was mostly just fun to figure out how to do it, and I thought I might as well get an article out of it after spending a few hours on the weekend mucking around with it.