Seneca, Fedora, and LUX

July 01 2008

Teaching Open Source development requires Open Source ways. I teach at Seneca College in Toronto, and we've been teaching inside the Mozilla community for the last three years with some very good results (I'll be talking about this at OLS in a... read more

FSOSS 2007 on the Web

October 25 2007

It’s day 1 of the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) — 32 talks and 10 workshops on Open Source and related topics over two days. We’re pumped! The FSOSS web site at http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/ will let you in on some of the excitement, with links to videos of… read more

FSOSS 2007 Coming Up!

September 11 2007

I teach at Seneca College in Toronto. On October 25 and 25th, we’re holding the sixth annual Free Software & Open Source Symposium, an event that has grown to encompass two days of talks and workshops by top open source developers, users, organizers, and educators. This year’s lineup includes: Bob… read more

Fedora 7: Core no More

May 31 2007

Fedora 7 is about to be released (minutes), and it should prove to be one of the most interesting Fedora releases to date. The concept of Fedora Core and Extras — on-disc and off-disk package sets, maintained by Red Hat employees and a mix of Red Hat / non-Red Hat… read more

Thank you, OpenSSH!

April 05 2007

In the spirit of chromatic’s many thank-you posts, I want to send a huge thank-you to all of the developers and contributors of the OpenSSH project. SSH provides the right tool for so many tasks, especially when faced with a temporary access need that spans several different networks. It give me… read more

FSOSS Call for Presentations/Workshops (or, Toronto is Great in October)

March 26 2007

The Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is a great community-oriented event held in Toronto each October. I’m co-chairing the 6th edition this fall, which for the first time will include two days of presentations and workshops (October 25-26). If you’re interested in speaking or teaching, we’re looking… read more

Linux on Dell: Preinstalled is Not What We Want

March 23 2007

It seems that Dell is scratching its head trying to figure out what it would take to get Linux on their desktop and laptop systems in order to meet customer demand (as hinted at on the DellIdeaStorm site). But I’m not convinced that preinstallation is what Linux customers really want… read more

Why Fedora Matters

November 28 2006

Recent blog postings here on the O’Reilly Network and articles on Slashdot (including a recent review of my book) have generated some really strong negative comments about the Fedora project. Does Fedora really matter? I believe that Fedora is a unique, vital, and critical open source project: Fedora is about pushing… read more

FSOSS Videos are Online

November 02 2006

If you couldn’t make it to the Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium last week, you can still hear the presentations by Mike Shaver (Mozilla), Nat Friedman (Novell), Chris Blizzard (OLPC/Red Hat) and others via the raw video that has been posted online. Edited versions incorporating the presenters’ slides… read more

What's New Fedora Core 6 (Part 2): More Yum

October 25 2006

Fedora Core 6 extends the use of the yum package manager which was also used in Core 4 and 5. In Fedora Core 6, yum has been further integrated into the Anaconda installer, the automated update service has been rewritten, and the speed has been significantly improved. The most visible change… read more

What's New Fedora Core 6 (Part 1): Hardened but not Hard to Swallow

October 24 2006

Fedora Core 6 was released today! Congratulations to all of the Fedora and upstream developers. The step to Core 6 is smaller than the step to Core 5 last spring, and the distinguishing qualities of this release are generally those of refinement and polish. Fedora Core is one of the few… read more

Fedora Core & Fedora Linux Downloads

October 19 2006

Fedora Core 6 will be released on Tuesday. It is the latest and greatest distribution from the Fedora project, hardened out-of-the-box with SELinux and including Xen 3, the latest KDE and Gnome desktops, AIGLX eye candy (for the few cards that support it so far), a handful of new or… read more

Using User Private Groups

September 29 2006

Red Hat and Fedora distributions of Linux create a separate user group for each user on the system. To someone coming from another distribution, such as SUSE (which puts all users in the group “users” by default), this may seem bizarre — but there’s a good reason for this often-ignored… read more

Great FSOSS Symposium Coming Up in Toronto

September 13 2006

For the past five years, Seneca College in Toronto has been running a Free Software & Open Source Symposium. This year promises to be the best yet, with an interesting lineup of speakers including: Chris Blizzard, Red Hat / One Laptop Per Child Project Marcus Bornfreund, Creative Commons Canada Nat Friedman, Novell Mike… read more

Fedora on a Stick

August 23 2006

The development version of Fedora Core will now install on and boot from a USB drive without any initrd magic or special installer options. I’ve been testing with a USB-connected IDE drive, but look forward to using this feature with a USB stick (”thumb”) drive. A 4 GB USB flash… read more