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Free software brings a number of huge advantages to the problem of spanning the educational and technology gap between rich and poor nations. So we can teach someone to use Linux and OpenOffice, and then they can take that software home and teach someone else, who can copy the software and take it to their business where they can teach someone else... so we see very rapid transfer of skills with software libre...

Since I’ve retired from IT work, I don’t have much chance to keep my Unix skills fresh so when it came time for a new laptop, I decided I’d devote it primarily to Linux, with a dual-boot option to Windows.

I generally don’t have any issues knowing someone might be snooping on a bit of my traffic. However there are times you may want your traffic to be a bit more private. For example if your boss is a raging tyrant and your looking for a new job, and you know the sky would fall if he found out you emailed or happened to be on Career Builder or for that matter had even the slightest idea of abandoning him. Yes I am recounting something from my past, hey at least its distant past :). So if you find yourself in that situation read on for how to use tsocks and ssh as a simple proxy.

Is Microsoft offering an olive branch to open source and Linux? Or is Microsoft just putting the best possible face on its defeat by the EU justice system, and its recent statements are really just business as usual? If you ask people in the open-source community you'll find answers from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Software always has bugs, and free software is no exception to this. When we think of free software, we think of software we can distribute, modify, study and of course, run. I don't spend a lot of my time studying or modifying free software, to be honest. There are lot of people who do this, and they're a lot smarter than me... well, most of them. Apparently, none of the people who write free software bug trackers ever actually use them to report a bug, or if they do, they have a very high tolerance for pain and annoyance.

Recent headlines have made me feel like it’s 1999 and Linux has just peeked its head through the veil of mainstream computing. Everyone is all wide-eyed about the little operating system that could. But this time there’s a different feeling surrounding the coming out party. This time it’s serious. This time Linux is the belle of the ball.