Fedora Desktop 20 (Gnome): A Class Act

by Dietrich Schmitz If there is one thing I have learned, it's that life is dynamic.  And so it is in life that many things change  -- not just the material objects -- but our social mores and mindsets evolve to such an extent that completely different views and perspectives are gained. This is a story about Fedora Desktop 20 and how it has changed my view of several things. I am using the pre-release version of Fedora Desktop 20,...

Read More

Sandbox? What Sandbox? -- Fedora Has You Covered

by Dietrich Schmitz It's not something the average user thinks about -- security.  But as with most Linux Distributions (Distro) Fedora, a Red Hat community-based Distro, has some things going for it that are not apparent.The single biggest asset going for Fedora is security.  You see, just about everything you do while on Fedora is under what's called 'Mandatory Access Control'.  That's security-speak for basically having...

Read More

Google: You've Been Owned. Fix Your F'ing Security

by Dietrich Schmitz Theatrics.  That's all it is.  We see blustering, cries of 'outrage' by Eric Schmidt in a public reaction of 'surprise' to the fact that the NSA penetrated their firewall and set up camp reading any and all of their 'clear text' data files with impunity. This same company, prides itself on selling Chromebooks with an unblemished record at Pwnium 2013 of no successful hack which resulted in fully owning the...

Read More

Bodega - The Missing Piece

by Daniel Sandman Some might not have heard of it but Bodega, a missing piece in the Linux ecosystem, was released not long ago. Many might not have put much thought about how important this little piece of software really is. As I talked about in my previous article the usual approach commercialized Linux take is to have their ecosystem closed. This can be a danger for open source and do limit the participation of others. In a way it takes...

Read More

Does it really matter?

by Daniel Sandman I have lately contemplated over Linux and it's market share on desktop. We have seen a little upswing the last year and depending who you ask it is somewhere between 1.6-3 percent of all desktop computers. It's a small percentage but what people tend to forget is that it is a HUGE number. There are around 2 billion desktop computers running in the world today. The estimation is hard to do but it's the general number I tend to...

Read More

Moving Away from Google's Proprietary Ways

by Dietrich Schmitz As a result of drawing a line with Google, I've spent considerable time considering a range of options to avail myself to in replacing Google services.  As for Blogger, I intend to use Wordpress and will convert my Linuxadvocates website soon and am hoping to have some of Kev Quirk's guidance on tap as I move forward. As for my browser, I've turned to looking at Chromium. Why? Because The Chromium Projects is fully...

Read More