TUX MACHINES turned 15 almost exactly two months ago. The site has operational costs, as one can expect, mostly the hardware and bandwidth. We've thankfully had these resources very kindly donated to us last year, basically saving us the massive burden of bills somewhere around $10,000. Running a site with a lot of traffic isn't cheap and it isn't getting cheaper, either. As an overhead or addition to server maintenance (uptime requires habitual work on repairing databases, managing backups, patching of software and agonising system upgrades once in a few years) it takes a lot of time to compose new material and moderate to keep spam out.

A lot of the mainstream media is bashing Linux Journal right now. It makes it seem like its demise is a problem with GNU/Linux itself. These are villainous lies from self-serving foes of Linux, sometimes people who are aligned with Microsoft or salaried by Microsoft (we don't want to link to their provocative clickbait). But anyway, the bottom line is that keeping Linux Journal online may be costly and people should prepare for the possibility of Linux Journal becoming unavailable (offline) some time soon. I try very hard to prevent this (today and yesterday). "There is a real (and ever-growing) danger that a massive trove of GNU/Linux and Free software history will vanish unless urgent action is taken right now," I said. There are ways to avoid this (writers of that site need to unite in a union-like sense). I also secure my own sites from such a fate, having reached almost 13 years in Techrights. This week the site is experiencing all-time traffic records.

I've decided to contact Rick Falkvinge (Dick Greger Augustsson), founder of the Swedish Pirate Party and head of privacy at Private Internet Access, which owns Linux Journal. Bear in mind he used to work for Microsoft. We're still friendly online (we've exchanged some messages over the years) and he probably has sufficient clout at Private Internet Access to sway their decisions. In case they plan to shut down the site, we must act fast. Please contact him; as per his Web site, his E-mail address is x1bpsas66na001@sneakemail.com and any message he receives he can relay to other high-level people at the company. I don't personally know anyone else at that company, so that's the only contact I'm able to provide. █

Summary: A very old cartoon/column (half a century old) rewritten to explain where Microsoft stands when it comes to "loving" Linux

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Summary: Anniversary of Tux Machines is today, a special anniversary too

Today Tux Machines is celebrating its 15^th year of existing. When we bought the website it was about 10 years old, so kudos to Susan Linton who devoted time to make and keep the site on pace. We promise to keep the website up to date with lots of insightful OSS/FOSS/Linux/Android-related articles. We hope to continue the job well into the distant future. █

Cake on the way...

THE MEDIA online is dying. It's no secret. Not all sorts of media are dying but traditional media struggles to survive. Causes for these have been explained for years if not more than a decade. This won't be the subject of this post.

Tux Machines does not produce a lot of original material. Susan used to publish GNU/Linux reviews (with galleries of screenshots), but other than that we mostly cluster and syndicate news. This has been the case for nearly 15 years (our anniversary is next month).

Each year it feels like mainstream media produces a lot less stories (not just about GNU/Linux but about anything, in general terms). So we're 'mining' more and more RSS feeds, typically of blogs. Do you have a GNU/Linux blog or know one/s you wish to recommend? Let us know in the IRC channel because we always hunt for more news sources, no matter if they're 'mainstream' or not as long as they're credible, reliable, and on topic. █

1. Thou shalt not host a FOSS project outside GitHub (otherwise it won’t ‘count’)
2. Thou shalt not edit code without Visual Studio (which now has an “open” — albeit spying and malicious — component for openwashing purposes)
3. Thou shalt not code without .NET (or Mono)
4. Thou shalt not use a voting machine without Windows (we have just announced some openwashing component to make up for the NSA back doors that compromise elections worldwide)
5. Thou shalt not boot GNU/Linux as a standalone operating system (UEFI might not permit this anyway, unless we sign for approval)
6. Thou shalt not get get a GNU/Linux distribution outside our Store
7. Thou shalt not buy a computer without Windows preinstalled; those are “naked PCs” and everyone who buys such PCs is a “pirate”
8. Thou shalt not disparage or even publicly criticise our staff (that would be in violation of GitHub rules, a Code of Conduct, T&C and so on)
9. Thou shalt not report back doors in our software or leak NSA tools that take advantage of these (there’s a prison sentence for doing so)
10. Thou shalt not write in mass media things that refute our narrative (proving that we are chronic liars); we would bribe the publication using advertising money and have you sacked
11. Thou shalt not use open formats such as OpenDocument except inside Microsoft Office, which is incompatible with all other software (by design)
12. Thou shalt not distribute Linux without paying Microsoft for patents; we’re still suing companies (in 2019) for having the audacity to do so
13. Thou shalt not host a site or a service outside Azure; we'd sic patent trolls at you
14. Thou shalt not oppose Microsoft’s lock-in and proprietary software shims inside Linux; we’d send our media partners (Condé Nast) to oust you, at least for a month if not permanently
15. Thou shalt not report our crimes to the authorities; doing so would make you a “toxic”, “intolerant” person
16. Thou shalt not use the GPL unless all other options have been exhausted
17. Thou shalt not adopt a Web browser other than MSIE or our rebranded Chrome, also known as Edge; we’d occasionally tinker with your computer’s settings to remind you to quit using other browsers or refuse the download of such “malware”

NOT many Internet enterprises or even protocols outlast the Web. IRC is under attack, E-mail is being hijacked by large corporations (the business model of spying), and copyright monopolies compel ISPs to disconnect from USENET. Even without the Web there's a similar problem; not many sites last a decade; some last a few years until interest is lost or life-changing events cause stagnation and ultimately shutdown (it's not cheap to keep a domain registered and it can be technically difficult to keep a host going). Some sites or blogs remain active only for days, weeks, months. Not many sites have lasted 2 decades. Some become dormant and shelved. Some suffer the "Google Plus effect" (host decides it's not viable to carry on hosting, mostly for selfish "business reasons").

Tux Machines remains very active. Every day, almost every hour. Even when we're on holiday (or abroad) we still log in and post the more crucial news. We never wink or lose a heartbeat. Dedication like this becomes almost addictive.

In less than a couple of months the site will turn 15. We're planning to celebrate locally somehow (a little party), knowing that it's a rare event and seeing how the Web becomes just "apps" and "social media" it's hard to guarantee we'll reach 20 (we sure hope so). Over the years we've considered modernising the site (CMS overhaul), but such novelty may entail bloat, speed losses, 'UX' erosion, and a lack of 'traditional' feel, maybe even issues associated with navigation, user familiarity, backward compatibility of URLs (we still use node numbers!) and so on. █

I like "Freedo" (a symbol for freedom) better

THE meaning of words can change over time, along with connotations that accompany these words. A little cat, for example, we can no longer call "pussy" and the word "gay" rarely means happy (colloquially). What about "Slack"?

Once upon a time I knew Slack as a solid, freedom-respecting distribution (GNU/Linux distro), whereas nowadays it is something to be stubbornly avoided as it threatens my freedom. It's technically spyware. It is a threat to everybody's freedom because of the network effect. When we use it we participate in a viral campaign of unwanted societal dependency. We help it spread exponentially. Like disease amongst anti-vaxxers. Richard Stallman had spoken about it in the context of Skype long before Microsoft entered the fray/picture. That's just common sense. The requirement of opening a Slack account to interact with other people is like the equivalent of an employer demanding the applicant has a Facebook account (despite all that is known about Facebook's incredible abuses). It can harm our neighbours, colleagues, family and friends as much as it harms ourselves.

As a little bit of background/context/polite remarks on this, I had been writing about Slack (the spyware, not the distro) for several years -- years before the prospects of actually using it. I never ever used it, but I know about it technically, from various angles (not just the shallow, user-centric end). Slack is proprietary at the front end and the back end. Only Slack employees know for sure what it does (and may do in the foreseeable future, as per secret roadmaps). They cannot speak out about it, for fear of retribution (so they're inherently gagged by fear over mortgage etc. or self-restraint that defies logic/ethics). Stallman has long warned about the morality of such circumstances and the ideology they breed. It was recently discovered that Facebook had targeted its critics (a huge number of them), subjecting them to Stasi-like treatment not for any government but for a private corporation, namely Facebook. It had been 'hunting' people using dubious and shallow justifications/pretexts. Nobody has yet been held accountable. Negative press has been the only cost/toll, so they got away with it with barely even a slap on the wrist. Others may imitate them, seeing that there are no fines, no arrests, no sanctions.

A colleague told me several months ago that someone at our company wanted to experiment with Slack; there was no final decision about it, so I assumed it was like our RT/OTRS 'dance' (choice of ticketing system half a decade ago). Sometimes we explore FOSS options/alternatives, which is a good thing! He sent me an invite, but he wasn't assertive about me joining as it was still an experimental thing (as I understood it back then, based on what I was told; I'll come to that in a moment). I thought we would, if it got adopted, still have options (duality). One colleague (at least) wasn't even sent an invite, so I took that as a sign of the adoption's semi-hearted nature (at the time). My colleagues never mentioned it since, except one person (who apparently liked Slack). Another colleague wondered why nobody had told her about it; as if she was left out, but she's happily using Kopete on KDE, so on she went with Jabber.

I've long been writing about Slack, maybe about 15 years (even when the name referred to a Live GNU/Linux distro, well before the name got 'hijacked'; it's Debian-based, it still has regular releases a few months apart, not the same as Slackware despite the names' similarity; BoycottNovell made a Slack-based distro called SUEME Linux 12 years ago); Tux Machines publishes announcements of Slack releases several times a year, but it's always about the distro. It's a European distro with pedigree; but I digress..

Nowadays "Slack" means something different; in a technical context, people no longer recognise it as the distro's name; Slack is now the darling of corporate media; myself and others could never quite explain why (we were rather baffled as it did not seem particularly innovative and we thus attributed most/all the press coverage to good marketing/PR); the name collision also raised legal questions because Slack is a well-known distro and the name is strictly used in the domain of software; it has been used for decades. Now the distro's development team needs to explain to people what came first and how this confusion came about.

OK, so now Slack is enjoying a valuation at $billions (as per very recent news headlines), with IPO rumours floated as well (making it easier to buy/subvert). Slack is relatively new a player/contender; it goes about 3-4 years back (in the mainstream), around the time we were in Alton Towers. I still remember that based on other events. Privacy activists had been warning about it and recently I kept seeing (also publicly writing about) more red flags. Slack, the company, is getting more invasive over time. It's like Facebook. Facebook for business. LinkedIn got picked by Microsoft, along with all that data (NSA PRISM comes to mind). Personal messages, passwords, social graphs, employment records and so on. Even location (picked every 60 seconds or so from one's phone through the 'app'). Same for Skype, which Microsoft added to PRISM just months after buying it (Microsoft was first in PRISM, based on Snowden's leaks -- it was one among the first stories to come out/emanate). Far less opinionated people than myself have blasted Slack for a variety of reasons. Some tweets of mine about it go ~3 years back (warning for 'opinionatedness'... I don't mince words much).

I still remember having to install Skype on an old phone for one company meeting. Back then the mere installation (for one hour, then deleted) meant sending Microsoft entire address books, entire call history and more. This phone of my wife is 7+ years old, so that's a lot of data, going a long way back. That's their business model. I'm usually apprehensive because some of my sources, e.g. for exclusive articles in Techrights (I published my 25,000^th article last week in Techrights!), are named in files on my system. I'm no Free software 'purist' per se (I use proprietary drivers sometimes), but "Slack would be the surveillance capitalism competitor to Jabber," to quote something I read yesterday. They digest information, including corporate communications. There's a certain risk associated with this, including competitive risk. As a Free software-based company I think it's important to demonstrate that every piece of proprietary framework can be swapped with FOSS. There are quite a few Slack equivalents that are FOSS; a colleague told me that another colleague had brought some of these up. We might examine these soon, maybe test and adopt these. Time will tell. Maybe I'll write about some of these.

I am also reading about bridges between protocols that enable access to Slack, but yesterday when researching it I found that Slack is gradually burning these bridges/gateways. Not entirely surprising, as once they get to a certain point/market share they up/boost the lockin. Naturally. More so if they have obligations to shareholders. Twitter did this last August, shutting out all third-party apps/APIs for the first time ever (in the company's entire existence). Many of us were devastated because we had built interaction tools, custom-made around these APIs). So, basically, whatever a centralised platform gets adopted, we can always lose control as they can change everything they want at any time. Even, at worst, some company can just buy them for the data; they can start charging a lot, they can shut down, change ToS etc.

The bottom line is, Slack ought to be avoided. It's worse than proprietary because it's all centralised, even the data. There's no concept such as "private" or "privacy". These are only illusions. █

"The first IRC server, tolsun.oulu.fi, a Sun-3 server on display near the University of Oulu computer centre." Credit/licence: CC BY 2.5, Urpo Lankinen

TUX MACHINES reached all-time record traffic in the past couple of weeks. This (raw) traffic now stands at about 4 million hits/week, with 3,970,777 hits in the past 6 days and 4,289,540 hits last week (predating these 6 days). It's just a shame that interaction with readers became hard; the forums had a severe spam issue, as did comments and submissions (by new registrants, always, more so at a later stage) -- to the point where it became impractical to allow any new registrations (except adding people manually upon request). The open/incognito registrants would overrun the site within minutes (we tried several times over the years and saw the effect immediately).

So we've decided to try IRC and have added "IRC" to the menu at the top with an applet (JavaScript) to make life easier for those who aren't familiar with IRC clients.

Here's how to join us. This is still experimental. Real-time updates with posts (as they are posted) will in due course be shown in the channel and we can all casually chat in real-time, too. We are also still working on our Android app these days. █

Tux Machines is turning 15 this summer and as we noted over the weekend, many people now access the site using mobile devices, for which the site provides a subpar experience due to legacy. RSS feeds are therefore recommended. There's our RSS feed for news, RSS feed for Tux Machines Blogs and another for Techrights, where I write my original articles.

Most readers, however, do not use RSS feeds. Consider the 700 followers of our Twitter account, the 2,365 followers of our Diaspora account, 1,080 followers of our Mastodon account, and 63 followers of our Pleroma account (so about 4,000 in total). Those are dependent on third parties (we do not self-host these platforms). Even if "apps" are used for access to these social media platforms/sites, the links would lead to Tux Machines Web pages, which don't render particularly well on small screens (phones). So we've made this simple "app" for the site, but we're still testing it. If anyone out there can try it on an Android device and report back to us, we'll appreciate it greatly and use the feedback to improve it. █

Summary: Visitors who use mobile phones get a subpar experience, but that's an issue that boils down to preservation versus novelty

TUX MACHINES is turning 15 later this year. Longtime readers may very well know that the appearance or the layout of this site barely changed over the years. The key components have been in place since the very start. We still use node IDs as URLs (not ideal, but that works), mobile devices are barely supported (they were barely used on the Net at the time the site started), and due to SPAM we can no longer allow new user registrations (they overwhelm the site with a flood of SPAM submissions, i.e. noise such as pornographic comments, abusive blog posts etc.) within hours. We know because we tried opening up these registrations several times in the past. Any loosening of these restriction means a complete and utter mess.

"Mobile users who struggle with the site contact me routinely and my best suggestion for them is an RSS reader (many exist for mobile devices), which overcomes these issues and bypasses all the 'cruft'."

So-called 'UX' (buzzword for user interfaces/experience) in Tux Machines is far from ideal, especially for those who use a phone. We are aware of it, but the overhaul required to change that would be truly massive because of the number of pages, images, and the underlying framework, which was heavily modified and tailored for the existing user experience. I spent a lot of time making things work as they do. Susan had also invested a great deal of effort.

Mobile users who struggle with the site contact me routinely and my best suggestion for them is an RSS reader (many exist for mobile devices), which overcomes these issues and bypasses all the 'cruft'. Taking all the implications into account (endless work associated with a change), we don't plan a site redesign/overhaul. Maybe in the distant future, but not any time soon. The RSS feed is already used by a lot of people, even desktop/laptop users. We have no ads and no surveillance in this site, so RSS feeds don't impact some "business model" or whatever. In fact, it helps lower the strain on the server. █

Summary: Tux Machines is on Pleroma.site, a lesser-known part of the Fediverse

Tux Machines has been on the Fediverse for quite some time (our Mastodon account), but months ago we also joined Pleroma, which is an exciting new alternative written in Elixir.

Just a few weeks ago somebody published this "Guide for GPlus [Google Plus] refugees to choose a new social network in the Fediverse" because "G+ will close on April 2nd. So to help people that haven’t decided yet where to go in the Fediverse I made some pointers. I divided this guide in a number of sections. Each section describes a certain use of social networks and which networks are most suitable for this specific use. Combine this with your preferred use of a social network and you should be able make a decision."

Pleroma too is part of the Fediverse and Pleroma.site, one large instance of Pleroma, recently completed hardware upgrades. GNU/Linux aficionados can follow us there. █

FORGET bloated Web browsers. Forget so-called 'social' media (I call it social control media). They're not efficient, they eat up a lot of memory and CPU cycles, and the interfaces are not consistent (across sites). They're sufficiently distracting and they have ads. They erode privacy. They don't scale well; neither for an aging system (my laptop turns 10 in a few months) nor for users. GUIs are good in particular scenarios, but when the same things are repeated over and over again one might as well set up scripts, automating things and tailoring one's own interfaces, which is easy to achieve (relatively fast and simple) in the command line. It's also more accessible, e.g. over SSH. The pertinent tools are already out there (available for download/installation from repositories), they just need to be put together and programming skills aren't required, just batching in a bash file.

Some years ago I 'developed' a little script (I've been scripting since I was about 12). I called it getswap-sorted.sh and it just ran another script that helped me see what applications use the swap (and how much of it). For the sake of speed I like to restart applications that heavily use swap (i.e. depend on magnetic disk operations). I don't have much RAM. I never had more than 2 GB. getswap-sorted.sh just called out ./getswap.sh | sort -n -k 5 and getswap.sh comes from Erik Ljungstrom. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash
# Get current swap usage for all running processes
# Erik Ljungstrom 27/05/2011
SUM=0
OVERALL=0
for DIR in `find /proc/ -maxdepth 1 -type d | egrep "^/proc/[0-9]"` ; do
PID=`echo $DIR | cut -d / -f 3`
PROGNAME=`ps -p $PID -o comm --no-headers`
for SWAP in `grep Swap $DIR/smaps 2>/dev/null| awk '{ print $2 }'`
do
let SUM=$SUM+$SWAP
done
echo "PID=$PID - Swap used: $SUM - ($PROGNAME )"
let OVERALL=$OVERALL+$SUM
SUM=0

done

The output of getswap-sorted.sh would be something like this:

PID=1559 - Swap used: 16472 - (x-terminal-emul )
PID=21980 - Swap used: 16648 - (kwalletd5 )
PID=25548 - Swap used: 16704 - (konversation )
PID=631 - Swap used: 19336 - (kded5 )
PID=23817 - Swap used: 50048 - (pidgin )
PID=23923 - Swap used: 180312 - (thunderbird )

This helps me see which application/process number uses swap and to what degree. It's sorted by the amount of swap taken and the PID helps when I just want to kill a process from the command line (some are small and obsolete anyway).

My script, however, grew bigger over time. I added more things to it, eventually binding it to a special (fifth) mouse key, using xbindkeys -- an immensely valuable and powerful program I've used since around 2004. Extra mouse buttons always seemed worthless (anything more than three), but that's just because there was no program I needed to open or action I needed to invoke often enough. Over time I found that keeping a new terminal one click away (fourth button) and another special terminal also a click away improved my workflow/productivity. I just needed to invest some time in tailoring it. I ended up opening, temporarily, a terminal window with important information displayed, such as weather, disk space (I'm always near the limits), swap usage (I have only 2GB of RAM), uptime, real-time football scores etc. Change of wallpapers was lumped in too, for good measure...

For football tables/scores use one of the following 1) livescore-cli 2) soccer-cli and 3) football-cli.

Sadly, the above CLI football scores' tools got 'stolen' by Microsoft and need to isolate themselves GitHub, in due cource/time. I use the first of the three as it suits my needs best and does not require an API key.

The output looks like this:

 ... Fetching information from www.livescore.com ... 
Displaying Table for Barclay's Premier League
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
                                Barclay's Premier League TABLE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 LP     Team Name               GP      W       D       L       GF      GA      GD      Pts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1      Liverpool               24      19      4       1       55      14      41      61
 2      Tottenham Hotspur       25      19      0       6       51      24      27      57
 3      Manchester City         24      18      2       4       63      19      44      56
 4      Chelsea                 25      15      5       5       45      23      22      50
 5      Arsenal                 24      14      5       5       50      33      17      47
 6      Manchester United       24      13      6       5       48      35      13      45
 7      Wolverhampton Wanderers 25      11      5       9       33      32      1       38
 8      Watford                 25      9       7       9       33      34      -1      34
 9      Everton                 25      9       6       10      36      36      0       33
 10     AFC Bournemouth         25      10      3       12      37      44      -7      33
 11     Leicester City          24      9       5       10      30      30      0       32
 12     West Ham United         24      9       4       11      30      37      -7      31
 13     Brighton & Hove Albion  25      7       6       12      27      36      -9      27
 14     Crystal Palace          25      7       5       13      26      33      -7      26
 15     Newcastle United        25      6       6       13      21      33      -12     24
 16     Southampton             25      5       9       11      27      42      -15     24
 17     Burnley                 25      6       6       13      26      46      -20     24
 18     Cardiff City            25      6       4       15      22      46      -24     22
 19     Fulham                  25      4       5       16      25      55      -30     17
 20     Huddersfield Town       25      2       5       18      13      46      -33     11
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 LP = League Position   GP = Games Played       W = Wins        D = Draws       L = Lose 
 GF = Goals For         GA = Goal Against       GD = Goal Differences
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Champions League       Champions League qualification  Europa League
 Europa League qualification    Relegation
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Real-time scores (when matches are on):

 ... Fetching information from www.livescore.com ... 
Displaying Scores for Barclay's Premier League
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 Barclay's Premier League SCORES 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 January 29  FT     Arsenal                  2 - 1  Cardiff City           
 January 29  FT     Fulham                   4 - 2  Brighton & Hove Albion 
 January 29  FT     Huddersfield Town        0 - 1  Everton                
 January 29  FT     Wolverhampton Wanderers  3 - 0  West Ham United        
 January 29  FT     Manchester United        2 - 2  Burnley                
 January 29  FT     Newcastle United         2 - 1  Manchester City        
 January 30  FT     AFC Bournemouth          4 - 0  Chelsea                
 January 30  FT     Southampton              1 - 1  Crystal Palace         
 January 30  FT     Liverpool                1 - 1  Leicester City         
 January 30  FT     Tottenham Hotspur        2 - 1  Watford                
 February 2  FT     Tottenham Hotspur        1 - 0  Newcastle United       
 February 2  FT     Brighton & Hove Albion   0 - 0  Watford                
 February 2  FT     Burnley                  1 - 1  Southampton            
 February 2  FT     Chelsea                  5 - 0  Huddersfield Town      
 February 2  FT     Crystal Palace           2 - 0  Fulham                 
 February 2  FT     Everton                  1 - 3  Wolverhampton Wanderers
 February 2  FT     Cardiff City             2 - 0  AFC Bournemouth        
 February 3  15:05  Leicester City           ? - ?  Manchester United      
 February 3  17:30  Manchester City          ? - ?  Arsenal                
 February 4  21:00  West Ham United          ? - ?  Liverpool              
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------

Now putting it all together:

feh --bg-fill --randomize /media/roy/c3fd5b6e-794f-4f24-b3e7-b4ead3722f11/home/roy/Main/Graphics/Wallpapers/Single\ Head/natgeo/* &

livescore -t bpl 

./getswap.sh | sort -n -k 5
 curl -4 http://wttr.in/Manchester
 swapon --summary | grep sda2
 df | grep sda1
uptime

sleep 10

livescore -s bpl 

sleep 40

The first line is feh choosing a wallpaper at random from a collection of award-winning National Geographic photographs. The options and the underlying parameters are self-explanatory.

The football league's table is then shown.

Next, after about 10 seconds of processing, a list of processes will show up based on swap usage (as described above)

The weather at home (Manchester) will then be shown, with colour. Right now I get:

Weather report: Manchester

     \   /     Sunny
      .-.      -5--2 °C       
   ― (   ) ―   ↑ 9 km/h       
      `-’      10 km          
     /   \     0.0 mm         
                                                       ┌─────────────┐                                                       
┌──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤  Sun 03 Feb ├───────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│            Morning           │             Noon      └──────┬──────┘     Evening           │             Night            │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│    \  /       Partly cloudy  │      .-.      Light drizzle  │  _`/"".-.     Light rain sho…│               Mist           │
│  _ /"".-.     -4-0 °C        │     (   ).    -2-3 °C        │   ,\_(   ).   1-3 °C         │  _ - _ - _ -  0-3 °C         │
│    \_(   ).   ↑ 12-20 km/h   │    (___(__)   ↑ 17-26 km/h   │    /(___(__)  ↗ 7-14 km/h    │   _ - _ - _   ↑ 9-17 km/h    │
│    /(___(__)  20 km          │     ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘   20 km          │      ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘  16 km          │  _ - _ - _ -  13 km          │
│               0.0 mm | 0%    │    ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘    0.4 mm | 83%   │     ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘   0.4 mm | 65%   │               0.0 mm | 0%    │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘
                                                       ┌─────────────┐                                                       
┌──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤  Mon 04 Feb ├───────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│            Morning           │             Noon      └──────┬──────┘     Evening           │             Night            │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│      .-.      Light drizzle  │  _`/"".-.     Patchy rain po…│               Cloudy         │               Cloudy         │
│     (   ).    2-6 °C         │   ,\_(   ).   3-7 °C         │      .--.     1-4 °C         │      .--.     -2 °C          │
│    (___(__)   → 16-26 km/h   │    /(___(__)  → 20-27 km/h   │   .-(    ).   → 13-23 km/h   │   .-(    ).   ↗ 9-16 km/h    │
│     ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘   14 km          │      ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘  18 km          │  (___.__)__)  20 km          │  (___.__)__)  20 km          │
│    ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘    0.3 mm | 88%   │     ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘   0.3 mm | 88%   │               0.0 mm | 0%    │               0.0 mm | 0%    │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘
                                                       ┌─────────────┐                                                       
┌──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤  Tue 05 Feb ├───────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│            Morning           │             Noon      └──────┬──────┘     Evening           │             Night            │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│    \  /       Partly cloudy  │               Overcast       │               Overcast       │      .-.      Light drizzle  │
│  _ /"".-.     -1-3 °C        │      .--.     2-6 °C         │      .--.     6 °C           │     (   ).    1 °C           │
│    \_(   ).   ↖ 19-31 km/h   │   .-(    ).   ↑ 23-33 km/h   │   .-(    ).   ↑ 24-40 km/h   │    (___(__)   ↑ 24-40 km/h   │
│    /(___(__)  20 km          │  (___.__)__)  19 km          │  (___.__)__)  8 km           │     ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘   9 km           │
│               0.0 mm | 0%    │               0.0 mm | 0%    │               0.0 mm | 0%    │    ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘    0.3 mm | 0%    │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

After this I am shown general memory usage and disk usage (for a particular partition) along with uptime thusly:

/dev/sda2                               partition       2097148 381128  -1
/dev/sda1        84035088   77299588   2443660  97% /
 08:03:28 up 116 days, 12:36,  7 users,  load average: 1.70, 1.40, 1.26

It will close on its own after I see what needs seeing, owing to the sleep command. It saves me the clicking (required to then close the window); it just fades away or 'expires', so to speak (until the next time the mouse button gets pressed). █

This Linux testmight help to check your personal knowledge of the various topics discussed in the Linux/UNIX fundamentals courses, in order to find out assess your Linux skills.

For those who do not favour RSS feeds and are not using Twitter, the Free/Open Source federated social network services are also an option (and have been for quite some time). We're adding to buttons to the site now (they are also clickable above) █

Awesome products, will definitely get another bunch of some more stickers soon █

IN JUNE 2004 Tux Machines was registered, which makes this site nearly a decade and a half old. Running this site is more than a full-time job; it's not just a hobby but more like a 24/7 duty, not even with holidays or weekends off. But as long as people find the site useful, it makes all the work worthwhile. RIanne and I will keep refreshing our RSS feeds and keep this site abreast of the news. █

"This is in effect the very same trick they did/pulled with Novell and SUSE (where Nat Friedman came from after his Microsoft internship) about a decade ago."

THE recent GitHub takeover, which has not formally been approved just yet (although there are no foreseen barriers to it), is definitely bad news; it is a lot of things to Microsoft however. It is good news only to Microsoft and GitHub shareholders, who basically sold out many developers without rewarding/compensating them for this unwanted (to them) takeover.

There are many aspects to it: First of all, it helps paint Microsoft as "open source" and it helps Microsoft gain leverage over developers, e.g. their choice process of framework/s and licence/s (Microsoft still dislikes copyleft); by leverage over platform they can suggest Azure, for example, or create bindings to it; they gain leverage over projects tied to governments, including some of our clients at work; Microsoft can vainly tell them, i.e. the governments and their developers: "look, you want FOSS? We're FOSS" (so they effectively become their own competitor!). In fact, there's so much more and I could easily name a couple dozen examples, but I know people pursue/need concision here. For an analogy, in politics this concept or strategy is known as "entrism" or "entryism".

Microsoft also uses patents to blackmail FOSS; there's that element too, albeit many people conveniently choose to forget it. Microsoft is sending patents to patent trolls, then offers "Azure IP Advantage". This is in effect the very same trick they did/pulled with Novell and SUSE (where Nat Friedman came from after his Microsoft internship) about a decade ago.

There are many other angles to it, including programming languages, frameworks (e.g. proprietary IDEs like MSVS), code editors and not just bindings to Microsoft as a host and API provider. People, especially developers of software, generally know how E.E.E. works; the basic precondition/premise is that you gain controls/leverage over that which threatens you (Nokia: Elop, Novell: Mono and lots more examples). So that's kind of a way of getting inside, gradually forming a partnership and then shutting down or sidelining whatever threatens you. Like Xamarin did to RoboVM, in effect killing it under Friedman's leadership. Friedman is going to be the chief of GitHub.

Microsoft can direct the opposition's decisions and its fate. Sadly, they already do this inside the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft staff already has chairs in the Board.

From what I can gather, developers ditching GitHub is becoming a fairy common thing this month. I already see the 1) active 2) large 3) non-Windows ones leaving, but it can take time; some told me they still rely on open bug reports and other 'vendor lockin'; that needs some work before they can migrate; the real alternative is self-hosted git. █

"Sadly, they already do this inside the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft staff already has chairs in the Board."