• Debian Celebrates Its 24th Birthday

  Yesterday marked GNOME turning 20 while today Debian developers and users have its 24th birthday of the project to celebrate.

• GNOME desktop environment for Linux and BSD is 20 years old today

  When many people think of Linux, they incorrectly assume it is an operating system. Actually, Linux is merely the kernel which many operating systems leverage. An actual operating system is compromised of many things, including a user interface -- after all, users need to interface with their computer!

  Most computer users will obviously want a graphical UI nowadays, and for BSD and Linux-based operating systems there are many such desktop environments from which to choose. One of the most popular environments is GNOME. Not only is GNOME a DE, but it has evolved into much more, such as a collection of apps and design rules (Human Interface Guidelines). Today, GNOME is celebrating a very important milestone -- it is an impressive 20 years old!

• Happy birthday, GNOME!

  The GNOME desktop turns 20 today, and I'm so excited! Twenty years is a major milestone for any open source software project, especially a graphical desktop environment like GNOME that has to appeal to many different users. The 20th anniversary is definitely something to celebrate!

• Linux desktop GUI GNOME celebrates its 20th birthday

  By 1997, there had long been graphical Unix and Linux graphical user interface (GUI) desktops, but none of them had gathered much support. KDE, which was destined to become a major desktop, had started in 1996, but it was still facing opposition for its use of the Qt license. The GNOME Project, founded by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero on August 15, 1997, was created to build a GUI without the use of any non-General Public License (GPL) software. Thus, a struggle began between the two Linux desktops, which continues to this day.

• DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced

  Next year, DebConf18 will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from 29 July 2018 until 5 August 2018. It will be the first DebConf held in Asia. For the days before DebConf the local organisers will again set up DebCamp (21 July - 27 July), a session for some intense work on improving the distribution, and organise the Open Day on 28 July 2018, aimed at the general public.

  [...]

  Next year, DebConf18 will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from 29 July 2018 until 5 August 2018. It will be the first DebConf held in Asia. For the days before DebConf the local organisers will again set up DebCamp (21 July - 27 July), a session for some intense work on improving the distribution, and organise the Open Day on 28 July 2018, aimed at the general public.

• Debian: a Commons of Innovation

  I recently returned from Debconf. This year at Debconf, Matthew Garrett gave a talk about the next twenty years in free software. In his talk he raised concerns that Debian might not be relevant in that ecosystem and talked about some of the trends that contribute to his concerns.
  I was talking to Marga after the talk and she said that Debian used to be a lot more innovative than it is today.
  My initial reaction was doubt; what she said didn't feel right to me. At the time I didn't have a good answer. Since then I've been pondering the issue, and I think I have a partial answer to both Marga and Matthew and so I'll share it here.

• Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

PolyVection’s “VoltaStream Zero” is an audio streaming SBC that runs Linux on a 996MHz i.MX6 ULL, and offers a TI PCM5121 DAC, TOSLINK, USB, and WiFi.

In 2013, Berlin based software developer Philip Voigt decided to build his own music streaming system. As detailed in this blog entry, Voight started with a Raspberry Pi, but decided it lacked the features he needed. He then tried working with a BeagleBone design, but found the board too complex and expensive — especially the prospect of duplicating the 6-layer PCB. Voight also evaluated several computer-on-module based designs, but after playing around with a vastly improved KiCAD PCB design and layout package, he decided to build an SBC from scratch.

• unifying OS installation and configuration management

  Three years ago, I realized that propellor (my configuration management system that is configured using haskell) could be used as an installer for Debian (or other versions of Linux). In propellor is d-i 2.0, I guessed it would take "a month and adding a few thousand lines of code".

  I've now taken that month, and written that code, and I presented the result at DebConf yesterday. I demoed propellor building a live Debian installation image, and then handed it off to a volenteer from the audience to play with its visual user interface and perform the installation. The whole demo took around 20 minutes, and ended with a standard Debian desktop installation.

• DebConf 17: Flatpak and Debian

  On Monday I gave a talk entitled “A Debian maintainer's guide to Flatpak”, aiming to introduce Debian developers to Flatpak, and show how Flatpak and Debian (and Debian derivatives like SteamOS) can help each other. It seems to have been quite well received, with people generally positive about the idea of using Flatpak to deliver backports and faster-moving leaf packages (games!) onto the stable base platform that Debian is so good at providing.

• Urgent: Upgrade to Tails 3.1 ASAP! Serious security holes found in the Linux distro

  Apple recently removed some VPN clients from the App Store in China at the request of the Chinese Government. Why? That country is largely anti-privacy, and it does not want its citizens bypassing its censorship of the web. If you live in China, the government can decide what you can and can't view online. If you get caught circumventing these controls, the government can harshly punish you. Sad, right? This is why it is imperative that Linux-based privacy-centric open source operating systems such as Tails continue their development -- you never know when it might be needed (including in the USA).