Linux Format

who we are

Mayank Sharma My fondest dates back to 2001, though it wasn’t a birthday party, just a regular do. After almost a week of messing with the XFree86 configuration files, I managed to get to the Gnome desktop on Slackware 8.0 while killing time waiting for my mates to show up. John Knight I don’t do birthdays, but my favourite computer memories are probably getting in a round of International Soccer on the C64 before catching the school bus. That, and trying to get The Muncher to load from the Commodore Format cover tape! Nick Peers My 13th birthday was unforgettable. My parents splashed out on a ZX Spectrum+ starter pack – the first ‘big’ present I ever received. Unfortunately they bought it six weeks early, stashed it under my grandparents’ bed – and I found…

richard stallman steps down as fsf president

Richard Stallman has resigned from both his position at MIT and as president of the Free Software Foundation, the organisation he founded in 1985. It follows controversy surrounding comments Stallman made about Virginia Giuffre – a victim of Jeffery Epstein – in an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list. These comments were shared on Medium (http://bit.ly/LXF256StallmanCommentsand appear to show him downplaying the severity of Giuffre’s abuse and arguing if it should be considered sexual assault at all. Many people were understandably upset, and the Free Software Foundation announced that “On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors,” and that “The board will be conducting a search…

librem 5 smartphones released

After years of hard work, the Librem 5 smartphone is finally being sent to customers. It’s a smartphone built by Purism (https://puri.sm) from the ground up to support and run open-source software and with a focus on privacy and security. Running the completely open-source PureOS (https://pureos.net), Librem 5 packs in some decent specs for $699 – see the full list at: https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/. Anyone who has pre-ordered the Librem 5 should receive an email about what shipping batch their order will be included in, along with a shipping date window. The team behind Librem 5 is rightly proud of reaching this important milestone, and anyone who has been patiently waiting for their order will hopefully soon have the smartphone in their hands. “This is a big moment… Not just for us as a…

german government fancies foss

Could the German government be thinking of moving to open-source software? It appears so, with the Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, releasing an official statement (in German at http://bit.ly/LXF256GermanyIt suggests that the Federal Ministry of the Interior – Bundesministerium des Innern or BMI – is looking at some of the commercial software the government relies on – products from Microsoft, but also Oracle and SAP. The BMI has commissioned a strategic market analysis from PwC that recently published its findings (http://bit.ly/ LXF256PwC, again in German), with one of the key areas of concern being data security. With services such as Windows Server and Office 365, Microsoft is collecting telemetry data which its users have little knowledge and control over. Some of this data could include personal information, and might…

ode to walden

“Oh my, this is odd. It seems that the great Future Towers database only allocated eight bits to store issue numbers. So this, my first (and not to sound too pessimistic, but very likely all of our last) power-of-two issue is now issue zero. Which is not a power of two in any sane magazine-indexing number system. All that uptime obliterated by the simple act of incrementing an integer. So I’ve been enjoying a nice break, swapping the vicissitudes of magazine life for the simple pleasure of just being. Just skipping along the precipice of bankruptcy, surviving largely on foraged acorns and mushrooms, plus the proceeds of making a LXFDVD around the time of the full moon.I recall a passage from my lost tome Zen and the Art of Linux System…

being nice

“Not everyone is fascinated by technology – odd, isn’t it? Those of us who are can have conversations with the others in two ways. We can show off, name-drop, try to impress: “We’ll build you a three node Pacemaker cluster and we’ll run all your apps in containers. You can move to Kubernetes next year if the app takes off”. Or we can talk their language: “We’ll build you a system that is reliable, fault-tolerant and secure. If it needs to grow to deal with more users next year, that’ll be straightforward.” Our job, as technically competent people, is to help other people use the technology in a meaningful way. Talking to them about things they probably don’t understand (IPv6, Kubernetes, attack surfaces, idempotency) is just showing off. Instead, we should be…