Category Archives: Linux

Can You Please Help The Ottawa Linux Symposium?

Ols logoIf you have ever used the Linux operating system, could you please help out the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS)? For many years OLS has been one of the key events that has helped bring together people from all across the Linux community, and the connections made at OLS have helped to make the Linux operating system that much more powerful and useful. But… as organizer Andrew Hutton recounts on the OLS Indiegogo page, the event has fallen in a bit of a financial crunch and it is now not clear if there will be an OLS in 2015… or ever again.

Could you spare $10? $25? or even $50 or $100? (Or more?)

If so, please help fund OLS on the IndieGogo page!

I first attended OLS back in the early 2000s when I was living right there in Ottawa and working for first a startup called e-smith and then subsequently Mitel Networks. In looking at my list of presentations I can see that I spoke there several times… and the topics I covered take me back to a much different time:

  • 2004 OLS – Tutorial: Introduction to OpenPGP, GnuPG and the Web of Trust
  • 2002 OLS – Tutorial – Single Source Publishing Using DocBook XML
  • 2001 OLS – Maximizing Your Use of CVS

I still remember OLS as the incredibly passionate place where people connected…. and where I made so many connections and learned an amazing amount about Linux.

If OLS was ever important to you… or if Linux has been important to you… please consider donating to help the OLS organization get out of its financial hole and get moving ahead in future years. Organizer Andrew Hutton has poured his heart and soul – and personal money – into making OLS the incredible event it has been… now it would be great if we all can help him! Please consider donating!

Here are a few other viewpoints on the importance of OLS:

Please do donate if you can! THANK YOU!

Hell Hath Truly Frozen Over: Microsoft WindowsAzure Supports Linux

In the category of “Things I Never Thought I’d See In My Lifetime“, given all of Microsoft’s intense animosity toward anything related to Linux (ex. Steve Ballmer’s infamous “Linux is a cancer” quote), I was shocked – but pleased – to see that Microsoft’s WindowsAzure cloud platform is now supporting Linux virtual machines:

Linux virtual machines in Windows Azure

Now, it’s no surprise, on the one hand. If Microsoft wants to see WindowsAzure remain competitive as a cloud platform with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace Cloud and a hundred other vendors they need to support both Windows and Linux.

Still, given all the anti-Linux venom coming from Microsoft in those early years of Linux, I never thought I’d see this kind of change!

Unix Turns 40 – And IEEE Provides a Historical Look Back

Ieee spectrum

As the Unix operating system turns 40 this year, writer Warren Toomey published an excellent historical piece in this month’s IEEE spectrum:

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix: The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound

I’ve been using Unix myself in various forms since the mid-1980’s. Much of my time was, of course, spent in the land of Linux… but even now I’m writing this post on an operating system that evolved out of that early Unix work (Mac OS X).

It is very hard to understate the role that Unix has played in our technology history… and this post provides some nice stories from those early days.

Well worth a read… (I say while stroking my beard that is now definitely grey… 🙂

Fun Tool to Run a Linux Computer IN Your Browser Using JavaScript

Here’s a fun little JavaScript experiment… go to:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Watch the boot sequence… and… ta da… you’ve got a Linux root prompt! Use basic Linux commands, edit files with vi, compile apps in C using “tcc”.

Javascriptlinux

Fabrice Bellard explains why he wrote this JavaScript PC emulator.

My immediate thought was how this could be used for teaching people Linux. Regardless of what it is used for or whether it’s just a fun experiment, it’s very cool to see that JavaScript engines in the latest browsers can support this type of more complex activity. Kudos to Fabrice Bellard for writing this!


Also check out:


And So The Groklaw Era Draws To A Close May 16, 2011…

GroklawAnd so must all good things come to an end… Pamela Jones announced over the weekend that she would be ending new posts to Groklaw on May 16, 2011, the eighth anniversary of the site.

For those of us who spent a good bit of time in the Linux world, Groklaw became a critical resource to stay up on the latest follies in the ongoing SCO lawsuit. “PJ”, as Pamela Jones preferred to be called, and the community of passionate helpers she soon attracted were there to rapidly research and debunk any claims that SCO put forward.

SCO has faded to pretty much irrelevance in 2011… but 8 years ago their lawsuit was extremely serious and a cause for great concern for anyone working with Linux. At the time of the initial lawsuit, I was a product manager at Mitel for a Linux-based product, so the whole issue was very definitely something I paid attention to… and Groklaw was definitely on my frequent reading list.

[NOTE: If you have never heard of Groklaw, I would start with the mission statement and the various links off that page.]

And now PJ writes:

In a simple sentence, the reason is this: the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won. SCO as we knew it is no more.

There will be other battles, and there already are, because the same people that propped SCO up are still going to try to destroy Linux, but the battlefield has shifted, and I don’t feel Groklaw is needed in the new battlefield the way it was in the SCO v. Linux wars.

Remember that when I started Groklaw, I had no intention to create something as huge as Groklaw became. I really was just trying to learn how to blog. When all of you showed up, I saw what we could accomplish together, and we did. But to do it, I had to set aside a lot of things that are important to me too. I’d like to go back to being nobody, just living a normal life again.

I kept going all these years because when SCO attacked in the media and in the courtrooms, there was nobody to do what we did. Only the community could have answered SCO, technically, because you guys lived the history of UNIX and Linux and you knew what they were saying was not true. So we spoke up and explained over and over until everyone understood.

And she ends with:

I always told you that I didn’t do Groklaw for money or for fame or as a career move. I did it to be effective. That’s all I wanted. And I told you that when it was over, I’d go back to my normal pre-Groklaw life. And now you know by this decision that I told you the truth.

No matter what happens next, I know that we changed the course of history. How many people get to say that? I never expected it, frankly, and I am grinning just thinking about how much fun we’ve had doing it. Our work will be available for historians permanently, so the impact we had isn’t over today, and someday we’ll tell our grandkids that we were part of this, part of Groklaw. We are in the history books. Our work will continue as long as anyone cares about this unique time period in the history of computer software, a history that we are a part of forever. And that is a long, long time.

Thanks to you, PJ, for all the insane amount of work that you and your community did and continued to do. We all out in the larger community owe you all an incredible amount of gratitude and thanks… you helped shine the light into dark corners and helped provide a means to focus the energy and passion of the greater community. Without all that Groklaw did, the SCO follies might have gone much differently.

And kudos to you, PJ, for what I’m sure is an incredibly hard decision to put a period at the end of the sentence and end the era of Groklaw. It’s super easy to simply let a project continue… there is a certain inertia that is hard to fight… and so projects and organizations continue to go on and on, even when their reason for being is no longer there.

Thank you for all you and your community did – and best wishes for whatever comes next!

P.S. Her full blog post is very much worth a read… as well as the many comments.