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The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of the LibreOffice 6.4 open-source and cross-platform office suite for all supported platforms.LibreOffice 6.4 has been development during the past five months, but the final release is now available to download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems. This is a major release that introduces several new features, multiple performance improvements, especially when working with presentations and spreadsheets, as well as better compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. “LibreOffice 6.4 is the first new release available in 2020. During the year, the community will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the best free office suite...

Dayglored Note: This is a real article from 2001. Ballmer really did say this, and believe it... Contaminates all other software with Hippie GPL rubbish Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, 2001.Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source."The way the license is written, if you...

I am familiar with Windows 7 and do not like Windows 10 shell, but I just switched to 10, and made it look just like 7. So now I can get Microsoft update support for many years, while the support for Windows 7 stops on January 14, 2020 making it more vulnerable to hacking after that date. The process was smooth and I like the results so far.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol used for an encrypted connection between a client and a server. The ssh client creates a secure connection to the SSH server on a remote machine. The encrypted connection can be used to execute commands on the server, X11 tunneling, port forwarding, and more.There are a number of SSH clients available both free and commercial, with OpenSSH being the most widely used client. It is available on all major platforms, including Linux, OpenBSD, Windows, macOS and others.In this article, we will explain how to use the OpenSSH command-line client (ssh) to login...

Requesting feedback for a distribution of Linux to install on a spare PC. The PC has a 4th Gen Intel i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and a 1 TB hard drive, so I should be good to go. While I used UNIX a lot during my 30+ year career, I have minimal Linux experience.

Linux system administration is a job. It can be fun, frustrating, mentally challenging, tedious, and often a great source of accomplishment and an equally great source of burnout. That is to say, it's a job like any other with good days and with bad. Like most system administrators, I have found a balance that works for me. I perform my regular duties with varying levels of automation and manual manipulation and I also do a fair amount of research, which usually ends up as articles. There are two questions I'm going to answer for you in this article. The first is,...

Linux was a 'cancer' but Microsoft is now defending it IBM, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have partnered with the Open Invention Network (OIN), a company formed to protect Linux from patent threats, to take on "Patent Assertion Entities", also known as patent trolls.Specifically, the group will help fund the Open Source Zone of Unified Patents, an organisation which provides legal services to deter "unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions".The move had already been flagged at the Open Source Summit in Lyon last month, but the identity of the participating companies was not then known. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt spoke to...

To: The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin: Executive Director Angela Brown: VP of Events Andy Updegrove: Legal Council From: Robert Martin (@unclebobmartin) (unclebob@cleancoder.com) Re: Code of Conduct case of Charles Max Wood. Dear Linux Foundation: I am writing to you as a concerned member of the software development community which I have enjoyed serving for the last 50 years. I am writing in public because the events I wish to describe took place in public. I fear that something has gone terribly wrong within your organization; and that it will have deep repercussions within this industry that I cherish. The timeline...

After a brief delay, while last-minute bugs were fixed, Fedora 31 has just rolled out the door, and besides being a worthy Linux distribution in its own right, it's even more interesting for what it tells us about parent company Red Hat's future plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).We tend to think of Fedora as a desktop operating system, but while it's great at that role, it's far more than that. Besides golden oldies such as the self-explanatory Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server, we also now have Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT, and Fedora Silverblue.CoreOS, like the name indicates for those...

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Home directories have been a fundamental part on any Unixy system since day one. They’re such a basic element, we usually don’t give them much thought. And why would we? From a low level point of view, whatever location $HOME is pointing to, is a directory just like any other of the countless ones you will find on the system — apart from maybe being located on its own disk partition. Home directories are so unspectacular in their nature, it wouldn’t usually cross anyone’s mind to even consider to change anything about them. And then there’s Lennart Poettering.In case you’re...

With Microsoft embracing Linux ever more tightly, might it do the heretofore unthinkable and dump the NT kernel in favor of the Linux kernel? No, I’m not ready for the funny farm. As it prepares Windows 11, Microsoft has been laying the groundwork for such a radical release.I’ve long toyed with the idea that Microsoft could release a desktop Linux. Now I’ve started taking that idea more seriously — with a twist. Microsoft could replace Windows’ innards, the NT kernel, with a Linux kernel.It would still look like Windows. For most users, it would still work like Windows. But the...

Summary: Microsoft and its boosters (media insiders) spread the illusion that Microsoft is “opening up”; the reality, however, is that it’s looking to tighten control over Linux while at the same time profiting from exFAT patents owing to back room deals TECHRIGHTS has come to the saddening realisation that entryism inside Linux is in an advanced phase if not a “terminal” stage.The “4 Freedoms” of Richard Stallman (RMS) are probably not enough for Software Freedom. There are glaring loopholes or workarounds. We’re not talking about stuff like systemd here. We talk about changes/passage of ownership/control. If you allow moles, entryism...

exFAT heading towards Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition Microsoft has published the technical specification for exFAT, a file system widely used for removable storage devices.exFAT is widely used for high capacity SD cards in cameras exFAT stands for Extended File Allocation Table and is widely used for things like memory cards. It is the most recent iteration of Microsoft's FAT series, a simple file system that is lightweight but lacks the resiliency and security of file systems like NTFS.The original FAT was used by DOS in the late 1970s. It was expanded to 8-bit, 16-bit, and then to FAT32,...

EU's upload filters are coming. Why and how the Open Source world must fight them. A year ago, I warned about some terrible copyright legislation being drawn up in the EU that would have major adverse effects on the Open Source world. Its most problematic provision would force many for-profit sites operating in the EU to use algorithmic filters to block the upload of unauthorized material by users. As a result of an unprecedented campaign of misinformation, smears and outright lies, supporters managed to convince/trick enough Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to vote in favour of the the new...

BERKELEY, Calif.; FRANKFURT, Germany; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The 53rd edition of the TOP500 marks a milestone in the 26-year history of the list. For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops. Top 10 rundownThe top of the list remains largely unchanged, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which was an existing system that was upgraded with additional capacity.Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)...

What are these weird directories, and why are they there? If you are new to the Linux command line, you may find yourself wondering why there are so many unusual directories, what they are there for, and why things are organized the way they are. In fact, if you aren't accustomed to how Linux organizes files, the directories can seem downright arbitrary with odd truncated names and, in many cases, redundant names. It turns out there's a method to this madness based on decades of UNIX convention, and in this article, I provide an introduction to the Linux directory structure....

Popular admin tool shifts to .Net Core 3.0 amid talk of future features Microsoft on Thursday released a preview version of PowerShell 7, its command-line shell and scripting language for administrators. The software was once was limited to Windows but opened up to Linux (including arm64) and macOS three years ago.Steve Lee, principal software engineering manager, announced the software's availability in conjunction with a roadmap of future features. He said the next preview release will follow in accordance with the established monthly release cadence; preview 2 is expected mid-July.The full list of changes has been posted on GitHub, a recently...

The debate over whether KDE or GNOME is the better Linux desktop has been going on since before the turn of the century. Actually, it boils down to choice and what works best for you. SOURCE: Pixabay Novelist Hugh MacLennan once described Canada as “two solitudes” — an English-speaking one and a French-speaking one, neither of which had much to do with the other. The description is decades out-dated, and today a dozen solitudes might be more accurate. However, the phrase echoes in my mind whenever I think of the gulf today between GNOME technologies and KDE software compilations. Although...

A couple of disclaimer/information before you see the list of shops offering computers with Linux preloaded. Please make a purchase on your own decision. I am simply listing the Linux computer sellers here, I cannot vouch for their product quality, after sale service or other such things. This is not a ranking list. The items listed here are in no particular order. The numbers are used for the purpose of counting the items, not ranking them. LetÂ’s see from where you can get desktops and laptops with Linux preinstalled. 1. Dell Dell XPS Ubuntu | Image Credit: Lifehacker Dell has...