Friday, 16 August 2013

Debian - 20th birthday

Happy Birthday! Second oldest Linux distribution still going - Slackware is a little older. It's also been the bane of my life / my obsession / fixation and joy for about 15 of those years. I'm pleased and proud to be associated with the Debian Project as a Debian developer: many of my colleagues are at Debconf 13 in Vaumarcus in Switzerland right now but there will be celebrations around the world.

Great distribution: great hardware support on lots of architectures: huge numbers of derivatives - but what makes it is the people, including some of those who have contributed hugely but are sadly no longer with us. Debian is a phenomenal, supportive, family but, as ever, sometimes dysfunctional

Joel Klecker, Chris Rutter, Frans Pop, Adrian von Bidder and all the others - I so wish you'd all been here to see this.

Saturday, 15 June 2013

Computers and stuff going to Africa

2 x laptops, 1 x HP microserver, 3 x routers, 1 x Raspberry Pi given to a charity to go to Kenya to help provide Internet and other services for an NGO. The house has the fewest working desktop computers it's ever had - but it is for a good cause.

Somehow, I suspect that £50 / $100 Android tablets that are starting to be common won't be quite as useful in a couple of years as this lot may be today. For those of us that have good access to technology, fast connectivity as a given and computers to give away - maybe it's time to share the benefits of prosperity with others. If nothing else, it is sharing Debian and Raspbian since I made sure that they were all working well with Debian 7 and Raspbian operating systems respectively before they went. The routers were also running OpenWRT - so it's all FLOSS :)

Saturday, 16 March 2013

UK Government suggesting the use of FLOSS for some projects.

Seen on Slashdot

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/open-source.html

UK Government appearing to suggest a preference for developers that they should use open source where feasible for future UK Government projects for "Digital by Default" deliveries to UK Government and citizens.

This _is_ a beta version, but it is interesting to see this.

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

Kali Linux - Debian derivative for penetration testing/security

New Debian-based security distribution.  The company behind BackTrack (Offensive Security) have just launched Kali Linux which will be tightly coupled to Debian and use Debian security updates, for example.

See also: http://www.kali.org/ and Raphael Hertzog's more informative post on Planet Debian.

Friday, 22 February 2013

Wheezy RC1 installer

Just installed using Wheezy installer on an older IBM Thinkpad Z61and a newer Lenovo Thinkpad X121 The Z61 needs no firmware to work out of the box.

The X121 was installed using UEFI (over a previous UEFI install) so not partitioning the disk ab initio.

The X121 needs libdrm1-radeon and nonfree firmware (brcm80211 to cope with the Broadcom wireless chipset).

The new UEFI installer splash screens worked very well indeed and I'm very impressed. An expert install extended to also install a KDE desktop worked like a charm. Many thanks indeed to all who've been so hard working on this especially Steve for the initial UEFI work.