Mint! Almost.

So I’ve decided, after about three years to turn my nice little Win 8 laptop into a dual boot device. Deleted a bunch of stuff, defragged, created a nice unallocated partition in GParted.

I thought I’d go with my old standby CrunchBang, but Corenomial went out of the distro business about a year ago. One crew seems to have released something called CrunchBang Plus Plus, but their web site gives a lovely little 404.

Another crew called Bunsen Labs has picked up the Debian + Openbox combo. At the moment it’s in RC2 status. I’d hoped to run it as from a USB stick, but it’s not playing nice. I get to the option to play with it, but it goes into a loop with the menu asking which version you want to play with.

I think I decided to go with the Cinnamon variation of Linux Mint. Booted into it from a stick and added Skype, wished my mom a happy birthday, and then saw this blog entry:

Beware of hacked ISOs if you downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th!

Great. Mint was hacked. I downloaded mine on the 21st, but am still wary. Not sure what I’ll install when I get to it.

 

 

 

 

Leiden Anglophone Linux User Group Rides Again

We’ll be meeting on Thursday 11 February at Quartier Latin in Leiden. Join us?

(My apologies for the spam that took over this page. I do hope a changed password and a lot of deletion has fixed things.)

Final LALUG Meeting of 2012

Thanks to all who joined for our meeting two weeks ago at Gaanderij. Great food, great conversation, but a little pricey for what I’ve been trying to do with this group.

My thought for the final meeting of 2012 is to gather at Quartier Latin, a lovely looking little wine bar directly across Nieuwstraat from Gaanderij. It was not busy last week and my hope is that it isn’t (yet!) taking a huge leap in popularity.

I’ll be there from 7 or so on Thursday evening 13 December, 2012.

Hope to see you there!

Good meeting last night

Seven folks showed up (Marie, David, George, Terry, Sytze, Chris, and yours truly) to the slightly posher-than-I-expected Gaanderij restaurant for discussions of various and sundry things. David has been having some adventures with migrating a client’s very large web site to Amazon S3.

Sytze shared his new Galaxy Tab which is very sweet.

While I had done a little playing with Haiku before we met, the venue wasn’t such that I was comfortable firing up the laptop to show it off.

We were also quite amused by the description of the venue’s crème brûlée as it contained tonka beans. While many of us enjoy cooking, none of us knew what tonka beans were. Tasty and banned as a foodstuff in the US.

Meeting place tonight changed

De Branderij was booked out, so we’ll be meeting at their sister restaurant around the corner:

De Gaanderij
nieuwstraat 32
1312 KC Leiden
071-5142158

The reservation is in my name and the time is 7:30 as usual.

If you’ve used the Raspberry Pi and have tips or tricks, bring them along.

Cheers!

~Joe

Pi!

I pretty much missed out both on Pi day (3/14 in US reckoning). I did, however, enjoy a very nice apricot crumble at Bennies in Leiden.

I’ve also, so far, missed out on the Raspberry Pi. I haven’t tried very hard to get one, and figure once all the hoo-ha dies down a bit, they’ll be easier to come by.

That said, there is a very cool set of pix over on Flickr including one of the Raspberry Pi running an Atari emulator.

FOSDEM participant

At last night’s LALUG gathering, Finne Boonen spoke about her presentation at this year’s FOSDEM. Her research examines open source projects that have contributions from both paid staff and volunteers.

Alas, I’ve not had a chance to watch, but you can see her presentation here:
http://mirror.geeksoc.org/fosdem/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/Caret_and_Stick.webm

Leiden start-up looking for expertise

Nick Hogan has posted the following to the LxP (Leiden Expats) Yahoo group and it might be of interest:

Launching a tech start-up based in Leiden and looking for technical personnel and/or networks of engineers and data scientists. If you have any experience in the following areas or know others who do, please drop me a line.

– Ruby and RoR
– Pentaho
– Big Data BI
– MySQL & PostgreSQL DBA
– Linode, AWS and Rackspace hosting and API programming

Nick’s email address is: nickATnickhoganDOTcom

And we’re back

Had a lovely time in the UK, got a lovely Kindle Keyboard for xmas and have been busy loading it up. My wife also knitted me a beautiful scarf which I’ve been wearing every day.

I’ve been busy clearing out my RSS feeds, but my main source for Linux news (tuxmachines.org) requires a lot of attention. I hope to post some new goodies at the weekend.

For those of you keeping up, the next meeting is this coming Tuesday. Gracious but time flies. See you at F&F!

Balls and Noble

My mom (a Win/iOS user who won’t be converted) was happy to find an item via Barnes & Noble that she thought I’d have to ship over to the US from Europe. When I mentioned that that was another feather in the B&N cap given how they’re handling the Microsoft protection racket, she asked what that was all about.

I shared the following:

The Nook, like most non-Apple tablets, uses the Android operating system. Android is based on the Linux kernel.

Microsoft claims they hold patents on a number of aspects of Linux. For the last year or so they have threatened to sue manufacturers of Android devices if they don’t pay a fee. At this point, MS makes more money off of non-MS smart phones than they do off of Windows Mobile phones.

In fact, back in May, they were making more off the $5 protection fee they negotiated off the sale of HTC Android devices than they were off their own products. (Reference)

Here’s the MS announcement of their legal action against BN.

And a summary of the B&N response. (This is the payoff article and worth reading all the way through.) The long and short of it? MS’s claims are BS and in many cases the patents should have been denied based on prior art.

The fantastic Linux Outlaws podcast titled their last episode Balls and Noble in honour of B&N’s stance against Microsoft. (This suit got about 3 minutes in the podcast, but there are links to follow in the show notes here as well: http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws/238)

Kudos of all sorts to Barnes and Noble for taking this on. I’m sure I have more to say on the subject, but it’ll wait til further developments.