Category: linux

22Jan

FSF High Priority Projects List

22 Jan 2017 pbenavent

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced a major update to its High Priority Free Software Projects (HPP) list.

I only quote this nowdays because I consider a really important focus on privacy the mobile ecosistem. The first item in the list is a Free phone operating system. There’re plenty of companies collecting information about our habits, purchases, preferences, and everything else, just in case.

It is not a conspirancy theory, it is really worthy to pay attention because information, your personal information, is gold for bussines, they pay you by offering someting you need (or they makes you believe that you need) and you loose your privacy.

A lot of people says they have nothing to hide, they’re no thieves, or evil people, or whatever, well, it’s true. Me neither. But pay attention to this: quite often, we share more personal information on social networks or with companies than with our neigbour, why? think about it.

Free Software is a plus in terms of security, privacy and open interaction. Please, consider -always- the Free Software Option for your personal uses.

8Jan

The Best Linux Distros for 2016

8 Jan 2017 pbenavent

Linux.com has publish its list “The best linux distros for 2016” with a surprise for me.

They point SuSE as the best enterprise server distribution, if I have to bet five cents for a distro I would have choose Red Hat, for sure. Even they remarks few items that makes though Red Hat it’s my choice, if we’re considering enterprise environments, not desktop or personal server, or my own development server, or anything else.

So, strengths for RHEL are (IMHO):

  • Enterprise support
  • Wide portfolio around the pure OS, such as application server, deployment tools, messaging server, integration with development main players and even certification for system administrators (BTW, maybe the best one)
  • Gartner consider RHEL in 2016 as a

    firmly positioned as the most successful open-source software vendor in terms of subscription model success and portfolio breadth

    • If you never had consider Linux as an option, please, do it. Don’t forget you’re using it right now since you’re browsing the web because most of the public Internet servers runs a Linux. In fact, most powerful computers; supercomputers runs Linux, too. You may find a linux distro for desktop in the link from Linux.com or alternatively try Fedora 😉

25Nov

Dnf update problems and how to solve them

25 Nov 2015 pbenavent

One of my workstations runs Fedora for a quite long. I’ve been following practices from my previous technical job and take easy to upgrade the distro or to switch the “lates-what-ever-technology” you would imagine.

I’ve finally adopt dnf command instead of yum to manage the command lines. It has being going well but suddenly I’ve started to received this error message in the terminal:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/bin/dnf", line 36, in
main.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dnf/cli/main.py", line 185, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dnf/cli/main.py", line 84, in main
return _main(base, args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dnf/cli/main.py", line 115, in _main
cli.configure(map(ucd, args))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dnf/cli/cli.py", line 981, in configure
self.optparser.usage = self.optparser.get_usage()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dnf/cli/option_parser.py", line 255, in get_usage
usage += "%-25s %s\n" % (name, summary)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 40: ordinal not in range(128)

So I decide to go back to the trusty well worker yum.

Finally I’ve found how to solve the problem, by typing this:

  1. export LANG=C
  2. dnf clean all
  3. … and then you may type dnf clean all just is case
  4. Finally, type dnf update and everything must be settled and done, and your system gonna work with dnf or yum, as you wish
9Nov

Does MS (really) loves Linux?

9 Nov 2015 pbenavent

Microsoft has redefined its targets and keep focus on three main areas:

  • Services
  • Cloud
  • Hardware

Any offer coming from MS may be put it into one of this areas. For instance, what about OS or Office? well, the new Office 365 is a Cloud app and it’s offered as a service.
According to this new approach MS is offering services based on Linux.

Things are so different from a couple of years that they have published a serie named Microsoft Loves Linux.

But don’t get fooled about it, they offer Linux as a service, as an OS built on MS services. So you gonna stay attached to MS.

29Apr

Es importante hacer aquello en lo que se cree

29 Apr 2015 pbenavent

Este artículo va en castellano y si no te interesa la tecnología tal vez sí te interese.

He leído un artículo de Dan Gilmore (periodista sobre tecnología) titulado Why I’m saying godbay to Apple, Google and Microsoft y me ha hecho volver sobre mis pasos.

Cuando leí el artículo me impresionó por distintas razones, contacte con Dan Gilmore y me ofrecí a traducirlo. A veces las personas son famosas y educadas, me respondió con rapidez diciéndome que ya estaba traducido: ¿Por qué le digo adiós a Apple, Google y Microsoft? (añado que no puedo competir con la bella maquetación de Medium).

El software libre tiene múltiples ventajas que no voy a comentar ahora (es gratis -aunque no siempre-, estable, supervisado por grandes grupos de desarrolladores, ofrece la libertad de manipular el código) en general es muy eficiente y seguro.

Además de las razones anteriores el software libre está comprometido con una serie de valores y ahí ya no hablamos de cuestiones tecnológicas sino de principios. Por ejemplo, el software libre está defiende entre otras cosas, la libertad de elección del usuario sin cautividades, el trabajo en común y por lo común, defiende la privacidad de los usuarios frente a abusos… en fin.

Gilmore reproduce una frase Cory Doctorow que viene a decir que es importante hacer aquello en lo que se cree.

Además, el software libre, simplemente funciona, y funciona bien.

¿Por qué digo volver sobre mis pasos? Adiós iPhone, en breve un S.O. libre en el teléfono. El ordenado principal de uso personal es una Lenovo T400 que a pesar de su edad funciona perfectamente con Fedora.