The things one learns...

[SteveRiley]

I'm conducting some research on public certificate authorities. This evening I encountered a thing I would never have guessed. Thawte, one of the largest public CAs, became part of VeriSign in 1999, which then sold its entire security business to Symantec in 2010. Guess who founded the firm? Our very own SABDFL! He sold Thawte to VeriSign for $575 million, from which he got most of his money to start Canonical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte

[oshunluvr]

Wow, who'd of thawte that?

I thank you...

[Feathers McGraw]

Wow, who'd of thawte that?

I thank you...

Ugh.

[GreyGeek]

He also used some of the money to book a flight to the space station. It cost him only a mere $20M dollars.
I read an interview he gave to a German online publication around 2008 or so, wherein he mentioned Thwarte. In it he also mentioned that he was putting about $10M/year into Canonical. A couple days later that page had removed the line about how much he was investing in Canonical.

[SteveRiley]

Thwarte

LOL. I often feel that Mark tries to "thwarte" the true goals of free and open source software

[tek_heretik]

LOL. I often feel that Mark tries to "thwarte" the true goals of free and open source software

At the risk of sounding 'tinfoil hat', his slow creep towards proprietary is the reason I re-adopted Debian now, not waiting for the bomb to drop, besides, I have a real problem with snoopware.

[GreyGeek]

LOL. I often feel that Mark tries to "thwarte" the true goals of free and open source software

From the moment he announced that 12.04 was going to a 5 year LTS and he was dropping Kubuntu and other spinoffs it became clear to me that he was gearing up for a single distro running his own desktop gui and employing drivers that are specific to Ubuntu. That is the beginning of a walled garden which would "thwarte" the goals of FOSS, IMO.

At the risk of sounding 'tinfoil hat', his slow creep towards proprietary is the reason I re-adopted Debian now, not waiting for the bomb to drop, besides, I have a real problem with snoopware.

For that same reason, and because I believe that eventually System Blue will see the bridge out farther down the road, I have switched to a Debian Wheezy distro called KWheezy. My main focus with my OS is KDE, not the distro under it. But, if the distro under it moves out to an island or into a walled garden, I am not following it.

[Feathers McGraw]

Greygeek, what are the differences between KWheezy and Kubuntu?

How are you getting on with it?

[tek_heretik]

Re: Kwheezy, it has all good intentions except it's loaded with proprietary corporate-ware, etc, and I find the artwork disturbing, black and pink, blech, that's why I installed a minimal command line Debian, then kde-standard, the rest is history.

It would make a good KDE alternative for noobie-ish people but the first Debian under the hood glitch that rears its ugly head, they'll be lost, I will admit the *buntus created a VERY user friendly set of distros, but not being able to troubleshoot and tinker makes your brain go soft, lol, neurologists say if you keep your brain busy with puzzles and teasers, your mental sharpness and health lasts longer in to old age, I like the challenge.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kwheezy, it has all good intentions except it's loaded with proprietary corporate-ware, etc, and I find the artwork disturbing, black and pink, blech, that's why I installed a minimal command line Debian, then kde-standard, the rest is history.

It would make a good KDE alternative for noobie-ish people but the first Debian under the hood glitch that rears its ugly head, they'll be lost, I will admit the *buntus created a VERY user friendly set of distros, but not being able to troubleshoot and tinker makes your brain go soft, lol, neurologists say if you keep your brain busy with puzzles and teasers, your mental sharpness and health lasts longer in to old age, I like the challenge.

mmm.... Corporate ware? Which apps are they? FireFox. Kmail. KMyMoney, Stellarium, PosgreSQL 9.1, PGAdmin III, K3B, Network Manager, KMixer, LibreOffice, System Settings, I do have GoogleEarth installed, and it does NOT throw a "illegal http..." box and then crash when I attempt to search for a location. I watch Youtube and I also can watch Amazon Prime Instant videos.

It comes with Steam installed. I installed Jitsi but don't use it. I installed Google Talk and use it often. I have Skype installed but rarely use it, preferring Hangout instead. I use gmail, googletalk, G+ and google (search, trends, scholar), but nothing else.

I am running the Liquorice 3.12-3.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT kernel because it WORKS with my AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter, which hasn't worked with Kubuntu since early last summer. So, I have a 300 Mb/s wireless connection instead of the 100 Mb/s eth0 connection. Kernels before 3.11 did not work with my wireless.

It came with Conky pre-configured. All I did was add a line to the conky.conf file which displayed a month calendar with today's date highlighted.

$color ${font nimbus mono L:size=10}${execpi 60 DJS=`date +%-d`; cal -h | sed s/"\(^\|[^0-9]\)$DJS"'\b'/'\1${color blue}'"$DJS"'$color'/}

I stripped out pulseaudio so I could use ALSA with KMixer.

KNemo is pre-installed in the system tray. It has two desktop icons which toggle the screen and toggle the taskbar mode.

All in all, it is completely stable and everything works. 99% of the updates come from the Debian repositories. I installed 1.4 and it updated to 1.5 automatically without any problems. Euan Thomas is doing a good job of building and maintaining it.

I love it. It is a sexy looking and acting version of Debian Wheezy.

[SteveRiley]

I am running the Liquorice 3.12-3.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT kernel

The Liquorix kernels are great. I use them most of the time. Seems that Barrett is sometimes a little behind getting new point releases compiled, and when that happens, I switch to the Ubuntu mainline.

I stripped out pulseaudio so I could use ALSA with KMixer.

PA causing you problems? It's been stable here for quite some time. And I do find the multiple source/sink capability useful.

[tek_heretik]

@Grey...when I tried Kwheezy, there was an HP logo in the system tray (printer utility, installer, whatever), I don't own anything HP, so why is Kwheezy practising 'desktop presence' for a corporation, that's what you get when you buy a proprietary Windows machine, tons and tons of 'desktop presence' bloatware, it's an effin logo billboard, lol (besides the insane lag from all that extra garbage running in the background), so the last place I want to see that is in a distro which has a GNU base (Debian), I was actually offended and disgusted.

[SteveRiley]

there was an HP logo in the system tray (printer utility, installer, whatever) ... so the last place I want to see that is in a distro which has a GNU base (Debian), I was actually offended and disgusted.

The logo comes from the GUI interface (package hplip-gui on Ubuntu) to the HP Linux Printing and Imaging System (package hplip on Ubuntu). Hewlett-Packard provides resources for the open source community to use their products, which is better than what most other manufacturers do. The maintainers of KWheezy have decided to include this utility, given their stated desire: "To be easier for Linux or Debian newcomers. It is full-featured, with all the applications, plugins, fonts and drivers that you need for daily use, and some more." Can't imagine why you would feel offended and disgusted that someone wants to make Linux easier for people.

[claydoh]

Heck, it wasn't all that far back, if memory serves, that Kubuntu included the hplip gui by default.

Sent from my DNA using Tapatalk, like that really matters

[GerardV]

I think the HP utility is one of the most useful bits of software around. Without it, i cannot get my HP Photosmart scanner to work wireless. I cannot remember when i last read a thread where people had trouble getting their HP printer to work. So good on them for providing the software. When my printer is due for replacement, i definitely will check out their printers first.