Linux? What's That?? -- Soon No more

Today, my mother showed me an article she read in a local newspaper.  It was about Linux, free software, and how students from a private university (probably the biggest private university here) were using FLOSS.

The article mentioned the benefits of FLOSS in educational contexts and how those students were using GIMP, LibreOffice, and Linux, of course.

I still recall that, four years ago, if anyone mentioned Linux, all people would ask "What's that?".  To the dismal of some company in Redmond, more and more people are getting to know about Free Software and its advantages.  Why cracking a video player if you have tools like VLC right there to take care of all your video playing needs?

It seems that the strongest weapon of privative software against FLOSS, that is, making it invisible, is working less and less each year.

Soon, most people will know about FLOSS and they will realize they do have choices.

Pynagram: Fun with Words!

Pynagram is a small and simple anagram-typing game that may lack fancy features...but it offers a quick, challenging, and addicting gameplay to make up for that.

It basically presents you seven letters that you may use to type as many words as you can in a 5-minute span. Two-letter words are not allowed.

When you type a new word and it is correct, it appears in the blanks below your available letters:

Any correct words will appear in green when you type them.  Repeated words will be yellow, and inexistent words will be red.  When your five minutes are over, the game will show you all the words.  The ones you got right will be boldfaced:

Even if this game is somewhat modest, its educational value is enormous. It gives you a fun way to test your vocabulary skills --and polish them-- whenever you have five minutes to spare!

Where to get it?  I got it from Debian repos, but you can visit Pynagram in Launchpad for more downloading options:

My Top 3 most Creative Linux-related April Fool's Jokes

April 1st. is a day in which computer users and developers have fun creating the most awkward stories and articles.  Linux jokes are especially creative, and the funniest part is that there is always someone who actually believes these "articles."  I learned to be on my guard because I used to be one of these poor victims!

Now, what happens when the jokes are taken to the developer level?  Let's see three of the most creative examples:


Number 3:  There has been lots of discussion about the volume sliders on KDE. Fortunately, a solution was finally reached. The KDE Volume Slider Compromise.

Number 2:  What happens when it is the developer of a distro himself the one who fools someone? This happened at the antiX ranks.  Anticapitalista, the developer of antiX Linux told an unsuspecting antiX user that a big company wanted to deploy this little distro to all their systems...with two conditions that could cause antiX substantial disturbance:

Number 1:   A big distro's whole site becomes a joke:  DEBIAN.ORG:

Do I need to say more?