How Both.org is rebuilding a community after the death of an organization
For about ten years, a large number of writers from around the world contributed articles to Opensource.com. OSDC, as we called it, published thousands of articles, helped to guide and mentor many of us as we began or boosted our writing careers. OSDC also helped some of us make connections into the book publishing world. We were a vibrant and active community.
OSDC was created and supported by Red Hat — until it was purchased by IBM and soon deemed extraneous.
Learn how Both.org is rebuilding that community.
Celebrating 30 years of FreeDOS
FreeDOS is a great example of the open source model: developers working together to create new programs
How many usability testers do you need?
It doesn’t take many testers to get results that are “good enough” to improve your design.
Intro to the Linux chgrp and newgrp commands
In a recent article, I introduced the chown command, which is used for modifying ownership of files on systems. Recall that ownership is the combination...
Screencasts for usability testing
With screencasts, you can extend your usability testing.
Intro to the Linux chown command
Image by: Opensource.com CC-by-SA 4.0 Every file and directory on a Linux system is owned by someone, and the owner has complete control to change...
Usability testing in open source software
Through usability testing, we can make open source software projects easier for everyone to use.
Intro to the Linux chmod command
Every object on your Linux system has a permission mode that describes what actions a user can perform on it. There are three types of...
Tips on writing open source documentation
Adjust your style when writing documentation to reach a wider audience.
Open source in organizations
Open source is a power multiplier for today’s IT organizations.
Learning with the turtle
Image by: Patti Black on Unsplash Mathematics was anathema to me in my early years. As a visual learner, abstract concepts were challenging for me....
How my easy, home-made backup program saves time, space on the storage medium, and network bandwidth
Nothing can ever go wrong with my computer and I will never lose my data. Riiiiight.
This article discusses the backup program I created to prevent catastrophic data loss and facilitate easy recovery. I also show how you can install and use it yourself.
Intro to the Linux useradd command
Adding a user is one of the most fundamental exercises on any computer system; this article focuses on how to do it on a Linux system.
Play a fun math game with Linux commands
Use these commands to generate random numbers for a fun math quiz game.
5 common C programming bugs (and how to avoid them)
Add a little extra code to your next program to avoid these common C programming mistakes.
5 note-taking apps for Linux
Notes are part of any writer’s life. Most of my articles begin in a note taking application and that’s usually Joplin for me. There are a large number of note taking apps for Linux and you may use something other than my favorite. A recent blog article reminded me of a half dozen of them. That was an invitation to learn more about how each of these applications came to be and who were their developers.