FSF Defends RMS

• RMS addresses the free software community

  Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were. Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it. Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them. Please direct your criticism at me, not at the Free Software Foundation. [...] False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense. I would have done it for anyone. Police brutality makes me angry, but when the cops lie about their victims afterwards, that false accusation is the ultimate outrage for me. I condemn racism and sexism, including their systemic forms, so when people say I don't, that hurts too.

• Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman

  The voting members of the Free Software Foundation, which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation. We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing. RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission. We take full responsibility for how badly we handled the news of his election to a board seat. We had planned a flow of information that was not executed in a timely manner or delivered in the proper sequence. FSF staff should have been informed and consulted first. The announcement by RMS at LibrePlanet was a complete surprise to staff, all those who worked so hard to organize a great event, to LibrePlanet speakers and to the exhibitors. We had hoped for a more inclusive and thoughtful process and we apologize that this did not occur.

• The FSF on Stallman's reinstatement

  The Free Software Foundation has finally issued a statement on why the decision to return Richard Stallman to the organization's board of directors was taken.

today's howtos

• Install Wine 6.6 in Ubuntu 20.04 / Linux Mint & Fedora 33

  Wine team released its new development version 6.6 This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 6.6 in Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora 33, and Linux Mint 20.1.

• How to use the tail command in Ubuntu Linux

  Everyone knows about the cat command alternative to the tail command , which is used to view the contents of files. But in some cases you don’t need to look at the whole file, sometimes it’s enough to look only at the end of the file. For example, when you want to see the contents of a log file, you do not need what it starts with, you will have enough of the latest error messages. To do this, you can use the tail command, it allows you to output a specified number of lines from the end of the file, as well as display new lines online. This article will look at the tail Linux command.

• How to enable Large Indexes in MariaDB 10 on Debian 10

  This tutorial shows you how to enable large indexes in MariaDB 10 on Debian 10. This refers to the innodb_large_prefix option which exists in MariaDB and MySQL. I will show you how to enable the large index option permanently by editing the MariaDB configuration file and I will also show you how to enable it temporarily in the current database session by using SQL commands. InnoDB large prefix allows it to have index key prefixes up to 3072 bytes (for 16k pages, smaller otherwise).

• Fix for menu font size in LibreOffice

  This morning posted how LibreOffice was compiled in EasyOS: https://bkhome.org/news/202104/how-to-compile-libreoffice-in-easyos.html ...and mentioned that menu font size is a bit small. Well, that is the case for all gtk+3 applications, compared with gtk+2 apps. The reason is, Easy is released with a theme set for gtk+2 apps, but no theme set for gtk+3 apps. So gtk+3 apps use the default theme built-in to gtk+3.

• Fedora 34/33 Enable root Account Password/Login – If Not True Then False

  This is quick guide howto enable root account password/login on Fedora 34/33.

• FreeIPA and Foreman Proxy development setup

  I have been avoiding this for like ten years now, but today is the day when I will setup a FreeIPA with Foreman Proxy for development and testing purposes and here are my notes. The goal is to deploy a libvirt VM with IPA server and Foreman Proxy intergated with it. The domain will be ipa.lan and the host named ipa.ipa.lan. This is NOT how you should deploy production Foreman FreeIPA integration! For that, reading our official documentation and using foreman-installer is suggested instead.

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right. I like to keep things simple when it comes to a desktop operating system so the description below is how I went from a fresh install of FreeBSD 13.0RC1 to a working environment that is based on using the XFCE4 desktop experience. The FreeBSD install process is simple and well documented in other official locations, so I am not going to repeat that here. However, some of the configuration items that I did select was to use ZFS on Root, encrypted swap and disabled all services (this is a workstation, not a server). Once the machine had been rebooted, we need to set it up so that suspend/resume works correctly (and tests as such) and enable power management. The main issue that people have getting the resume part of the suspend/resume to work is not having the drm or xf86 drivers loaded that are applicable to the onboard graphics.