Education

Thoughts from the Future of Linux

Bryan Lunduke — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 12:30:00 +0000

By technology standards, I'm an old man. I remember when 3.5" floppies became common ("Wow! 1.44MB! These little things hold so much data!"). My childhood hero was Matthew Broderick war-dialing local numbers with his 300-baud modem. I dreamed of, one day, owning a 386 with more than 640k of RAM. At the pace that computing moves forward, I'm practically a fossil. So, if you were to ask me, "What is the best way to encourage kids, today, to get into open source?" Well, I honestly haven't a clue.

So, "What do kids want to do with Linux?" And, "Where will the next generation take open-source computing?"

I don't have good answers to those questions either. I'm just too stinkin' old. No, to get answers to those questions, we need to talk to the people that actually know the answers—the kids themselves.

Specifically, I mean people still young enough to be "the next generation" while old enough, with sufficient experience, to understand Linux (and open source) and create well founded opinions, goals and dreams of where Linux goes from here—perhaps young adults nearing the end of high school or just beginning their college (or work) lives.

Those are the people who will be running open source in 20 or 30 years.

After Linus Torvalds officially retires, these kids will take over Linux kernel development. When Richard Stallman finally calls it quits, these kids will push the ideals of the Free Software movement forward. And, eventually, I (and the rest of the Linux Journal team) will retire—hopefully to somewhere with a nice beach. And these kids (and the rest of their generation) will be the ones reporting on and writing about Linux.

So, we found three kids (young adults, really) who are eating and breathing Linux and open source in the United Kingdom: Josh Page, Samadi van Koten and Matthew Lugg.

Gentlemen, introduce yourselves to the world, and give us the quick overview of what you're currently doing with Linux and open source.

Matthew Lugg: Hi, my name's Matthew. I'm a year 11 student living in Devon, and I tend to spend most of my free time either coding or playing games. I've been using Linux—specifically Debian—as my main desktop OS, as well as on my VPS, for around a year now (both for dev and for gaming), and I've never looked back!

Josh Page: My name is Josh. I'm in year 11, and I use Linux for networking mainly, VMs, routing and the like.

Samadi van Koten: I'm Samadi van Koten, known online as vktec. I've recently finished my A levels and am currently taking a gap year before going to study Computer Science at Bath University this September. I'm currently in a software development contract at a multinational company that makes GNSS test equipment.

Go to Full Article

Linux...Do It for the Children

Marcel Gagné — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Marcel Gagné

A rundown of some fun and educational Linux software for kids.

I'm probably going to regret that title. I've been making fun of those words, "do it for the children" for years. It's one of those "reasons" people turn to when all else has failed in terms of getting you to sign on to whatever lifestyle, agenda, law, changes to food—you name it. Hearing those words draws the Spock eyebrow lift out of me faster than you can say, "fascinating".

Okay, pretend that I didn't start this article with that comment. Let's try this instead.

As I write this, my youngest son is 11 years old. He has grown up in a magical world of electronics that delivers what he wants to watch when he wants to watch it. Access to the web is something he always has known. Until very recently, he never had seen television with commercials. A couple years ago, my wife and I thought it was something he should at least understand, so we turned to a live TV program for the first time in I don't know how long. He was not impressed with the interruptions. Now, with multiple Google Home units in the house, including one in his bedroom, the on-demand magic is pretty much complete.

He started playing video games when he was three and was scary good on my PS3 by the time he turned four. He started using a laptop when he was five, and that laptop ran Linux. I'm pretty sure he was using Kubuntu, but it might have been Linux Mint. Either way, it was a KDE Plasma desktop. In short, the world of tech is nothing new for him, and Linux is just what people run. His school has Chromebooks, and the few run-ins he's had with Windows left him cold.

Kids and Linux? Absolutely.

GCompris

Much earlier on, however, I took advantage of some of the simpler educational games available on Linux. One of my favorites is GCompris, an all-in-one collection of educational games for children, geared for ages two to ten (Figure 1). By the way, GCompris is pronounced like the French words, J'ai compris, and it literally means, "I have understood", paying homage to its educational focus. I've mentioned this one in the past, but GCompris is a living, breathing project, actively developed by the KDE community with a new release just this past month.

Figure 1. GCompris is a suite of educational games for kids.

Go to Full Article

FOSS Means Kids Can Have a Big Impact

Corbin Champion — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Corbin Champion

An eight-year-old can contribute, and you can too.

Working at a company that creates free and open-source software (FOSS) and hosts all of our code on GitHub, my team and I at UserLAnd Technologies are used to seeing and reviewing contributions, which are called pull requests, from users. Recently, however, we received a pull request that is very special to me. It was from an eight-year-old, and not just any eight-year-old, but my daughter.

Figure 1. Addison Hard at Work

Now, I had many reasons for wanting my daughter to get involved with our project, but before I pollute this story with what I think, let's hear from her—this is the Kids + Linux issue after all.

Figure 2. My Daughter's First Pull Request

The following is a brief interview I conducted with her after she provided the shown pull request.

Corbin: To start with, please tell us who you are and provide your age?

Addison: I am Addison Champion, and I am eight years old.

Corbin: Now Addison, you have a skill that I don't have. You may be eight, and I am (gulp) 38, but you have a skill that neither I nor any of the members of my team have. Can you share with us what that skill is and how you posses it?

Addison: I am bilingual, as I speak both Spanish and English. I am enrolled in a bilingual school, and in my class, we mostly speak and read in Spanish.

[Note: She has been in a two-way immersion program at our local, public school since kindergarten where some of the kids are native Spanish speakers and some are native English speakers.]

Corbin: Can you describe the work you did for UserLAnd that used this skill?

Addison: I provided a Spanish translation for UserLAnd's Android app, because there wasn't one already.

Corbin: Can you describe what you had to do to make a Spanish translation?

Addison: There were a lot of phrases in English, and I had to provide the phrase in Spanish that matched each one in English. I also had to make sure the translation would sound right to a Spanish speaker.

Corbin: Was the task difficult?

Addison: Some of the phrases were hard, but some were pretty easy. There were some technical words that we had to look up. We found a cool website, like Google translate, but where you could type in a word or a sentence and it would show you a real example of a translation that used something similar.

Go to Full Article

The Asian Penguins

Bryan Lunduke — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

When I was young, Apple computers dominated the schools I attended. The Apple II and, later, the Macintosh Plus were kings of the classroom in the late 1980s.

This was a brilliant move by Apple Computer (this was back before Apple dropped the word "Computer" from its company name). Get the kids used to using Apple hardware and software, and then those kids will be more likely to use it when they grow up. Plus, the parents of the kids will become at least a little more likely to pick up Apple gear, so that any computer schoolwork can also be done at home. And, the same goes for the teachers. It's just a fantastic strategy to encourage adoption of a computer platform.

When it comes to Linux and, more generally, open-source software, there's no singular company responsible for promoting the platform. Luckily, many individuals and small organizations have taken up the charge of teaching free and open-source software (like Linux) to the next generation of computer users.

One such group is a computer club at a Hmong charter school in Minnesota known as the Asian Penguins.

Figure 1. The Penguins Posing for a Group Shot

Started by Stuart Keroff in 2012, the Asian Penguins is a club made up of sixth, seventh and eighth graders—both boys and girls—all focused on using Linux, as they put it, "for school, for fun, for communication, and to help others".

Their Mission: "Changing the world, one computer at a time."

Their vision: "The Asian Penguins exist to have fun and experience freedom through Linux and open source software, to share that fun and freedom with others, and to use open source software to help as many people as possible."

I love it.

In the seven years since they started, more than 200 kids have gone through the program—200 young minds working with Linux and open source. It warms my heart.

Even better? They take recycled and donated computers, load them up with Linux and other free software, and donate them to the community (including family members of students, an anti-poverty non-profit in Minneapolis, and to a St. Paul recreation center). To date, they've given away 241 computers loaded with Linux. On average, that means nearly one computer every week!

Figure 2. Hard at Work Building Linux Computers for Those in Need

Figure 3. Students Ready to Deliver a Newly Setup Linux-Powered Computer

Go to Full Article

The Kids Take Over

Doc Searls — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

As with Linux, these kids are all about making things—and then making them better. They're also up against incumbent top-down systems they will reform or defeat. Those are the only choices.

It starts here, in the heart of Long Island, a couple dozen exits east of Queens. I saw it with my own eyes in Mineola's Public Schools, where kids, led by a nonprofit called kidOYO ("kid-oh-yo"), are learning to program in different languages on different devices and operating systems, creating and re-creating software and hardware, with fun and at speed. Their esteem in themselves and in the eyes of their peers derives from their actual work and their helpfulness to others. They are also moving ahead through levels of productivity and confidence that are sure to create real-world results and strip the gears of any system meant to contain them. Mineola's schools are not one of those systems.

OYO means Own Your Own, and that's what these kids are learning to do. In geekier terms, they are rooting their own lives online. They're doing it by learning to program in languages that start with Scratch and progress through Python, Java, C# and beyond. They're doing it on every hardware and software platform they can, while staying anchored to Linux, because Linux is where the roots of personal freedom and agency go deepest. And they're doing in all in the spirit of Linus' book title: just for fun.

With kidOYO, the heuristics go both ways: kidOYO teaches the kids, and the kids teach kidOYO. Iteration is constant. What works gets improved, and what doesn't gets tossed. The measures of success are how enthused the kids stay, how much they give and get energy from each other, and how much they learn and teach. Nowhere are they sorted into bell curves or given caste-producing labels, such as "gifted" or "challenged". Nor are they captive to the old report-card system. When they do take standardized tests, for example the college AP (advanced placement) ones for computer science, they tend to kick ass.

kidOYO is the creation of the Loffreto family: Devon and Melora, and their son Zhen, who is now 13. What started as a way to teach computing to Zhen turned into ways to teach computer science to every kid, everywhere. kidOYO's methods resemble how the Linux kernel constantly improves, with code contributors and maintainers stamping out bugs and iterating toward ever-expanding completeness, guided by an equal mix of purpose and fun.

Go to Full Article

Open Source Is Winning, and Now It's Time for People to Win Too

Reuven M. Lerner — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 13:11:05 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

Teaching kids about open source? Don't forget to teach them ethics as well.

Back when I started college, in the fall of 1988, I was introduced to a text editor called Emacs. Actually, it wasn't just called Emacs; it was called "GNU Emacs". The "GNU" part, I soon learned, referred to something called "free software", which was about far more than the fact that it was free of charge. The GNU folks talked about software with extreme intensity, as if the fate of the entire world rested on the success of their software replacing its commercial competition.

Those of us who used such programs, either from GNU or from other, similarly freely licensed software, knew that we were using high-quality code. But to our colleagues at school and work, we were a bit weird, trusting our work to software that wasn't backed by a large, commercial company. (I still remember, as a college intern at HP, telling the others in my group that I had compiled, installed and started to use a new shell known as "bash", which was better than the "k shell" we all were using. Their response was somewhere between bemusement and horror.)

As time went on, I started to use a growing number of programs that fit into this "free software" definition—Linux, Perl and Python were the stars, but plenty of others existed, from Emacs (which I use to this day), sendmail (pretty much the only SMTP server at the time), DNS libraries and the like. In 1998, Tim O'Reilly decided that although the "free software" cause was good, it needed better coordination and marketing. Thus, the term "open source" was popularized, stressing the practical benefits over the philosophical and societal ones.

I was already consulting at the time, regularly fighting an uphill battle with clients—small startups and large multinationals alike—telling them that yes, I trusted code that didn't cost money, could be modified by anyone and was developed by volunteers.

But marketing, believe it or not, really does work. And the term "open source" did a great job of opening many people's minds. Slowly but surely, things started to change: IBM announced that it would invest huge amounts of money in Linux and open-source software. Apache, which had started life as an httpd server, became a foundation that sponsored a growing array of open-source projects. Netscape tumbled as quickly as it had grown, releasing its Mozilla browser as open-source software (and with its own foundation) before going bust. Red Hat proved that you could have a successful open-source company based on selling high-quality services and support. And these are just the most prominent names.

With every announcement, the resistance to using open source in commercial companies dropped bit more. As companies realized that others were depending on open source, they agreed to use it too.

Go to Full Article

Using Linux for Logic

Joey Bernard — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:30:00 +0000

by Joey Bernard

I've covered tons of different scientific applications you can run on your computer to do rather complex calculations, but so far, I've not really given much thought to the hardware on which this software runs. So in this article, I take a look at a software package that lets you dive deep down to the level of the logic gates used to build up computational units.

At a certain point, you may find yourself asking your hardware to do too much work. In those cases, you need to understand what your hardware is and how it works. So, let's start by looking at the lowest level: the lowly logic gate. To that end, let's use a software package named Logisim in order to play with logic gates in various groupings.

Logisim should be available in most distributions' package management systems. For example, in Debian-based distros, install it with the following command:


sudo apt-get install logisim

You then can start it from your desktop environment's menu, or you can open a terminal, type logisim and press Enter. You should see a main section of the application where you can start to design your logic circuit. On the left-hand side, there's a selection pane with all of the units you can use for your design, including basic elements like wires and logic gates, and more complex units like memory or arithmetic units.

Figure 1. When you first start Logisim, you get a blank project where you can start to design your first logic circuit.

To learn how to start using Logisim, let's look at how to set up one of the most basic logic circuits: an AND gate.

Figure 2. You easily can add logic gates to your circuit to model computations.

If you click the Gates entry on the left-hand side, you'll see a full list of available logic gates. Clicking the AND gate allows you to add them to the design pane by clicking on the location where you want them added. At the bottom of the left-hand side, you'll see a pane that displays the attributes of the selected gate. You can use this pane to edit those attributes to make the gate behave exactly the way you want. For this example, let's change the number of inputs value from 5 to 2. The next step is to add an output pin in order to see when the output is either 1 or 0. You can find pins in the wiring section.

Go to Full Article

Road to RHCA--Preparation Meets Opportunity

Taz Brown — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Taz Brown

This article is the second in my series "Road to RHCA", where I'm charting my journey to the Red Hat Certified Architect designation—a designation that's difficult to come by. As an advocate and enthusiast of Linux and open source, and more important, as someone who works as a Linux professional, I am eager to change the current state of affairs around the number of women and people of color who know Linux and open source, study Linux and work in the Linux and/or open-source space.

Things haven't changed much in general when it comes to the numbers of women and people of color who enter the IT field, but those numbers drop significantly when it comes to Linux and open source. It's my goal to convince other women and people of color to study Linux and pursue open-source projects, because diversity of thought is invaluable in the world and in the enterprise. This world is not homogeneous; nothing else ever should be either. So I'd like to see more professionals who look like me in Linux and the Open Source community, and I'm starting to see a few, but there's still more work to be done.

Joining the RHCA ranks requires significant time and effort. Nothing worth anything comes easy, nor should it, but I can say with work, family, mentoring and now writing a book for Packt publishing, finding time to study will be more and more difficult for me, but it's my highest priority. At the time of this writing, I am five exams away.

You can choose from five areas of concentration, or you can select any combination of eligible Red Hat certifications to create a custom concentration. Those five concentrations are:

Data Center
DevOps
Application Platform
Cloud
Application Development

I decided the best route to my RHCA is for me to customize my concentration to include these five certifications in the order I plan to take them:

Red Hat-Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation
Red Hat-Certified Specialist in High Availability Clustering
Red Hat-Certified Specialist in Red Hat OpenStack
Red Hat-Certified Specialist in Linux Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
Red Hat-Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration

If you ask Red Hat the company, it obviously would recommend paying for and using one of its subscription options. The standard option costs $5,500, and the basic option costs $7,000. Having the subscription definitely would be beneficial, especially if you are working toward an RHCA, but it's not something that everyone can afford. You might be able to get your employer to cover the costs, but that's not always possible. So how does one without such resources become an RHCA? True grit, determination and a little creativity.

Go to Full Article

The Road Less Traveled: Certifications Can Chart a Great Career in Linux and Open Source

Taz Brown — Tue, 08 May 2018 14:20:00 +0000

by Taz Brown

Taz Brown writes about the challenges of a career in IT and her goals of helping to increase diversity in the field and bring Linux to urban education.

The year is now 2018, and the world has changed tremendously in so many ways. One thing that's changed significantly is the way we learn and the way we demonstrate that knowledge. No longer is a college degree enough, particularly in the area of Information Technology (IT). Speak to two technologists about how they paved their way in the field, and you will get, oftentimes, completely different stories.

It's one of the things I like most about IT. You often can work with many different people with varying experiences, backgrounds and stories about how they came to enter the field, and one of the most common paths to IT is through certifications.

My path to IT could and would not have happened without certifications. First, my college degree was not in any tech or computer science concentration or track. I did not begin my career in IT, and therefore, gaining the knowledge I needed to enter the field began and continues with certifications. Now, this is not to say that I did not need to gain practical experience in order to be able to do the job, but had I only had practical experience and no certifications, I likely wouldn't have attracted the recruiters that I did.

I started with some CompTIA certifications like A+ and Network+, and Microsoft certs like the MCSA, focusing on Windows 7 and Windows Server. So after putting in 25–30 hours a week studying and practicing—and this was all with just a laptop, mind you—I obtained those certifications. But after getting those certifications, I wanted more—more knowledge and skills, that is. I was able to obtain a job in IT on the HelpDesk, and after a few years, and a few more certifications, I became a Systems Administrator.

So fast-forward ten years, and I am now a Sr. Linux Systems Engineer. I moved into the field of Linux about five years ago, because I saw a trend that I could not resist—a niche market. And, it has paid off, but with advancing my career came the need yet again to prove myself, and so I have been focused on the Red Hat track of certification for the last few years.

I have some Linux certifications, but the ones that have been the most important to me at this stage in my career are those from Red Hat. I currently possess the RHCSA (Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator), and for the last few months, I've been preparing to take and pass the RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). My ultimate goal is to obtain the RHCA (Red Hat Certified Architect).

Go to Full Article

It’s Here. The March 2018 Issue of Linux Journal Is Available for Download Now.

Carlie Fairchild — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 15:08:24 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Boasting as many pages as most technical books, this month’s issue of Linux Journal comes in at a hefty 181—that’s 23 articles exploring topics near and dear to everyone from home automation hobbyists to Free Software advocates to hard-core hackers to high-level systems architects.

Besides making the magazine bigger overall with more articles in each issue on a wider range of topics, we’ve also added a new feature that explores a given topic in-depth: the Deep Dive—think of it like an ebook inside each magazine. This month contributing editor Petros Koutoupis dives deep in to blockchain. He explores what makes Bitcoin and blockchain so exciting, what they provide, and what the future of blockchain holds. From there, he describes how to set up a private Etherium blockchain using open-source tools and looks at some markets and industries where blockchain technologies can add value.

Subscribers, you can download your March issue now.

Not a subscriber? It’s not too late. Subscribe today and receive instant access to this and all back issues since 2010. Alternatively, you can buy the single issue here.

Go to Full Article