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Issue 192 (Christmas 2014) - Power Up
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We’re powering up this issue, but this time it’s your brain that’s getting the upgrade (don’t worry it won’t hurt a bit). Your inner Tux is about to get a super-boost of FOSS knowledge. So prepare your sedated synapses, wake your napping neurons and gather your grey matter for an influx of distro secrets and the inner workings of the GNU/Linux system underbelly. You can’t understate how important this system-level knowledge is. It’s valued highly by old-school system admins and enables you to grapple with the inner workings of Linux unlike anything else. It’s so highly prized that recent changes to the Debian caused a group of ‘veteran Unix admins’ aka Unix grey-beards to threaten to (all together now) fork it, find out more over at http://debianfork.org. It’s the old cliché that no one likes change, the loss of SysV init for Systemd, plus the emphasis on the Gnome desktop has got the backs up of a bunch of old-timers alongside other groups that are against the supposed feature creep of Systemd. Like or loath Systemd, the Debian board democratically debated and selected it as the new init (SysV also remains in there) so asking it to then renege on that democratically made decision feels wrong. It’s like the FOSS Godfather is making us an offer we can’t refuse. But it’s their freedom to fork Debian and good luck to them, just quit with the threats. Life remains very exciting in the world of Linux we’ve managed to condense just a fraction of the developments that are taking place in the open source world. To kick things off we’ve got a full report and interviews with the people at Oggcamp 2014, (p42) hearing from the movers and shakers about developments this year. Our lad Jonni has been very busy building a Linux NAS box on page 46, creating the game 2048 inside of Minecraft, of all places, and using Mathematica to control Pi gadgets. Finally, an area we’ve wanted to explore for a long time is robotics and we look at how you can get started building a Linux-powered robot on page 52. With Ubuntu 14.10 on the disc this issue should keep you very busy!
