One of the things that Olympic Softworks is chartered to do is provide training to the public on how to use computers, and specifically how to use computers running GNU/Linux. To that end we are once again trying to set up first bi-monthly, then weekly meetings. These will be free for the general public to attend, and as we have done in the past; will be driven by topics that are selected to be of some use to those attending, and by questions that will be fielded on the spot as much as possible.

I was reading a few dozen posts this morning, I couldn't sleep so I figured I may as well do something with my time, and I came across a mention of something that had had failed to really 'click' with me in a several posts regarding firefox 3.5. Then a post from some Fedora guy about the direction Red Hat is taking Fedora actually congealed it for me.

Phoronix has lots of interesting stuff on their site; but before you go through their site in general, check out their benchmark test comparisons between Apple's new Snow Leopard OS, Ubuntu 9.04, and Ubuntu 9.10(alpha)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_karmic_leopard...

And this is their benchmark for Java performance between Vista and Ubuntu

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=java_vm_performance&n...

And this is a link to a direct benchmark comparison between Ubuntu 9.04 and Vista!

This blog entry is to help answer two questions: "What is Linux?" and "What is Free Software?"

These two questions are often not asked directly.  Instead people ask questions like "What is so different about Linux?".

So Microsoft released 20,000 some lines of code for use under the General Public License version 2(GPL v2). On all the tech websites we have been reading that Microsoft is finally playing nice with Free Software. Can this be true? Has hell really frozen over? Don't bet on it.