What follows is the most important news for the week! Linux-y news! Retro computer news! Alternative OS news! You know… the stuff that matters!

The Free Software Foundation is 37 years old!

On October 4th, 1985, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation.

Weird thought: On October 3rd, 1985, the Free Software Foundation didn’t exist.

After all these years, it’s almost hard to imagine a world where the FSF wasn’t around.

A physical, retro-Hard-Drive sound simulator: HDD Clicker

This mad genius got tired of the silence of his flash based hard drives. He longed for the days when his bit, magnetic hard drives made all of those awesome “hard drive noises”.

So he did something about it: He build a small device that made that noise when his flash drives are accessed..

Check out the video demos he gives. Turn the sound up. Just lovely.

I want four.

Canonical launches Ubuntu Pro as free service for individuals

Canonical is now offering an “Ubuntu Pro” service for individuals… for free.

“Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines”

And then, naturally, companies and big organizations will need to purchase a subscription plan for the Ubuntu Pro service. Makes sense. And, really, is a model I quite like: Businesses and Enterprise customers are helping fund the development and support… which directly benefits the individuals. Nice.

The primary purpose of Ubuntu Pro looks to be “ten years” of security updates for the core OS plus “23,000” other packages:

“Ubuntu Pro (currently in public beta) expands our famous ten-year security coverage to an additional 23,000 packages beyond the main operating system.

Including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, and many more...”

Honestly, this seems like the way to go for folks using Ubuntu. Better support, longer lifespan of updates in the repository… if I were running Ubuntu, I’d probably jump on that. Especially considering the fact that it’s free.

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