Tag: Jitsi

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Talking about Linux and open source

Yesterday I collaborated with long time friend and fellow Linux enthusiast Phil Shapiro. Recently we had been exploring open source solutions for video conferencing. There are two platforms with which we had some experience and those are BigBlueButton and Jitsi. They’re both great platforms but for slightly different audiences. I have used Jitsi recently to collaborate with local librarians and to meet with friends. BigBlueButton is a platform that really is designed to support online education. It has a tools like a whiteboard that Jitsi doesn’t have. Although you can share your screen on Jitsi and you can record to the cloud if you would like.

Yesterday we planned to collaborate on BigBlueButton but had technical difficulties and switched to Jitsi. Phil used screen capture software and published our conversation on YouTube. It was a good experience. Today I decided to invest in a portable video background so our next effort will look a bit more professional and I need to be a little less wooden.

Phil and I met about ten years ago on Twitter over a common love of Linux and open source software. In the video we discuss our experiences with the Linux Terminal Server project and the advantages of using Koha supported by ByWater Solutions in public libraries. I hope you enjoy the video and our conversation.

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Pandemic is good for Linux

A month or so ago after receiving calls from friends that their Windows machines were having troubles and needed attention I thought this is the perfect time to switch to Linux. Apparently I wasn’t the only person thinking that way. Jason Evangelho who has a regular column at Forbes shared a tweet today that said Ubuntu enjoyed a 599% uptick in users. That’s a very significant number.

https://twitter.com/killyourfm/status/1257932439370039296?s=20

With more and more people working from home and a growing segment of the population videoconferencing in education and other sectors of the economy Linux just makes sense. I’ve been doing a lot of videoconferencing lately to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. Besides great open source conference platforms like Jitsi and BigBlueButton there is Linux support for BlueJeans, Zoom, Skype and Google Hangouts.

You can go purchase a new Linux laptop from System76, Purism, Dell and other vendors but more importantly you can easily refurbish an older system and run Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS or any other Linux distribution and be reasonably productive at a fraction of the price. I have a number of laptops and only one is not running Linux.