10 ways to contribute to open source
without writing a single line of code

What are the ways we can give to an open source community without contributing code?

A recent comment to an Opensource.com article a career in open source went something like that they wanted to contribute to open source but lacked coding skills. In fact, code contributions are very helpful and welcome for most open source projects, but there are a lot of other ways to contribute.

First, there are two things to remember about open source projects:

1. Open source is not only about sharing in the sense of "throwing code over the wall for others"; it's also about contributing back. When my open source career started, I was benefiting from software like INN. Then, it became natural for me to give my modifications and additions back.

2. Open source is a meritocracy. When you start working on a project for the first time and no one knows who you are, it's important to communicate. Start with what you need to get started or to get you through a problem. Otherwise, you likely to be ignored. If you have contributed to a project before, you are more likely to get a new feature implemented because there is trust from the community that gets you more rights and permissions to access code and document on the wikis.

When you start helping an open source project and enter the community built around it, you begin on a path that grows from a point where you are "outside" to a point where you are on the "inside." This is typical of any community and especially functional in an open source community. Remember this as you begin communications; if you don't get a reaction during your first contact or outreach, don't be disappointed. Continue to contribute, share, and strive for respectful communication, and you will succeed.

10 ways to contribute to an open source community

(without contributing code)

1. Provide reports of what you liked and what you did not like. This includes bug reports as well as simple communication with the appropriate person(s). It is good to hear from users as well about how the project has helped them and to find out the details of their set up.

2. Create feature requests that explain your use case. Describe why you find it is useful and how others can benefit. Without code contributions it is of course harder to get that feature into the code. But, if you can explain why the feature is useful and how others can benefit from it as well, you will often find out that others have similar pain points and eventually someone might implement that new feature.

3. Test the code while it is being developed. No matter how many automated tests are in place the reality is that the project runs on a combination of hardware and software as well as other environmental items that have not been tested by the project team (which in fact can't all be tested). So taking a daily or weekly snapshot, installing it, and giving feedback is very helpful and welcome. For the project I work on, we changed some graphs and had one community member giving almost daily feedback about his experience from the latest code, which resulted in a lot of fixes and improvements.

4. Write documentation. Many project contributors are good coders but not (documentation) writers. Some documentation is barely readable and needs proofreading for grammar, spelling, and sentence construction corrections. This helps the overall implementation and evolution of a project. In other cases, documentation describes technical details but lacks any information for beginners. Plus, outlier cases, workarounds, and best practices should written down and included. If you find the same question answered over and over again, you may also be able to write or update a Frequently asked Questions (FAQ) document, so that the answers are readily available for future reference.

5. Translate the user interface and documentation. While many users understand English quite well, it is also true that many enjoy documentation that is written in their native language. After writing the first German book on JBoss AS, I was contacted by people telling me that they had read all available documentation in English already but that they still benefited from the book in their native language because they could concentrate more on the technical content without the distraction of reading in a foreign language.

6. Answer questions users have on the forums and mailing lists. You may be surprised that you know more than you thought you did. And, the user on the other end will be very grateful for your help. Also, when you attemp to answer a question, you yourself will then better understand the project. This will help you write better bug reports, feature requests, and documentation. Bonuses to helping answer questions is that users who get faster answers are then more attracted to the project and much more likely to stay and contribute and core project members can spend more time coding. These both work to strengthen the project as a whole.

7. Help design the user interface, logo, and website. Many programmers tend to create very technical user interfaces that are not aesthetically pleasing and may not attract new users. Good and self-describing interfaces do not by themselves provide new or additional functionality, but can very much improve the user experience. The same also applies to the website and any logos that are needed. Improving the visual appearance of the project can thus very much contribute to reducing the support efforts and can at the same time invite new users to try it.

8. Promote the project by talking about it at your local user group, writing a blog post, and/or spreading updates via social media channels if you use them. Even if you think others must have heard about the project, don't assume. Hearing someone talk about their personal experience with a project is much stronger and involve others in a different way (versus browsing the project website and/or source code).

9. Provide hardware if there is a need for dedicated build or test servers. You can provide access to hardware in a datacenter directly to the developers or indirectly by running continuous integration or testing yourself then providing results back to the project.

10. Thank the community for their work and contributions to the cause you are working for and goals you are working towards.

These ways to help an open source project without contributing code are a great way to get started. If you have some more ways, please share them in the comments.

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Source : opensource.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Firefox 44 Stable Officially Released
Download and Install Now

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 44 for all supported operating systems. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the new improved . Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 44.
Windows users Can Download And Install Firefox 44 from Official Firefox Website

See More Browsers here

Note For Linux Users : Linux Users Can Install or Update Firefox 44 From Their Distributions Official Repositories(Depends upon the Linux Distribution that It may takes one or two days to land New Firefox on Official Repositories.)

To install or Update Firefox on Debian and Ubuntu based systems :

 sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox

To install or Update Firefox on Fedora systems :

          click here for installation instructions to install firefox version 44 on fedora

and Click here to See Whats New In Firefox 44

and here, You can see advanced list of changes takes place in firefox 44

Why Parents Should Encourage Their Kids To Use Open Source Software

No Doubt ! Open source and Open source software is one of the best things that parents and Teachers can teach their children to enhance their knowledge.

  Actually ,I saw this article initially @opensource.com which explains very well about ,

"why parents should encourage their children to use open source software "

so now i want to share that reasons with our readers who mostly inspired by open concepts ...

A 16-year-old boy recently asked the r/Linux community for advice. When his parents discovered that he'd reloaded his laptop with Linux, they were horrified—after all, this "free" software must certainly be riddled with viruses and/or hackers. It didn't help matters any that he'd "ruined" an expensive gift, and was no longer using some of the expensive software that had been purchased with it. He tried to talk to them about it, but it was tough—he was the teenager; they were the adults.
With the help of information and advice from the Reddit community, that young man talked to his parents again and helped set most of their concerns to rest. The open letter you're reading right now is for the other parents out there who have discovered their children are using free and open source software, and aren't sure what it is, or whether using it is a good idea.

Who am I?

Really, this article isn't about me—it's about you, and it's about your kids, and it's about software. But to give you some idea who's giving you the information, my name is Jim Salter. I'm a 43-year-old professional systems administrator, author, and public speaker. I own and operate a couple of successful small businesses, and I attribute a lot of my success to FOSS—free and open source software—which empowers my businesses, my customers' businesses, and much of the economy you and I function in.

What is FOSS?

FOSS is an acronym for free and open source software. This includes operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD, as well as applications like LibreOffice (which manages office documents, like those created by Microsoft's Excel, Powerpoint, and Word), Firefox (a web browser, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari), or GIMP (an image editing program, similar to Adobe Photoshop).
FOSS is not "stolen" software. Free software licenses like the GPL and the BSD and Apache licenses allow users the ability to freely use, and developers the ability to freely develop, the software placed under those licenses. Another important thing to understand about FOSS is that it is not merely "free" in the sense of "free in every box of cereal." Making a new copy of a piece of software literally costs nothing at all—this has made it possible for community efforts to produce world-class products in a way material goods never could be.
FOSS is a community effort, with the emphasis on the community. Every user who actively uses FOSS is actually contributing, in their own way, to that project. By using the project, the user increases awareness of it, attracting more users. Some of those users will file bug reports, helping project developers understand what isn't working right in the code, or what could be working better. Other users who know how to write code (or decide to learn how to write code) may fix those bugs or add new features, directly improving the project. Others who write well may improve the documentation, allowing new users to learn how to use it better. This is what we mean when we talk about the open source community. Even in the case of projects with developers on the full-time salary of a large corporation, the community is incredibly important, and the community is vital to keeping the project active, healthy, and engaging.

How can FOSS be safe?

It's easy to understand why you might think something free can't be as good as something you pay for. In an age where it seems like a new virus is always right around the corner, suspicions tend to flare. You can't trust the "free" program that's a click away in a banner ad on a website, so why should you trust this "free" software?
Again, the important difference to understand is the difference between "free" as in "click here," and "free" as in libre. And again, the community is that difference. When a shady website offers you a "free" download promising coupons, drivers for your computer, or some other form of snake oil, it's only "free" in the sense that you don't need to pull out your credit card. You cannot personally view the source code of that "free" download—and neither can anyone else. This makes it easy for the person pitching the "free click" to bury things in there that you don't want. In the old English language idiom, you're buying a pig in a poke—that is, you're being offered a tightly closed package with nothing but promises about what's inside.
With FOSS, you are not simply getting a free download—you're being given the freedom to openly review (or even edit) the code of the software itself. Where a "free coupon" program might (and does) secretly track all of your activity on the Internet and force ads into webpages you view to make its author money, a FOSS program really can't do something like that. If it tried to, technically knowledgeable users would quickly find the "secret" code that did things that aren't good for the users—and shortly after that, even more technically knowledgeable users would actively disable the code that did things bad for the users.
Nothing in life can truly be guaranteed safe in every situation. However, with FOSS code, you know that the maximum number of people whose motive is making the software good for the user (rather than making money) are actively involved in looking at the code and keeping it good for the users. This is an experience that proprietary software really cannot match, because the primary goal of proprietary software isn't to make the users happy—it's to make the company money.
Want to read some articles about the security record of FOSS? Katherine Noyes of PCWorld gives you five simple reasons why Linux is more secure than Windows.

Why would I want my child to use FOSS? Shouldn't they use what everybody else is using?

Oh, this is the fun part! It's easy to look around your office and see computers running Microsoft Windows, or look around the nearest coffee shop and see Apple phones, and think, "Proprietary software is what runs the world." But that would be a mistake. Open source is frequently more behind the scenes than in your face, but it's actually the driving force empowering the world economy. Does that seem hard to believe? Let's take a look at a few examples. I'll provide links so that you can easily fact-check me or just learn in more detail.
It's probably worth noting that even Microsoft uses Linux in their core infrastructure these days—so it's not like a child loses the ability to work with proprietary software companies by choosing Linux early.
Let's look at some other interesting places you'll find FOSS like Linux and FreeBSD. BMW and Audi are using Linux. Internet, finance, healthcare, and insurance industries overwhelmingly use Linux. In particular, online retail giant Amazon.com has been running on Linux for well over 10 years. Search giant Google not only runs their public facing infrastructure on Linux, but also the desktop computers their employees sit in front of day to day. IBM is even running Linux on their Z series mainframe computers for enterprises! Linux is also increasingly prevalent in educational institutions, from the kindergarten to the postgraduate level, around the world. For one literally out-of-this-world example, the International Space Station runs on Linux. And if you're not sick of examples yet, here's a list of 50 more educational, governmental, and big business Linux users.
BSD—another FOSS operating system that runs most of the same applications Linux does—doesn't get as much press as Linux these days, but it's also crucially important. Without BSD, we very likely wouldn't have the Internet as we know it today—the TCP/IP network protocol our computers all speak was adopted partly because of its free availability under the BSD license, and the Routing Information Protocol it used to address extremely large networks came from BSD itself. If you look hard enough, you'll find BSD everywhere—parts of the Apple OS X operating system are FreeBSD, Sony's Playstation 4 gaming console runs on a modified version of FreeBSD, Juniper powers its enterprise-grade network routers with FreeBSD, Netflix uses FreeBSD to deliver and cache streaming TV and movies, and WhatsApp uses FreeBSD infrastructure to deliver real time messages between millions of users around the world.
FOSS operating systems aside, FOSS applications power a lot of the world we all live in too. Apache and NGINX web servers power more than 70% of the world's websites, both large and small. The open source video rendering application Blender has been used to make some pretty impressive free movies, as well as award-winning short independent films and major advertisements for products including Pepsi, Coca-Cola, BMW, Hugo Boss, and more. You've used FOSS personally if you've ever used the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and even Google's Chrome browser is based on the open source Chromium browser.
The point is that there are a lot, and I mean a lot of ways to make money as an adult with a solid knowledge of open source technologies... and to make more money than you would without that knowledge. Considerably more money, in fact—Indeed.com shows that jobs with the keywords "Microsoft Windows" have an average salary of $64,000, while jobs with the keyword "Linux" have an average salary of $99,000.

In conclusion

If your eyes haven't crossed yet from information overload, I hope you can agree with me that free and open source software is a wonderful thing for a child to be interested in. And the best part is that the community welcomes you—as parents and as individuals—as much as it does your children! If you want to find out what your children are doing, you can read documentation for the operating systems and applications they're using, or you can install the same things they are on your own computers to see. It won't cost you anything, and it just might gain you a lot.

Source : opensource.com

A first-timer's guide to getting started with open source code and communities

A first-timer's guide to getting started with open source code and communities

 

So, you want to start using that open source thing...
You've been reading Opensource.com and there's a package that you're excited about. You'd love to give it a try and maybe—just maybe—find a way to contribute to the community that made it (if, you know, it turns out as awesome as that article you found says it is). But where to start?

First-time installations

Every package is a little different—some run on different operating systems than your home machine, some have different dependencies, some expect a certain minimum level of technical expertise. Some are crazy-easy, like LibreOffice or Wordpress. Some are much more challenging due to factors like high complexity, lots of moving parts, lots of dependencies, or that the community's developers haven't yet gotten the installers built like they want to. But as someone who's looked at a lot of different packages out there can tell you, there are some pretty common lessons learned that you can—if you're wise—learn from the easy way (by reading them here) rather than the hard way (wrestling with that installation at midnight when you should be doing something else).

"Plan to throw one away. You will, anyway."

In 1975, Fred P. Brooks wrote this statement in his seminal series of essays on software development, The Mythical Man-Month, and it's no less true for open source projects and test installs than it was for big-iron projects of that era.

continue reading @ opensource.com ....

New Features In Firefox 44 For Desktop And Android

Firefox 44 Beta Released
See What Is New

The Firefox team released Firefox 44 beta on 17 Jan 2016 . And now available for download and test.
The official final version of Firefox 44 is scheduled to release on 26 Jan 2016 for all supported platforms.
The open source browser company published a brief report about this beta release, which features a new Warning pages for Untrusted connections and WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don't support MP4/H.264 .

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You may also like to read : See some Awesome Open-source Web browsers For Daily use

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New In Firefox 44

• Improved warning pages for certificate errors and untrusted connections
• Enable WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don't support MP4/H.264
• Enable H.264 if system decoder is available
• To support unicode-range descriptor for webfonts, font matching under Linux now uses the same font matching code as other platforms
• Use a SHA-256 signing certificate for Windows builds, to meet new signing requirements

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You may also like to read : 9 Deadely Linux Commands , Intresting Facts About Linux Creater.. etc

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New Features Available For Developers

• Visual tools for Animation
• Right click on a logged object in the console to store it as a global variable on the page
• Visual tools for Layout and Styles
• New memory tool for inspecting the memory heap
• Jump to function definitions in the debugger with Cmd-Click
• Built-in JSON reader to intuitively view, search, copy and save data without extensions
• Service Workers API
• WebSocket Debugging API and Add-on signing enforcement

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Additional Firefox Download Links :

• Current Stable Release
• Beta Release
• Developer Version

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See : How To Install Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS on Ubuntu and It's Derivatives

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How To Install Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS On Linux Ubuntu 15.10 & Ubuntu 14.04 (Updated)

This article is updated on April 3 2016.
Click Here To See The Updated Content.

Linux kernel 4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) was officially released by Linus Torvalds and his team of developers on 10 January. The new release means , the much more new features and bug fixes. And also Linux Kernel 4.4 is an LTS(Long Term Support) version and more stable release.
Now , Here I am going to show how to install Linux kernel 4.4 rc4 in Ubuntu and Ubuntu based systems using official ppa.
it is official ppa of Ubuntu kernel ,so we will get updates from Ubuntu.

Some Awesome Opensource Web Browsers

Install Kernel 4.4 on Ubuntu

Run the following commands to install Kernel 4.4 on 32 bit Ubuntu and Derivative systems:


$ cd /tmp
$ wget \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400rc4_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_all.deb \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400rc4-generic_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_i386.deb \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-image-4.4.0-040400rc4-generic_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-4.4*.deb linux-image-4.4*.deb


Run the following commands to install Kernel 4.4 on 64 bit Ubuntu and Derivative systems:


$ cd /tmp
$ wget \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400rc4_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_all.deb \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400rc4-generic_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_amd64.deb \
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-rc4-wily/linux-image-4.4.0-040400rc4-generic_4.4.0-040400rc4.201512061930_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-4.4*.deb linux-image-4.4*.deb

Some Interesting Facts About Linux

Run the following commands to uninstall and remove Linux Kernel 4.4 from Ubuntu and Derivative systems:


$ sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-4.4* linux-image-4.4*


Update :

Install Ubuntu 16.04 's Kernel(Linux kernel 4.4.x) #

Now you can install linux kernel 4.4 on ubuntu and it's derivatives more easily through Ubuntu's HWE(Hardware Enablement) release

Step 1 :

Open The Terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T )

Step 2

Update Your System's Source List

sudo apt-get update

Step 3 :

Now run the following command to install linux kernel 4.4 which is provided by Ubuntu as HWE stack

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-xenial

Now package manager will ask for your confirmation ..that whether you want to continue or you want to abort installation process..
So, give Y (yes) and press Enter

That's it ,,, Now you have system installed with 16.04 's kernel (Linux kernel 4.4)

If you encounter any issues after installing this kernel .. you can easily un-install this kernel.
Run the following command to un install the kernel that you have installed just before.

sudo apt-get remove linux-generic-lts-xenial

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Linux kernel 4.4 released ... Look At The New Features Of The Linux 4.4 Kernel ..!

Linux kernel 4.4 released

Linux kernel 4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) was officially released by Linus Torvalds and his team of developers on 10 January.

Prominent features of Linux kernel 4.4 LTS include 3D support in the virtual GPU driver, allowing for 3D hardware-accelerated graphics in virtualization guests, a leaner and faster loop device that supports Asynchronous I/O and Direct I/O, thus increasing the system's performance and saving memory, and support for Open-Channel Solid State Drives (SSDs) through LightNVM.

Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.4 LTS adds journaled RAID5 MD support, fixing the RAID write hole, and perf and eBPF integration, allowing unprivileged users to run persistent eBPF programs. Also worth mentioning are Block polling support for improving the overall performance of high-end storage devices, a brand new mlock2() syscall for locking memory on page fault, and fully lockless handling of the TCP listener, allowing for more scalable and faster TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) servers.

Some Awesome Opensource Web Browsers

"Nothing untoward happened this week, so Linux-4.4 is out in all the usual places.The changes since rc8 aren't big," says Linus Torvalds. "There's about one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third 'misc' (mainly some core kernel and networking), But it's all small. Notable might be unbreaking the x86-32 'sysenter' ABI, when somebody (*cough*android-x86*cough*) misused it by not using the vdso and instead using the instruction directly."

Some Interesting Facts About Linux

In addition to the awesome new features introduced in today's release of Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, we can notice a lot of updated drivers, as well as the addition of new ones, which will make the kernel support even more modern hardware components and all sorts of devices. Linux kernel 4.4 LTS ships, of course, with lots of under-the-hood improvements and countless bugfixes. More details can be found in Mr. Torvalds announcement.
you can read more intresting article @ Linux Planet

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• 9 Deadly Commands !! You Should Not Run on Linux
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• How to get started with Linux: A beginner's guide

Why To Use Open Source Software ? ?

        Why To Use Open Source Software

Introduction : 

      Open Source Software / Free Software (aka OSS/FS), also described as Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), has risen to great prominence. Briefly, FLOSS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers). 

    There are many good reasons to use open source software.... 
Here , I listed some of the Benefits of using open source software ....

Benefits of Using Open source Software : 

•  Public Collaboration
•  Reliability
•  Better Security 
•  Audit ability
•  Flexibility
•  Cost Effective 
•  Error Resolution 
•  Better Integration
•  Open platform 
• see more benifits .... 

Practical reasons for open source software :

Some IT people and more technical computer enthusiasts believe that open source software is less secure due to its open nature. These same individuals might also feel that open source software is less reliable since many applications aren't backed by large companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc.

I'd argue that isn't the case. I believe open source software is often more secure and more flexible than proprietary options as it has nothing to hide. The entire process can be vetted at anytime by examining the source code, offering to help with the software development and learning how the application works from the inside. I'd be lying if I claimed that all open source software is 100% secure and totally bulletproof. Obviously no application is completely secure, this is why updates and patches are important to install as they're released.
 Continue Reading .....

Also read...

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