FOSS Weekly #23.51: Fish Shell, Free AI Course, Zorin 17, DG/UX UNIX and More

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays 🧑‍🎄

To keep up with the holiday spirit, you may give your Linux desktop some Christmas touch with these tips.

Give Your Linux System a Christmas Touch With These Tricks’Tis the season for celebration. Customize your Linux desktop with the Christmas spirit.

We are lagging behind with our goal to reach 125 Plus members by the end of 2023. Help us with that by opting for It’s FOSS Plus membership?

💬 Let’s see what you get in this edition of FOSS Weekly:

  • Broadcom being greedy after VMWare acquisition.
  • Mozilla doing something that Google will probably never do (and that’s a good thing).
  • A trip down memory lane alongside a few coverages focusing on AI.
  • IBM has free AI courses.
  • Christmas themed puzzles and riddles.
  • And other Linux news, videos and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux news

Zorin OS 17 is available now. The new desktop effects make it an attractive choice.

Zorin OS 17 Introduces a Hybrid User Experience to Linux DistrosZorin OS 17 has landed!

Fresh on the heels of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the perpetual license is no more.

Broadcom Drops A Hammer on VMware Customers After AcquisitionVMware customers may not like the intention behind the changes made.

🌐 Follow us on Google News

By the way, if you use Google, follow It’s FOSS on Google News to get trusted It’s FOSS content before other websites in Google search.

It’s FOSS – Google NewsRead full articles from It’s FOSS and explore endless topics, magazines and more on your phone or tablet with Google News.

🧠 What we’re thinking about

Mozilla has done something that Google will probably never do for their Android web browser.

New extensions you’ll love now available on Firefox for Android | The Mozilla BlogToday, Mozilla announced more than 450 new extensions (software that adds new features or functionality to the browser) to users on Firefox for Android at

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials and More

Here are some compelling reasons why you should switch to Fish from Bash.

11 Fish Shell Features That Make it More Awesome Than BashYou should try Fish, even if you are vegan or allergic to seafood 😛

IBM will teach you the ways of AI, if you have a few hours to spare.

Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals – for freeI already took IBM’s AI ethics class and plan to complete the rest to earn my digital credential in AI over the holiday break.

📹 What we are watching

Nick from The Linux Experiment takes a look at the state of Linux as we head into 2024.


✨ Project highlights

Ready for a trip down memory lane? This time we took a stroll around the DG/UX UNIX OS.

Blast from the Past: DG/UX UNIX Operating SystemRelive the nostalgia with me as I recall my experience with the DG/UX UNIX OS and Data General’s AViiON workstations and servers.

🧩 New quizzes

Enjoy the Christmas special puzzles and riddles. There are more on the quiz page.

Christmas Special: Journey to the NorthGet into the holiday spirit with this series of challenges.

The Plus Members-only puzzles will be back in 2024. As a Christmas gift, the puzzles are open for all.


💡 Quick handy tip

You can prevent entering characters accidentally on a running GNOME terminal session by making it read-only.

To do this, click on the top-right hamburger menu and check the option called “Read-Only”.

It can also be done by right-clicking on a terminal window and selecting “Read-Only”

Revert the same process to resume input of characters.


🤣 Meme of the week

Cheers to that! 🥂


🗓️ Tech Trivia

On December 18, 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1.0. Perl became a popular scripting language among the Unix and later Linux sysadmins.


🧑‍🤝‍🧑 FOSSverse corner

One of our longtime FOSSers has shared a detailed tutorial on how to use the ‘runit‘ init system.

Multiboot: setting grub parametersI learnt something about grub today. Say we have 2 Linux distros, A and B , with grub configured to multiboot. Let distro A be the controller of grub. So A has grub installed and has a /boot/grub/grub.cfg file produced by running update-grub ( and os-prober). B may have no grub installed at all, and èven if it has grub, it may have no /boot/grub/grub.cfg file. Now lets say I want to set a linux boot parameter for B… I go to /etc/default/grub in B and add a line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“init=/…

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