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I typically have a dozen computers up and running on my home network—yes, 12. And I am responsible for several more in other locations. With so many computers, there are always failures of various types, and I ultimately diagnose many of them as hardware problems. But it can be difficult to diagnose which hardware component is causing the issue.

Support calls are important and often satisfying in the end, but the act of clear communication can be arduous for everyone involved. If you've ever been on a support call, you've probably spent several minutes spelling out even the shortest commands and explaining in detail where the spaces and returns fall. While it's often easier to just seize control of a user's computer, that's not really the best way to educate. What you might try instead is sending a user a screen recording, but one that they can copy commands from and paste into their own terminal.

I've recently become a little obsessed with an online word puzzle game in which you have six attempts to guess a random five-letter word. The word changes every day, and you can only play once per day. After each guess, each of the letters in your guess is highlighted: gray means that letter does not appear in the mystery word, yellow means that letter appears in the word but not at that position, and green means the letter appears in the word at that correct position.

With the pandemic changing the way we're working, job decentralization is becoming an important challenge for all companies.

Battling the pandemic has created a shortage of microchips needed to produce new computers. In addition, some newer proprietary operating systems come with higher minimum standards for those systems. This conundrum has created an opportunity for those of us who use Linux in our daily lives.

Linux has long been noted for adding life to aging hardware. That ability has been a boon to those folks who use computers every day.

The 12-Factor App methodology provides guidelines for building apps in a short time frame and for making them scalable. It was created by the developers at Heroku for use with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps, web apps, and potentially Communication-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) apps. For organizing projects effectively and managing scalable applications, the 12-Factor App methodology has powerful advantages for open source development.

This article is part of a series about open source DevOps tools for C/C++ development. If you build up your project from the beginning on a powerful toolchain, you will benefit from a faster and safer development. Aside from that, it will be easier for you to get others involved in your project. In this article, I will prepare a C/C++ build system based on CMake and VSCodium.

If I told you that all content and software you need to build the metaverse is already available and completely free, would you do it?

Hold that thought, and let's take a step back and explain the metaverse.

Python has long been one of the most popular programming languages, but that doesn't mean there's nothing new to learn. This list of Opensource.com's most-read articles about Python is an excellent place to start. 

• Widespread adoption of machine learning is here, and its applications are still growing. See how machine learning, using Naïve Bayes classifiers and implemented with Python, can solve real-life problems.

Containers are an important part of modern computing, and as the infrastructure around containers evolves, new and better tools have started to surface. It used to be that you could run containers with just LXC, and then Docker gained popularity, and things started getting more complex. Eventually, we got the container management system we all deserved with Podman, a daemonless container engine that makes containers and pods easy to build, run, and manage.

If you've ever wanted to join an open source community and contribute or start an open source project of your own, then read on to find out about our fun and awesome open source project we created from scratch at Red Hat. I'm a Software Quality Engineering Manager in the OpenStack Networking group, and together with a team of engineers both from my team and from R&D, we collaborated to create the Tobiko open source testing framework.

Sometimes, you just have to start a new open source project.

Automation just keeps improving the lives of everyone on the IT team. Ansible helps anyone who uses IT automation, whether for keeping files organized or configuring printers, or for anything else someone can imagine and build. These are some of the most notable use cases and experiences shared on Opensource.com in 2021.

If you are hearing about Ansible for the first time, or if you're a seasoned user, these articles will have something for you.

For governments and large organizations, open source continued to be a critical component for policy decisions and sustainability goals in 2021. The United Nations is one such organization that is relying on open source to reach its goals across a wide spectrum of issues including climate change. While it is crucial for world leaders to make big decisions to save the planet, many average citizens are also eager to contribute to the cause.

If you stream with OBS with multiple cameras on Linux, you might notice that cameras are loaded as they are detected during boot. You probably don't give it much thought, normally, but if you have a permanent streaming setup with complex OBS templates, you need to know which camera in the physical world is going to show up in which screen in the virtual one. In other words, you don't want to assign one device as Camera A today only to have it end up as Camera B tomorrow.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, DOS was king of the desktop. Not satisfied with a proprietary version of DOS, programmers worldwide worked together to create an open source version of DOS called FreeDOS, which first became available in 1994. The FreeDOS Project continues to grow in 2021 and beyond.

We've run several articles about FreeDOS on Opensource.com to help new users get started with FreeDOS and learn new programs. Here are a few of our most popular FreeDOS articles from the last year:

You can't remember every command or shortcut you need to use. We are all human. Usually, I keep notes on separate bits of paper and in notebooks. This has led to some serious dysfunction on my desk. There is some five years' worth of clutter in scribbled bits everywhere. 2021's cheat sheets will bring that clutter down a notch. From JavaScript to Linux, there's something in this list for you.

Sometimes it's useful to get visual feedback from a script. For example, when a script or cron job completes, a long-running build fails, or there is an urgent problem during script execution. Desktop applications can do this with popup notifications, but it can be done from a script too! You can use script commands to send yourself desktop notifications and reminders.

In introducing pdftk-java, I explained how I use the pdftk-java command to make quick, often scripted, modifications to PDF files.

I am proficient in several programming languages, but my favorite has to be C. Developed in the 1970s as a systems programming language, C remains one of the most popular programming languages in 2021. If you'd like to explore several features of the C programming language, start with these popular articles from the last year:

Short option parsing using getopt in C