10 years on: free software wins, but you have nowhere to install it

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I am typing this as I am finally connected in shell to my Android phone. The prompt reminds me that it’s based on the Linux kernel (it’s free), the Dalvik virtual machine (it’s free), and free libraries. Millions of Android devices are shipped every day, each one is a Linux system. Today, it’s phone. Soon, it will be tablets: Android 3.0 (coming out at the end of the year) will finally be very suitable for tablets. Apple alone will have to face fierce competition on pretty much every front. Microsoft… who? They are more irrelevant every day. I should be happy, right? Well, sort of. Looking back at how long it took me to get this shell prompt makes me worried. Very worried. We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware.

Apollo Project and Contact Management

Drowning in your TODO list? Trouble organizing project and contacts? Try Apollo, project and contact management done right.

http://www.apollohq.com

A single-page Ajax application that finally looks and feels like an application.

The Jargon of Freedom: 60 Words and Phrases with Context

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What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.

Sky Over Baikonur Backdrop with Gimp

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Often, when modelling in 3D, it’s necessary to create a “backdrop” panoramic image. Typically this shows sky and distant land which should appear behind the foreground action. One place we’ll need this for the pilot to Lunatics is for the sky in Baikonur, Kazakhstan on launch day at the beginning of the story. I had some very particular ideas about how this should look, and I want to create just the right look. Here’s how I constructed it.

Defending the Free Commons: Another 30 Words in Context

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Having defined the terms that represent the core values of free culture and free software in a previous column, today I want to talk about the terms that define its boundaries: how we describe them and defend them. And what’s on the other side of them.

The Bizarre Cathedral - 75

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Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Finding Free Music for a Free Film with Jamendo, VLC, and K3B

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One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the material that you both want and can legally use. Here’s a little bit of my strategy, a few tips, and some sources, including Jamendo, which I found to be the most useful for finding music. I also touch upon some useful free software tools for listening and sorting tracks.

MediaWiki and Script Translation for the Morevna Project

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We are getting very close to wrapping up the English translation of the script for “The Beautiful Queen Marya Morevna: Underground” (which is the working title of the film being produced by the Morevna Project). So it seems like a good time to talk about the software we’ve been using, which is MediaWiki.

Book Review: Foundation Blender Compositing by Roger Wickes

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Hardly anyone realizes that Blender even is a video compositing and non-linear editing tool (in addition to its modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities). There are few, if any, books available on how to use it for that purpose, so Roger Wickes’ book is much needed. It contains an enormous amount of very useful information.

The Bizarre Cathedral - 74

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Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Extracting and Using a Recorded Sound Effect with VLC and Audacity

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I found a useful sound effect in an online video from NASA which replaces an earlier temporary sound I used in a scene soundtrack for the Lunatics pilot, “No Children in Space.” I’m going to extract the sound from the video (with VLC), cut out the sound I need, clean it up, and insert it into an existing sound mix (all with Audacity). This should give you some insight into using Audacity and a VLC on a real project.

Backup up your GoogleMail locally with getmail

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To the chagrin of their competitors, GoogleMail seems to have become almost as synonymous with webmail as Google has with search engine (recently my six year old was explaining to me how he Googled for something at school). GoogleMail is a useful tool and has a lot of advantages over traditional client-server mail accounts, particularly if you are on the move. To be honest those sorts of advantages are present in pretty much any webmail setup: I’m just concentrating on GoogleMail because it’s by my experience the most popular. But GoogleMail has one disadvantage, all your messages are stored on Google’s servers. If you lose access to Google service or to your account then you lose your e-mails. Fear not oh free software lover, help is at hand in the form of the very useful getmail.

Falcon WOPI, the Falcon Web Oriented Programming Interface

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These are exciting times for Falcon’s language development. New and interesting features are being implemented, tested and rolled out at break neck speeds! Not only are core language features being released, but so are a multitude of feathers (Falcon libraries/modules). One such module release is V1.0 Web Oriented Programming Interface (WOPI). It is the intent of this article to cover the basic features/functionalities of WOPI through common web oriented functional examples.

Soyuz Launch Vehicle in Blender: Part I, Modelling the Core Stage

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For Lunatics, we need several space vehicles. For a few of them, we have existing free-licensed computer models that we can use, but others are not so easy, or need customizations. The Soyuz launch vehicle is one of these, and it was relatively easy to model, since launch vehicles are geometrically simple (basically a bunch of extruded cylinders and cones). In Part I, I’ll demonstrate the basic modelling techniques I used to create the Core Stage.

Storyboards for a film with Flickr, OpenClipart, Inkscape, Gimp, and ImageMagick

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How do you get a flurry of images in your head into a concrete description of a film so that you can produce it? One important step is to create storyboards. For the storyboards on Lunatics, I’ve used a variety of approaches, from rough sketches on index cards to found photos and collages. This has allowed me to collect my ideas and get them into a concrete form — both as cards I can manipulate directly and as images on computer that I will later be able to turn into an animatic.

Making Movies with Free Software

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Sometimes life is very circular. Once upon a time, I was a film major. Then I was an astronomer, then I was unemployed for quite awhile, during which time I discovered free software, and as a result of my various rantings about it, I started writing for Free Software Magazine. Now it seems that I’ve become a film-maker again. I’m working on not one, but two animated science-fiction films using free software tools, intended for a free-licensed release on the internet under new distribution models. And, being a writer, I’m going to write about it. I think it will be both entertaining and useful.

Creating an Animatic Using Audacity and Kino

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An animatic is a kind of a rough sketch for a film. It’s not really meant to be an artform in itself (although some reach that point), but it is rather intended to be enough information for the filmmaker to make intelligent production decisions. It also must be cheap and easy, since effort that goes into the animatic will not appear in the final film. I have not yet fully decided what tool is right for doing the animatics for Lunatics, so I’m doing some experiments with different tools in order to decide. In this column, I’ll create an animatic for a short sequence from the pilot.

Painting Sound with ARSS and Gimp

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As I was working on a sound track project for a science-fiction film I’ve been working on, I remembered reading an article in Free Software Magazine, by Gianluca Pignalberi, in which he described filtering using Gimp and a command-line program then called “ARSE” (version 0.1). The program is now called “The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph” (“ARSS”, now version 0.2.3). Combined with an image editor of your choice (I also chose Gimp), it also turns out to be a very interesting way to make original sound effects — by painting the sound spectrum.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari have finally killed Internet Explorer

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I have been wanting to write this article for a while. Years, in fact. I am determined to write it in the simplest possible format: no punch-line at the bottom, no building up to a grand conclusion, but simply stating something impressive, true, and simply wonderful: the hegemony that Internet Explorer once upon a time had is… over. Right now, other browsers are fighting amongst each other, and it’s all about how much of IE’s share they are getting. The war is over: Internet Explorer lost. Everybody else won.

So, what kind of scenario has the IT world painfully missed?

OpenSolaris and its killer features. Coming to a GNU/Linux near you?

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When we think of free operating systems we tend to think overwhelmingly of the big hitters (all GNU/Linux) like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva and then of those niche distros that have been designed for low end systems or for specialist purposes like security and forensics. But Oranges are not the only fruit. There is a hinterland out there called Unixland, populated by other less well known systems whose roots are firmly Unix too. BSD for example, famed for its rock-like security. OpenSolaris is another one, perhaps less well known, but it has features that are well worth a punt.

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Interviews

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

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Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Nice meeting you Dave. Please introduce yourself to our readers…

Hi Tony, nice to meet you too, I am Dave Mohyla President and founder of dtidata.com, Inc

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?

DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Interview with Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con

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Fuat Kircaali is the founder and CEO of SYS-CON Media, the company which publishes “Linux Business News” among its 16 i-technology titles.

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark agreed on releasing an interview about anything and everything

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Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

The interview

Tell us about your early days Mark. You started Thawte, which eventually became extremely successful and was bought by VeriSign. Well, what was the most exciting moment for you, during the development of Thawte?

Most emailed

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

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A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was “Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for”. His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of strippers in Perth, strippers in Sydney, strippers in Brisbane, strippers in Melbourne. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

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Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you’re looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

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More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops at items.com for cheap, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But… is that the full story?

Is better education the key to finding better software?

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I read David Jonathon’s article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don’t advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available… if you know where to look.

Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week! Plus a SNEAK PREVIEW of FSDaily's new site

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  • 2007-11-24
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You get the best free software news at FSDaily… because YOU decide what’s important. Here are the top 10 FSDaily stories from the last week as voted by the members. Don’t like ‘em? Think something’s missing? Want to know more? Head to FSDaily and get voting!

Zenoss: a great system monitoring program which tries to do everything right

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I was happily hanging out in the sysadmin room of a major ISP around here in Western Australia (no, I wasn’t meant to be there, if you really want to know!). Steve, the senior sysadmin in charge of the place, showed me a computer screen (running Vista, but I won’t comment on that) and said “Oh yeah, I’m sure you know about this…”. “Yeah, I know Google maps” I answered. He looked at me embarrassed. “Err… actually, we use Zenoss server monitoring here… look close. That’s our VPN!” It was a map of their server in Australia. There were green lines between them.