FSM Newsletter 11th of December 2006

FSM Newsletter 11th of December 2006


Mon, 2006-12-11 15:06 -- admin

Hi all, welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with the world of free software. Happy reading!

General announcements

Big news, everybody... Issue 15 has been released! If you haven’t already got it, come and download... it’s packed full of interesting articles!

Furthermore, the winners of the blogging competition have been notified and are now blogging with us. This is fantastic news, and combined with the other new bloggers we have recently aquired, we now have an army of talent writing for us all the time. So keep your eyes out for the new names on the front page, and enjoy what they have to say!

Latest content

Interview with Fred Trotter: the Medsphere saga—Tony Mobily interviews Fred Trotter about the “open source” company who’s suing someone for releasing their code? Read more...

Visualise your disk usage—Jon Peck helps you clean up your virtual desk. Read more...

Graphics creation on GNU/Linux: nice stuff and big hurdles—Mitch Meyran talks the good and the bad with GNU/Linux graphics programs. Read more...

Have I already lost my bet?—Tony Mobily tries to figure out why it was so hard to find a laptop preinstalled with Ubuntu... Read more...

Ubuntu for Non-Profit Newbies—Chris Holt talks about the good that free software can do for non-profit. Read more...

From XMMS to audacious: the history of a Winamp clone—Patrick McFarland talks free software music programs. Read more...

MP3: nothing to do with piracy—Marco Marongiu’s MP3 quandry has nothing to do with piracy. Read more...

Sometimes I just want to be stupid—Ken Leyba sometimes wishes for blissful ignorance. Read more...

Viral advertising via free software—Terry Hancock looks at how viral advertising could work for free software. Read more...

Kerberos, final bits—Wouter Verhelst gives us more on Kerberos. Read more...

Change is maddeningly inevitable—To broaden or not broaden the GNU/Linux user base; Chris Mostek asks the philosophical questions. Read more...

Penguinz in da hood—Jabari Zakiya talks about marketing penguins... in his hood. Read more...

Latest content continued

Reclaiming ICT education: why free software is a necessity in schools—Tim Cowlishaw talks about education and free software—and why IT education shouldn’t be a how-to for using the Microsoft suite. Read more...

Welcome ippimail.com!—Tony Mobily investigates a free software project success story. Read more...

Child’s play—Rachel Probert theorizes about how to convert young and old to free software... with a little healthy competition. Read more...

Fork off Mr Ballmer!—Oh Steve. Gary Richmond sums up where we’re at with the Microsoft debacle. Read more...

Why hack your game console?—Jon Peck talks gaming—seriously. Read more...

Firefox extensions: fun and games—Anthony Taylor examines the classic gaming options on firefox. Read more...

GPLv3 embedded in devices—Ciaran O’Riordan has a detailed look at GPLv3. Read more...

Free software for non-profits—Chris Holt looks at some of the concerns non-profit groups have with free software—when they really need it most. Read more...

Converting your techno-resistant loved ones—Chris Mostek gives step-by-step instructions on how to convert the non-believers. Read more...

How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?—Scott Carpenter tries to figure out if you have to be super-smart to use GNU/Linux... or not. Read more...

Dump Linux now!—But why, Anthony Taylor? Why are we over Linux? Read more...

File formats: approaching the freedom crossroad—Dale O’Gorman philosophizes about freedom. Read more...

Latest book reviews released

Moving to Ubuntu Linux by Marcel Gagne Thinking about Ubuntu? Jeremy Turner looks at a good starting place. Read more...

Core Python Programming by Wesley J Chun Want to learn/brush up on Python? Jeremy Turner looks into it... Read more...

Book competition announcement for this fortnight

This week we are giving away a copy ofManaging and Customizing OpenCMS 6 Websites by Matt Butcher AND a copy of OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks by Markus Feilner.

All you need to do to enter is check out the latest book competition announcement on our blogs page.

GOOD LUCK!

Thanks go to _Packt for providing these fantastic prizes._

Winner of the book competition from last fortnight

To be announced.

Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition

Poll Results—What’s your distro of choice?

This was a VERY popular poll; lots of comments, lots of votes... the winning distro was Ubuntu, which flew into the lead with 46% of the vote. Then came Debian with 13%, Fedora with 10%, OpenSUSE with 9%, and Gentoo with 6%, then the “other” option with 5%. A lot of people talked about why they liked certain distros, and it helps us too—so we know the kind of things our readers are interested in with regards to their distros. Read more here and stay tuned for...

Category: 
Announcements
Tagging: 
newsletter
License: 
CC-BY

Author information

admin's picture

Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

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

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.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

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).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

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.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

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.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

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 entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

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

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

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, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

Most emailed

Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

Free Software Magazine uses Apollo project management software and CRM for its everyday activities!