FSM Newsletter 12th of February 2007

FSM Newsletter 12th of February 2007


Mon, 2007-02-12 00:00 -- admin

Hello readers, and welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software! Enjoy!

General announcements

Great news... Issue 16 has finally been released! It is jam-packed with excellent articles—it may be our largest magazine yet! We hope you’ll enjoy them! Also, for those of you who have been living under a rock for the past week, we have stopped releasing the PDFs of Free Software Magazine. While there was quite an outcry from some of our readers about this, it was a financial decision. So even though some of you will miss PDFs, the staff here at the FSM can put more energy into the magazine itself. And we are still catering to those of you who prefer to read the magazine without ads and offline—we are organising a “printer friendly” version of each article. It’s still incomplete, but it will beimproved over time so we can continue provide you all with the magazine you love!

Latest content

Making PDFs with free software—Jon Peck looks at two free software packages that can be used to create PDFs. Read more...

A killer idea for code—Anthony Taylor knows what the free software world needs—a website dedicated to free software code. Read more...

Faking the FOSS—Jabari Zakiya explores the notion of being free... or paying lip service. Read more...

Paper is dead—has PDF followed suit?—Tony Mobily’s controversial editorial announcing the possible death of PDF. Read more...

A Valentine’s guide to geek behaviours—Chris Mostek imparts his wisdom on geek/non-geek relationships for Valentine’s day. Read more...

So, why has the PDF gone?—Tony Mobily responds to the reaction to FSM dropping PDFs. Read more...

Gentlemen, start your engines!—Marco Marongiu talks TORCS.Read more...

Command line media editing—Jonathon Roberts gives a howto on DVD authoring. Read more...

The machine stops: IPV6 and the growth of the internet—Gary Richmond contemplates the connectedness of the internet and what a pain it is for those that bestow the IP address... Read more...

Using free software to build professional and life skills—Jon Peck considers the contribution free software makes to us, and the contribution we make to free software. Read more...

War and free software—Jabari Zakiya explores how tools of war can become tools of peace.Read more...

Digital image resizing with the GIMP—Are you sure you know everything needed to resize images? And can you do it properly with the GIMP? Gianluca Pignalberi tells you how. Read more...

Why Johnny can code—Anthony Taylor explains that learning to code doesn’t just involve studying—it’s hands on. Read more...

Free software vs open source—Jonathon Roberts weighs into the nomenclature debate.Read more...

mgetty—Wouter Verhelst talks sending and receiving faxes on GNU/Linux. Read more...

Do we need an Ubuntu installer for Windows?—Jon Peck debates the need for an Ubuntu installer on Windows—is it really such a good idea? Read more...

Latest book reviews released

**The Definitive Guide to GCC, Second Edition by William von Hagen** Want to know how to use GCC effectively? Alan Berg reads along. Read more...

**Pro Apache XML by Poornachandra Sarang, Ph.D.** Alan Berg gets to know Apache Software Foundation XML projects. Read more...

Book competition announcement for this fortnight

This week we are giving away a copy of Self Service Linux by Mark Wilding and Dan Behman and a copy of Embedded Linux Primer by Christopher Hallinan.

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

GOOD LUCK!

Thanks go to _Prentice Hall 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 favourite email program?

Thunderbird was the definite winner, romping home with 51% of the vote. From there, the percentages take a dive... “Other” came second with 31% of the vote, followed very closely by Evolution (12%) and Kmail (11%). This dropped off further to a tie between Outlook/Outlook express and Mutt (both with 6%), and finally Pine with 1%. Read more here and stay tuned for...

This fortnight’s poll

Who should be the next president of the United States?

A little bit of fun this fortnight to raise our spirits. If the candidates for the upcoming US election were miraculously swapped with some noted IT celebrities, which one would you vote for and why? You can also let us know who you think would be most likely to win and why too.

Reminders

Comments

Your comments on articles, issues, and blog entries are very welcome. They provide other readers with insightful suggestions, further information, and the feeling that they are not alone. They also provide our authors with the feeling that they are being heard. 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.

Avatars

Avatars are a great way of expressing your personal identity, whether it be a photo or an image that you feel represents the you you want to be. Read more about avatars here. To add an avatar: log in, go to “my account” in the menu on the left, go to the “edit” tab and scroll down to where it says “Upload picture”. Now, hit the browse button, find the image on your computer that you want to upload and go to the bottom of the page and hit the submit button. That’s it; you now have an avatar image.

Donate

As you might know already FSM is a low profit project with all funds raised going back into producing the fine magazine you can download for free.

Think about how much you would normally have to spend buying a magazine of this quality. We provide it for free!

Your donations will help us to continue spreading the word about free software and producing more fantastic issues.

Contacting us

If you’d like to contribute to FSM: read our Write for us page. Then send your proposal to proposals@...

If you have some feedback for us about our site or its content, then drop us a line at input@...

If you are interested in advertising on our site, or in our magazine or newsletter, you can find more information on our Advertise page or send an email to advertise@...

If you need help with your account for any reason, please send an email to helpdesk@...

Please add freesoftwaremagazine.com to the ends of the email addresses above. Sorry for the inconvenience but spammers make this necessary.

Thanks

Thank you for subscribing to Free Software Magazine. You are a part of a growing community who help to raise the awareness of, and educate new users in, the joys of free software. Without you we would not have this community and without you we would not have a magazine. Happy reading!

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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.

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