FSM Newsletter 29th of January 2007

FSM Newsletter 29th of January 2007


Mon, 2007-01-29 10:00 -- admin

Welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter, your link to the free software world! Happy reading!

Latest content

How to hate free software in 3 easy steps—Oh, compiling! Steve Goodwin asks why it’s so difficult. Read more...

The state of the union of FOSS—Let Jabari Zakiya inspire you with a rousing speech about FOSS! Read more...

Control machines with your machine: Digital speed controller using RTAI/Linux—Linux—what can’t it do? Sreejith Nair talks about the versatility of a Linux RTOS. Read more...

Small businesses are ripe for free software—Chris Mostek considers the benefits of free software for small business. Read more...

Free books for free software—free software is software for society—and Anthony Taylor thinks that if we had more texts documenting free software, we would be giving even more to society. Read more...

Has the free desktop revolution arrived?—Jon Peck has the opportunity to find out... Read more...

Ruby, a real gem of FOSS—Jabari Zakiya shares his reasons for labelling Ruby a jewel. Read more...

Fun with free software astronomy: a photorealistic experience—Alan Berg admires some free software astromomy programs. Read more...

Use GNU/Linux and help save the planet—In a world of constant computer upgrades, Gary Richmond looks at how using an old machine with GNU/Linux isn’t just better for you, it’s better for the planet too! Read more...

Latest book reviews released

**Self Service Linux by Mark Wilding and Dan Behman** Alan Berg gets prepared for that most infrequent of events—Linux behaving badly! Read more...

**Embedded Linux Primer by Christopher Hallinan** Alan Berg examines the way from developer to embedded developer. Read more...

Book competition announcement for this fortnight

This week we are giving away a copy ofLinux Server Hacks, Volume 2 by Bill Von Hagen and Brian K Jones and a copy of Ubuntu Hacks by Jonathon Oxer, Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers.

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

GOOD LUCK!

Thanks go to _O’Reilly for providing these fantastic prizes._

Winner of the book competition from last fortnight

Winner 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 kind of articles would you prefer to see in Free Software Magazine?

We reached an impass this week—while 45% of you voted for Desktop oriented howto-like tutorials, many of the commenters came out strongly in support of Opinion pieces on free software and politics and Comparative articles and reviews (hardware and software) at 17% each. This was closely followed by System administration articles with 16%, with Other coming in last with 6%. You can all rest assured that we are going to continue to provide a balance between each of the categories into the future. Click here to view the comments and graph and stay tuned for...

This fortnight’s poll

What’s your favourite email program?

Don’t forget to let us know what your “other” program is if you use a different one from the ones listed.

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@...

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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

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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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