FSM Newsletter 8 October 2007

FSM Newsletter 8 October 2007


Sat, 2007-10-06 21:26 -- admin

Hello everybody, and welcome once again to the fortnightly newsletter of Free Software Magazine: keeping you well informed about the realm of free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this week! Happy reading!

General announcements

Issue 20 has been released! It's brimming with fabulous and informative articles, don't delay... get in there and start reading!

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week

  1. Free Software Magazine's Issue 20 is out - Free to read online and free to download. There's 19 new articles to peruse. Read more...

  2. Novell uses Microsoft FUD to market itself - For some time, we have not heard anything about the patent sellout which Novell inked with Microsoft 11 months ago. Read more...

  3. 5 Reasons your parents should use Linux - It’s no secret that tech-savvy computer users typically become the go-to guy for all technical help in their circles. Read more...

  4. Torvalds irate over Linux Smack - Linus Torvalds has launched a blistering attack on security programmers who object to adding the Smack application to the upcoming 2.6.24 Linux kernel. Read more...

  5. OpenOffice.org community conflict leads to fragmentation - In a blog entry posted yesterday, developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun's excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Read more...

  6. FFII awards Microsoft "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization" prize - "we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is." Read more...

  7. HP: Linux ready for most applications - Linux is ready to take on a more serious role in enterprises, a senior Hewlett-Packard executive has said. Read more...

  8. Full speed ahead for Linux drivers - Noted Linux kernel and Novell developer Greg Kroah-Hartman will be devoting all his time to helping create Linux drivers. Read more...

  9. Open source entrepreneur turns his hobby into an Inc. 500 enterprise - iFAX, a commercial company that is built on open source fax server software HylaFAX, was recently included in Inc. Magazine's 2007 list of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. Read more...

  10. Distinguishing Between Free Software and Freeware - I ran across a business website that refers to Amanda and Bacula as freeware. Read more...

Thanks to dave, C733tus, greengrass, snotbutter, can.axis, Jimbob, and dcparris for these stories!

Latest content

Extending Nautilus: rotating JPG images - How to customize the GNOME file manager with scripts. By Scott Carpenter. Read more...

Free software drivers: the unmatrix - Mitch Meyran's take on 3D cards. Read more...

Interview with Clement Lefebvre - This is the first in what Tony Mobily hopes will be a series of interviews with major GNU/Linux distribution lead developers. Read more...

Using PDFedit in Kubuntu - Laurie Langham learns to use PDFedit in Kubuntu. Read more...

SSH beyond the command line - File servers made easy with SSH. By Nathan Sanders. Read more...

The "alias" command - Alias: Speed Dial for your Shell. By Gary Richmond. Read more...

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.

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.

Invite a friend

Share Free Software Magazine with your friends! We have a really strong community and we want it to grow and grow, and with your help, it can! When you are logged in to Free Software Magazine, you should have a feature called “Invite Your Friends” showing on the left hand side in your navigation menu. If you click on this feature, you will be taken to a page where you can insert your friends’ email addresses and a personal message, and they will receive an invitation from you! You can also keep track of which of your friends have accepted your invitations. Go on, spread the free software word today!

Subscriptions

Ever wanted to follow that story, or blogger, or be informed when a change appears to some content that you want to keep up with? Now you can. Using our new “Subscribe” feature, you can receive an email update every time a blog or page is updated or when a comment is added, so you can keep up with all the latest changes. You can manage your subscriptions by logging in and going here.

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 read 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!

Category: 
Announcements
Tagging: 
newsletters
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!