Issues

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Online articles

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Articles published "outside" normal issues. This is an ever-growing issue.

Issue 22

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In this issue of Free Software Magazine Terry Hancock interviews the amazing engineers involved in the OpenHardware project. Gavin Baker casts doubts on the effectiveness of the GPL In today's web-oriented world where applications are less and less "desktop". Scott Nesbitt's article on Prism, which helps people to bring web applications to the desktop couldn't be more timely. Steven Goodwin then tries to awaken the hacker in all of us with his fantastic piece on home automation, and Mitch Meyran talks about creating web pages the "right" way.

Issue 21

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In this issue of Free Software Magazine David Jacovkis reports from Colombia and explains why free software is an ethical choice. Colin McGregor interviews several key people in the GNU/Linux world as well as explaining how to get KDE looking fantastic. Then we have Terry Hancock covering the Open Hardware project and making a comprehensive list of Linux-friendly hardware. Steven Goodwin shares how much he saved by using free software for his great beer podcast, and Alan Berg entertains us with free software easter eggs, while Andrew Min will explain the basics of HTML... Monty Python style.

Issue 20

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Issue 20 of Free Software Magazine has hit the virtual newsstand! Mauro Bieg talks about DRM, while our tips&tricks hosts, Gary and Andrew, uncover more GNU/Linux secrets. Andrew Min then tells you how to have the best-looking desktop with Compiz Fusion. Scott Carpenter and Gary Richmond talk about Nautilus and Konqueror in their respective articles, Solveig Haugland comes back to FSM talking about OpenOffice.org... and these are just some of the articles in the User Space section!

Issue 19

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Issue 19 of Free Software Magazine is out, and so are another 18 fantastic articles. Tony Mobily opens the magazine with his editorial on file formats. Andrew Min and Gary Richmond join forces to provide useful tips&tricks, while Robin Monks reviews some of the best free software media players. Howard Fosdick reviews Puppy Linux, Andrew Min talks about Pidgin, and Dirk Morris covers Untangle Gateway... and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Issue 18

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Issue 18 is here and with it another bunch of great articles all about free software. We have Andrew Min showing us how to dual-boot Windows and Kubuntu. There's Mitch Meyran's in depth article on 3D desktops and Xavier Calbet's one on Fractal generation. Rosalyn Hunter breaks in new users with her follow up article on using the CLI and Jonathan Roberts gives us all the low down on how to get help with free software. Of course, I'm only scratching the surface... there's a lot more in this fine issue of Free Software Magazine.

Issue 17

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Issue 17 of Free Software Magazine is here and it's a big one! Steve Goodwin talks about the evil inside every programmer in "The seven sins of programmers". Solveig Haugland has two great new OpenOffice.org howtos for you. David Horton wants to help you make waves with Audacity and Matt Barton lets us in on "What's a GNU/Linux distribution?" anyway. Eddy Macnaghten goes into open-format depth in his "ODF/OOXML technical white paper" and Ken Leyba helps you "Backup your workstation with Backup Manager". And, as always, but even more this time than usual, there's much, much more...Enjoy!

Issue 16

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Wow! We're up to Issue 16 of Free Software Magazine. And it comes with a big change - it's online only! It still brings you a wealth of fine articles: Davide Carboni hacks your living room in "A media center based on GNU/Linux", Mitul Limbani phones in a detailed howto for Asterisk in "Asterisk, the easy way", Alan Berg blasts away another game review in "Vega Strike", and Jon Peck helps us all with our iPods in "Managing your iPod without iTunes"... and of course much more! Enjoy.

This issue is only available online

Issue 15

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Issue 15 of Free Software Magazine brings you another fantastic spread of articles to feast on. Nathan Sanders will have you "Stitching seamless panoramas with Hugin", Alan Berg has some "Fun with free software astronomy" and our favorite tank simulator "Bzflags". Sreejith Nair teaches will teach you to "Control machines with your machine" and Ryan Cartwright will show you how to plot your family tree with GRAMPS in "Roots access". And we have two much-anticipated sequels: Yousef Ourabi concludes his "Secure email servers from scratch with FreeBSD 6" article, and Graham Oakes finishes off "Creating a managed website". And, don't forget... lots more!

Issue 14

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Free Software Magazine presents another collection of great articles for its issue 14. Alan Berg takes us soaring with his review "Flying high with FlightGear" and Anthony Taylor shows us some curious Firefox extensions in "Firefox extensions: fun and games". In "Creating a managed website — Part 1" Graham Oakes reveals a lot about content management systems. And, while we're talking about websites, Terry Hancock will "Spiff up your website with KImageMapEditor". As always, there's a lot more too...

Issue 13

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Issue 13 of Free Software Magazine brings you a bunch of fine articles covering various aspects of the free software world. We have Richard Fennimore showing us how to spruce up Ubuntu, Robin Monks plays with a few of the best Tetris clones and John Goerzen tells you who to call for your free software phone needs. Plus, Robert Pogson teaches us how to set up class using Edubuntu, LTS and thin clients and much more...

Issue 12

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In Issue 12 of Free Software Magazine, Jerome Gotangco guides us through securing email communication and Yousef Ourabi shows us how to harden our Linux servers. Rosalyn Hunter introduces the GNU/Linux CLI for beginners and Terry Hancock explains LyX. We also get to have some fun when Robin Monks reviews some clones of a classic game: Tetris. And more...

Issue 11

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Issue 11 of Free Software Magazine is finally here and it's packed with great articles including: our own Tony Mobily interviewing Simon Peter the creator of klik. Robin Monks gets us started with Knoppix and Marco Marongiu takes Synaptic Package Manager out of the box. We also have Alan Berg (with the much required assistance of his son Nelson) fighting his way through the Battle for Wesnoth. And, of course, much more...

Issue 10

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In Free Software Magazine's 10th issue Eddy Macnaghten helps to make X a little less unknown and "MC" Brown browses the browsers for Mac OS X. On a more political note: David Sugar talks about how free software is freeing Venezuela and Tom Chance reveals how the internet is beginning to aid in political campaigning. And more...

Issue 9

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In Issue 9 of Free Software Magazine Saqib Ali gives the public a lesson in Private Key management and David Horton shows us ways to attract volunteers for free software projects. There's also an intro to RSS news feeds by John Locke, and much, much more.

Issue 8

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Issue 8 of Free Software Magazine talks extensively about liberating software - in particular old games and operating systems. This issue also covers free (as in freedom) antivirus software for windows, the change of the market towards a free matter economy, and much more.

Issue 7

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Issue 7 of Free Software Magazine gives you advice and assistance on migrating across to free software. Plus in a very special interview our TeX programmer Gianluca Pignalberi talks with the creator of TeX himself, the Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming, Donald E. Knuth.

Issue 6

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In this special 84 page issue of Free Software Magazine we paint you the pretty picture that is art and free software. We also have our Editor In Chief Tony Mobily interviewing Miguel De Icaza about MONO and Tom Chance concludes his excellent series on guerrilla marketing.

Issue 5

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The June issue of Free Software Magazine tells the real story behind free software and virtual machines. Also in this issue, Saqib Ali presents the news on RSS and David M. Berry and Giles Moss take us for a walk on the Creative Commons.

Issue 4

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In this issue of Free Software Magazine we let you in on the dangers of writing and using proprietary software and also how to avoid doing so by using free software alternatives. Plus Marcus McCallion shows us the power of graphic icons and Adam Hyde introduces us to net.labels.

Issue 3

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Worlds collide in Issue 3 of Free Software Magazine. In this months issue we cover the pros and cons of using free and proprietary software together. John Locke also relates his story of the collision between his laptop and a cup of coffee and he lets us in on how he recovered from this accident.

Issue 2

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In the March issue of Free Software Magazine we report on the on going battle with the ever increasing SPAM and some of the latest things troops are doing to fight it. On another front, Aaron Krowne launches a counter-FUD strike against anti-Wikipedia statements.

Issue 1

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This is the first issue of Free Software Magazine. This month we take a closer look at free and proprietary file formats. Chris Karr shows us through Mac OS X and Tom Chance reminds us of the principles that underpin free software.

Issue 0

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This is the issue "zero" of Free Software Magazine. It is meant to show the magazine's potential and characteristics. Creating it has required a huge effort from all of us, but we can only be proud of the finished product. Remember: no compositor has touched the magazine at all!



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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. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe.

After talking about it for a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a short case study about how I created the site. So, here we go.

The constraints

The site needed to be hosted in Perth.

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. 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, Super Shareware, PCWin Download Center and Software Archive (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.

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.