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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
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.
Comments
Why ask?
We decided that it would be interesting and useful to see what distros our readers use. Sorry if your distro is not shown... you know we can't show them all. We have listed the top ten distros from DistroWatch.com in no particular order. We may use this info to decide on what distros to focus on for future issues and articles.
I voted for Ubuntu since
I voted for Ubuntu since I've used it the longest (since Hoary). It's the one distro that you'll always find on my system. I prefer Debian-based distros. Debian itself complicated to set up in some areas. Lately my distro for experimenting is Arch Linux. It gives the administrator total control, but provides a nice package system--kind of a cross between Slack and Debian. Works well and is fast, too.
Whoa, first vote
I'm still a Debian user, despite my whining about some recent policy decisions. It's the biggest distribution and one of the most purely produced by a community process. I have a strong belief that you should truth-test your values, and using Debian is a matter of practicing what I preach. If community-based production is your primary consideration, it's hard to do better than Debian (though I believe some other distributions such as Fedora are catching up in this respect).
Community-based has a downside in that Debian tends to lack some professional polish, and it's certainly lacking in marketing panache (unless possibly we consider the strength of Debian's "community-based" image, which is well-established), but the upside is that it's a very thorough and well thought out system. It also tends to be a little out of date compared to distributions developed on a commercial basis.
I do also realize that my choice, once made, tends to be pretty permanent. I'm just too lazy to learn how a new distribution works, unless it has an awful lot to offer beyond what Debian can do.
Debian retains a very strong feeling of community participation, and I think that may be the most important reason for choosing it. At least with Debian, I know that it was designed "by users for users".
Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived distributions
There are GNU/Linux distributions that are derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (http://www.redhat.com/rhel), that is, recompiled from source.
Two of them are Scientific Linux (http://www.scientificlinux.org) and CentOS (http://www.centos.org). They are rock solid, with Enterprise-level stability.
1 vote gets 3%
Yeah, that would be my vote for Mepis.
While I love ubuntu's depositories, I am a kde person - and Warren's distro rocks for everything I like about linux.
Do you bundle Suse Linux with OpenSuse??
If so then maybe change the infor to openSuse / Suse Linux or simply state any version of Suse.
Fair enough
We've added any version to Ubuntu as well to cover X/Ed/K/Ubuntu.
Give me out of the box graphical effects and apt
I like Fedora core 6 because of the extra out of the box graphical effects (child that I am), but prefer apt to yum, therefore I voted for Ubuntu.
Mandriva
Years of satisfied use with virtually no problems, other than self inflicted during the learning process. This one really works for me.
I like Fedora 1-5.
I like Fedora 1-5.
gentoo fullfills my whole
gentoo fullfills my whole life & it's my forever love :) .
ubuntu fits my needs
ubuntu has all the things which i wanted in a distro it is simply the best.
Ubuntu enshrines the spirit of Linux
Ubuntu is truly a community of caring folks. The distribution installs on anything and everything and is complete. It meets all of my needs. Living out ubuntu would help this old world of ours!
Ubuntu/Debian
Well, Ubuntu is based on Debian/testing.
So that means that Debian is the largest distribution here :)
Well, not really
Ubuntu is more and more diverging from Debian. I believe that within a few years, it will no longer be based upon it that much.
Mandriva is just plain excellent
I've been using Mandriva for more than half a dozen versions. I tried Fedora Core 6 recently and, although I was impressed with the integration of SELinux, I was disappointed with the partitioning tool, the lack of "official" support for non-ext3 filesystems, and once I was set up, I concluded that Mandriva's urpmi is a better package tool than yum. Fedora is probably excellent for running servers, but on the desktop, you can't beat Mandriva.
Mandriva 2006 was good and
Mandriva 2006 was good and Mandriva 2007 is even better. KDE loads faster now. I've been using Mandriva for both Desktop and server and haven't encountered any problems so far which weren't caused due to my own ignorance. I've tried other distributions too, including Ubuntu, but I want to be able to play multimedia out of the box and not many other distros provide this.
Which Distro:
Archlinux,cause its the best,and the year i settled on Archlinux,i tested between 30 and 35 of distrowatch's best.Great community,wiki,chat channel and of cource developers:)),hands down Archlinux is the best i686 binary distro there is! I have used Archlinux since version 0.7 and am currently running 0.7.2 (Gimmick).
Red Hat 9.0
Red Hat is a nice one to operate but it is somewhat complex for the kernel programming, becasue it by default contains teh different version of gcc and different version of running kernel which always makes the externel modules programming difficult.
other distros
Please collect names of other distros and make our own "top ten" distro list.
I Like Ubuntu
I like it. Ubuntu is very user friendly.
S.A.M Harun
Once you go Gentoo, you never go back
Gentoo is the best distro I've ever used, I've installed kubuntu once, after all the stuff I read about it online, removed it after 3 hours and went back to my trust worthy Gentoo, you are able to configure your system you want it, not how someone wants.
MohShami
1 vote for Puppy Linux
I'll put in a vote for Slackware based Puppy Linux.
Debian: who needs anything else?
Debian is the more stable and powerfull distro, no doubt on that.
Ubuntu also is a good distro.... BUT... uppsala!... it's only another Debian's son...
"GOD SAVE, BUT BUDDHA MAKE INCREMENTAL BACKUP"
I bow to Debian
Shifted from Slackware to RH to Debian in 10 years. No intention of even seeing anything else.
PCLinuxOS: the only way to go for hardware
Shifted from Ubuntu to PCLinuxOS: it's truly remarkable. I haven't seen this kind of hardware detection since Knoppix. It even found my wireless printer adapter without me having to lift a finger!
Opensuse
Slackware user, need efficient Sonypi kernel patcj for my laptop, so now my Vaio VGN-BX194* (BX504 for US) is under OpenSuse10.2, the faster peripherics detection ever, even if it's a RedHat-like but it's a fun distro.
I relly mean that now it's is a good compromise for thoses you want easy hardware install and enougth advanced use of Linux (i can't use ubuntu after Salck for exemple).
For the specials WarXing week-end, i'm still using slack-based live CD...
The most important for linux i think is that now we don't need no more two weeks for install all stuff in a laptop (wifi cards, acpi...) and we can use it like a MAC OS or like a Windows, it's not so Geek but for working, my boss prefer see me programming than compiling my Kernel during office hours...
No *BSD's ?
Well, if I don't have a choice of *BSD's; it would be Debian or a derivative of Debian.