Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine 's fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this week! Enjoy!
General announcements
Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week
The Bizarre Cathedral - 12 --Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral by Tony Mobily and Ryan Cartwright. Read more...
My take on negative voting on FSDaily --It has been suggested by one of our prominent community members that the use of negative votes should be confined to demoting spam. As the individual responsible for the introduction of negative voting on FSDaily, I feel I should explain my rationale for its inclusion and provide my tips on negative voting. Read more...
OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect? --Around 3 month ago OpenOffice.org released its 2.4 boasting quite an impressive arsenal of advancements. However if you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! Read more...
Re-enforcing our Commitment to Free Software --"...When we launched Squish Software, we had goals of “open software.” We realized that openly supporting free and open source software, while not contributing back with our own software, was sort of hypocritical. So today we’re very excited to announce that we’re beginning to phase out ‘open software,’ and phase in true free software. Read more...
Book Review: Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 --My first exposure to Unix was ULTRIX from the Digital Equipment Corporation, a former employer. ULTRIX was Digital's version of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, Unix) that ran on VAX computers. FreeBSD, also descended from BSD, is a robust operating system for x86 and other architectures. Read more...
5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G --"The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G: * iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can't be on everyone's phones. * iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology. Read more...
25 Best GIMPed Images --GIMP is an amazing image editing software that allows people with limitless imagination create extraordinary images out of ordinary photos. To let you see what I mean, I have here a collection of some of the most beautiful and sometimes funny GIMPed images. I hope you’ll enjoy this one as much as I do.1. An eye with regard by funadium2. Read more...
Speak out against ACTA --"ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed enforcement treaty between United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Mexico, with Canada set to join any day now..." Read more...
The Human Genome Goes Wiki --A group of scientists aims to post thousands of entries on Wikipedia that describe the workings of individual human genes. The team realizes the potential for mischief -- anyone can change a Wikipedia article, regardless of their expertise or intent -- but were convinced by the popularity of the online encyclopedia and its volunteer overseers' general quickness. Read more...
Nohup - Run a Command Even Once your Shell is Closed --Oftentimes you’ll be in a situation where you want to run a command on a remote machine that will take a long time to complete, but you want to be able to issue the command and then log off and have that command run in the background. There are many ways you could achieve this, perhaps by using cron or at to schedule the command to run right away. However, there is a better way. Read more...
Thanks to dave, docsmartz, snotbutter, peterk, can.axis, Chris7mas, and chen2007 for these stories!
Latest content
The Bizarre Cathedral - 13 --By Ryan Cartwright and Tony Mobily. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...
Do we have a "Vista for Dummies" yet? --By Laurie Langham. Ryan Cartwright wrote an excellent article, Don’t compare GNU/Linux with Windows or MacOS – they are not in the same game. I ran across the same blog he is referring to, while gathering potential stories for FSD and my reaction was very similar. Read more...
Chapter 5: Building shared libraries with Libtool --By John Calcote. The person who invented the concept of shared libraries should be given a raise… and a bonus. The person who decided that shared library management and naming conventions should be left to the implementation should be flogged. Read more...
Prism: bringing web applications to the desktop --By Scott Nesbitt. Are you still using a web browser to access your favourite online applications? Why not do things the easy way, and make those applications part of your desktop with Prism. Read more...
GNU/Linux free software tools to preserve your online privacy, anonymity and security --By Gary Richmond. Whether you are online or offline, freedom matters. Like good health you never think about it or miss it until it is under threat or actually gone. If you love freedom, you probably love free software and it has given us some terrific tools with which to defend freedom. In this article I will give an overview of some of the available resources (Freenet, Wikileaks and Tor) to protect dissident opinion, facilitate whistle blowing and promote the safe and anonymous development of free software. Read more...
Don't compare GNU/Linux with Windows or MacOS - they are not in the same game --By Ryan Cartwright. Recently a blog post entitled “Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It’s yet another in the long line of “Linux ain’t ready yet” jeremiads and it doesn’t really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why? Read more...
The Bizarre Cathedral - 12 --By Ryan Cartwright and Tony Mobily. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...
Home automation in GNU/Linux --By Steven Goodwin. Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community. Read more...
Acer's Linpus Linux Lite (Fedora) ultra portable laptop piles the pressure on Microsoft --By Gary Richmond. First Asus , then Dell, then MSI , Elonex, the Cloud and all their clones. Now Acer has entered the fray and it is all, at least initially, good news. It looks like they’ve all found a bit of Dutch courage and started to turn on the schoolyard bully from Redmond. Read more...
Creating web pages, the right way --By Mitch Meyran. Have you ever felt that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your code is error-free and complies with the latest standards? In terms of programming skill, web authors are too-often seen as the bottom of the barrel (you will notice I didn’t call them ‘web programmers’) due to the apparent forgiveness and limitations of the platform. However, they are required to cover a large array of programming expertise and, even worse, they must ensure that their code runs the same on various platforms–something “real” programmers consider a challenge. Read more...
Latest book reviews
**Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 by Bryan J. Hong** --Reviewed by Ken Leyba. What Bryan J. Hong attempts to do in Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 is to create a guide to installing FreeBSD, its applications and services—in short order and without fuss. Hong does this successfully and in great detail. Read more...
Reminders
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