Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
If you are looking for a powerful yet easy to use collaboration solution, you might want to take a closer look at http://www.mindquarry.com. Groupware tools are a dime a dozen these days, but there are a few features that make Mindquarry stand out from the crowd.
GNU Mailman is the most popular free software mailing list manager, and probably the most configurable; however, it normally requires you have a web and mail server always connected to the Internet. With a little extra work, you can run Mailman from your intermittently-connected GNU/Linux desktop.
It is grey a dull, overcast day here in downtown Amsterdam. The weather is rather oppressive, summer’s smile long gone and my wine cellar miraculously has grown to quiet emptiness. However, I know a not too-well guarded secret. Hidden in the cracks, just at the edge of your eyesight, is extra humorous functionality in your favourite free software applications. Silent professional Easter eggs are waiting stealthily to make you smile.
I have a podcast—The Beer Crate, since you asked—which is written and produced using free software, and released under the CC by-nc-nd license. It's a fun little hobby that keeps me off the street, and gives me an excuse to drink and review beer. But had free software not existed, how much would it cost to produce and host a show using proprietary software? I set out to investigate...
Imagine you need to create an Ajax application, and you’re scratching your head in frustration since you don’t understand prototype.js, you think using ASP.NET Ajax feels like building a car with scissors and paperclips and you don’t know enough Java to use GWT. If this is your problem, Gaia Ajax Widgets could solve your problem: Gaia abstracts away JavaScript, feels like normal ASP.NET, works on both ASP.NET and Mono—and it’s free software.
ImageMagick, as many would know, is a software suite for image manipulation and display, supporting a wide variety of formats. But, what is less widely known is the many facets it has, and the wide array of things that can be done with it. This book gives you more than a hint of all that’s possible.
GNU/Linux is the most popular operating system built with free/open source software. However, it is not the only one: FreeBSD is also becoming popular for its stability, robustness and security. In this article, I’ll take a look at their similarities and differences.
Programmers. The system administrators worship their bit twiddling capabilities. The users exchange vast quantities of beer for new features and tools. And the project managers sell their souls when they make the magic work. But inside the average programmer’s psyche are several demons that need exorcising.
This article is intended for new Linux users who wish to use their Linux-box for some real work. Speed control of an industrial motor? Sounds complicated?
For a long time, hibernation has been associated with proprietary operating systems. Now, the feature has started taking the front row in GNU/Linux systems too. What’s more, it’s fast, flexible and is a real time saver!
The powers that be at Free Software Magazine decided to be a media sponsor of LinuxWorld Expo UK at Olympia, London held on the 25th and 26th of October. As I make a habit of going to that expo, and I also write for the magazine when I remember to hand articles in, I was contacted and discovered I was to be handed a “press” badge for the event. So, on the day, I set off early from Cambridge to enjoy the privileges of my new super-status.
Asterisk is a phone system in software. It can replace large and expensive business phone systems, powering thousands of extensions, or it can help home users save money on long distance. Because it’s implemented in software, it is extremely versatile, easy to customize, and easy to extend.
Follow along and watch while I take a stock Ubuntu desktop and transform it something really slick!
Window borders, icons, splash images and other graphical user interface (GUI) preferences are largely a subjective thing. Still, it’s nice to have the tools available to transform the GUI into something that is more pleasing to your eye. Fortunately, GNU/Linux makes it relatively easy to mould your desktop environment into whatever suits your taste, and Ubuntu is no exception.
Summer has come. The crops in the fields are beginning to fill, the barbecues on the park are smoking away and, this being the UK, either the clouds in the sky are starting to thunder or the utility companies are announcing water shortages or both. Despite all this though, the free software flowers in the virtual garden are blooming like never before. Once again, I have limited my writings on the free software oriented events that have attracted my personal attention and fired my personal interests. During the past month, these consist of...
Security is a process, not a result. It is a process which is difficult to adopt under normal conditions; the problem is compounded when it spans several job descriptions. All the system level security in the world is rendered useless by insecure web-applications. The converse is also true—programming best practices, such as always verifying user input, are useless when the code is running on a server which hasn’t been properly hardened.
May and June have always been my favorite months. The arrival of the wild flowers on the roadside and the warmer sunshine ensure the assignment of the last thaws of winter into history, also the earlier arrival of the sun in the morning, together with its later retirement, grant eager anticipation to the long lazy summer afternoons to come. Not so lazy, though, has been the work of the free software community, from which I have chosen a minuscule sample to report in this current issue of this newsletter. This sample, whose only attribute for inclusion here are that they grabbed my attention, consist of:
Email is one of the most common activities we perform on the internet. However, email is also one of the most vulnerable internet services currently used. Email spam is common, but what most people are not aware of is that email identity theft is common as well. There is also continuous concern over the privacy and security issues surrounding the matter. However, most users dismiss security software as complex and still continue to send email messages with very little or no regard at all to security.
Ubuntu makes printing reasonably easy and straightforward. This brief article is for those who need a specific and encouraging step-by-step guide. I hope that this article will not only ensure that you print with ease, but that you have every reason to enjoy a productive GNU/Linux desktop.
Before you begin the installation steps below, connect your printer/s. You need to do this prior to turning your system on. This helps to ensure Ubuntu recognizes how the printer is connected to the system, and it allows Ubuntu to identify the specific printer port.
Games under GNU/Linux have usually been a lacklustre affair. For every Tux Racer, there are a hundred sub-standard Pac-man clones you’d be embarrassed to advocate. For every commercial version of Quake, there’s a hundred other worthy games the publisher elected not to port to GNU/Linux. Without good games, there’s no market, and without the market, no effort is spared. And so the cycle continues. In this article, I will look at two of the areas in which GNU/Linux games have succeeded, and a new device that combines them both, which could help expose GNU/Linux to the populous.
The showers of April have died away. As spring matures, the song birds greet the mornings of May with their music and I find that it is once again time to hand in my report on events regarding free software. This consists of the usual conglomeration of occurrences that I have noticed, think important, or which simply take my fancy.
For this last month, these consist of:
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?
