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I recently installed KnowledgeTree for a small office that needed a piece of document management software. Document management is one of those things: you don’t think you need one until you actually see one. I noticed that it’s free software, financed by private extensions. I got curious and managed to talk to Daniel Chalef, the CEO of KnowledgeTree. Read the full interview at Free Software Magazine.

I had the pleasure to talk to Amanda McPherson, one of the minds behind LinuxCon, “LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux”. Where and where: September 21 - 23 2009, Portland. Read the full interview at Freesoftware Magazine.

Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I’ll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a “second order virtual machine”. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

GNU/Linux is slowly invading everybody’s everyday life. I won’t say “The year of the GNU/Linux desktop is here”. Been there, done that. But, GNU/Linux is definitely imposing its presence — think about Android, or the number of people who are currently using GNU/Linux as their main desktop. And yet, software installation in GNU/Linux is broken. No, not broken… it’s terribly broken. Why is that, and what can be done to fix it? Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

This is a story of hubris, nemesis and very bad language. Mine. We all like to have our egos flattered and I’m no exception, so when two old acquaintances told me their Windows laptops were infected with viruses I knew they were about to put the bite on me. They did. Could I fix them? Well, my vanity was flattered of course but it was to be a salutary experience that got me to thinking about whether it will ever be possible to wean users off Microsoft products. Read the full story Free Software Magazine.

If you haven’t heard yet, Google have released a developer preview of their new social networking and collaboration tool - Wave. What impact might this have on free software users and developers?

I have been talking about the convergence of telephony and desktop computing for years. Nowadays, more and more companies are announcing small devices (“netbooks”) that will run Android — and we are not talking about phones here. Is this the beginning of a new revolution? Or maybe not?

This article is necessarily going to be short: I am busy restoring our server from a backup from the 2nd of June. Why? Because 3FN was shut down by the FTC; and yes, 3fn is the hosting company we used and were sponsored by. We are now hosting the magazine with the angels at OpenHosting, which in this case were a life saver. FSM is back! Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Jim Kent, an American biologist who used free and open software to race Craig Ventnor to the finishing line, sequencing the human genome. That was very big, cutting edge science with a global audience and reach. We live in an age when big science is done, overwhelmingly, in big businesses, universities, research labs and government laboratories. In Eric Raymond’s paradigm it is the culture of the Cathedral. Hierarchical, big, controlled and funded by taxpayers, venture capital or shareholders. The time of the amateur dilletante scientist seems to be over. It takes the huge, collective organisation of private individuals to challenge this monopoly. GNU/Linux has managed to make a significant challenge but what of open science, not just the actual use of free software as practised by CERN but utilizing the whole philosophy of organizing scientific endeavour on the principles of open source? Some amateur biohackers think they have the answer. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here’s a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of interest. However, I didn’t expand much on some features and their implications, so I will do so here. I will, also, touch upon a few improvements other than pure graphics. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

What’s in a look? Before Apple started making immensely slick, sexy hardware, the main issues were always “specs”, “graphic cards”, “memory”. Then, the game changed. People started buying Apple computers because they looked good — inside and out. Their computers (and gadgets) are immensely appealing. Their operating system, OS X, is a pleasure to look at. When the iPhone was announced, I knew it was going to be the equivalent of Naomi Campbell in the cell phone world. And I was right. Are iPhones just too sexy to compete against them? Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter. It has some fantastic features (like the ability to run application over the network) and some shortcoming. One thing is sure: it has evolved over the last year or so, immensely, especially as far as 3D and hardware acceleration. In this article I will explain has X Window has changed, and what to expect in the near future. Several significant things happened, and they all depended on one another. But first, some background. Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it’s Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing. Like all fashions there is a deal of hype surrounding it but there is a consistent concern emerging from all that hype and is about the dangers of proprietary cloud computing. Richard Stallman has called it a “trap”. He is right—but it is more than that. It is a well-baited, DRM-like honey trap for the unwary. That is not immediately obvious. Like all good traps it suckers you in before the wire noose tightens around your neck. You don’t have any wire cutters in your rucksack but you do have the GPL and free software to effect an escape. Can it save us from vendor lock in and proprietary software?

Recently, I had to fact-check some older articles I wrote about One Laptop Per Child in order to bring them up to date. This meant digging through the controversy in 2008, and what I found was some pretty appalling human behavior. That’s the “bitter”. The “sweet” is that both OLPC and Sugar (now separate projects) are both doing a lot of good in the world. Sugar, in particular, is doing a better job of connecting with the community. That’s a challenge for us in the community to step up and do a much better job connecting with Sugar. We need to make it the best thing ever, and that’s going to mean more than lip service. So we all need to get it installed and start contributing. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Microsoft has recently announced that its beloved encyclopaedia, Microsoft Encarta, will soon be discontinued. After October 31, 2009 its contents will no longer be available. Both the online version and the CD ROM version will be discontinued. My first reaction was “what a pity”. My job is to gather and publish good contents. I know how much work goes into creating and publishing material. This news must have been quite hard to digest for people who have been working on Encarta for a while. The two main questions that come to mind, however, are: “Why?”, and more importantly, “What about the contents?” Read the full post mortem at Freesoftware Magazine.

It is not often that you fail to find half a dozen free software programs to fill a particular niche -browsers, e-mail clients or file managers to name a few; so it was with both surprise and disappointment that I nearly drew a blank in my search for an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) for GNU/Linux. Yes, Freevo and MythTV have this feature built in, but installing and configuring them just to get your mitts on an EPG looks like overkill. I wanted a simple, stand-alone EPG programme. I got TV-Browser and I got a hell of a lot more than I bargained for. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The project gNewSense started with the goal of creating a GNU/Linux distribution whose first priority is users’ freedom - even if this limits user comfort and hardware support. As a starting point Ubuntu’s operating system is used. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

About two years ago I published an article about Firewall Builder. Now that the version 3.0 is out I had a catch-up interview with its creator, Vadim Kurland, and I discovered a number of new interesting features. Read the full interview and the accompanying install howto go to Freesoftware Magazine.

Like anyone else who writes about software I subscribe to the maxim that a picture paints a thousand words. In short, I like to illustrate my text with timely and relevant screenshots; so I’m always on the lookout for good, free software to get the job done. Back in the mists of time I looked at a command-line utility called Scrot. It’s immensely powerful and configurable but it does take some setting up. Not really entirely convenient when you just want to concentrate on writing the definitive user guide for some piece of killer software. I think Shutter may well be the solution. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

Inkscape is my vector graphics application of choice. It can do a wide variety of vector drawing tasks with relatively little effort. It uses the now-standard SVG vector format as its native format, and it has become very extensible through a simple “stream-based”, language-agnostic scripting system. On modern systems, it is reasonably responsive (though not the fastest), and the interface layout is well-balanced and fairly intuitive. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.