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Since free software and other free culture products are formed by an organic, incrementalist process, they tend to be highly organic in their design as well. Free software is not so much built as it is grown. Thus, when considering a new project, you must think not about how to break it down into implementable chunks that can be assembled into a working product, but rather about how the project can organically grow—moving from working product to working product as it does so—becoming progressively more useful as it is developed. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Setting up an electronic “card catalog” for my books always seemed like a lot of work, so I hadn’t really attempted it before; lately, I happened across a KDE program called Tellico that made it so easy and fun that I completed my inventory in under a week. Plus, I finally found a use for that “CueCat” scanner I’ve had collecting dust for the last several years! Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

You don’t have to be an uber system administrator of a network to use Htop. It might have been designed with the masters of the universe in mind but just because you are a mere solitary desktop user in a Pizza-strewn study room staring at a single machine doesn’t mean you can’t get it and use it too. This article will show you how to configure and use htop to monitor system resources and how to use this dinky interactive application to manage running applications and processes on your desktop. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

GNU/Linux is blessed with a good choice of file managers. Gnome has Nautilus, KDE has Dolphin and Konqueror and Krusader, which I wrote about some time ago). If you are looking for a minimalist system with low processor and memory overheads to revive an old “underpowered” machine or make the latest PC look even faster, you have to start thinking about alternatives. One of them is Thunar, the default browser of XFCE. read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

When the GNU/Linux revolution started reaching the masses, around 2000, I predicted that by 2010 there would be full vendor support for the free operating system. Well, it’s 2009, and I have to admit it — I am feeling nervous. This article will outline my odyssey, the causes that triggered it, and — for a change - a number of possible solutions. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Just as there are “classic” cars that never seem to go out of style, there are some classic pieces of software that remain useful long after most of their contemporaries. One of those programs is Xfig, a vector graphics editor hailing from the days of academic Unix workstations. Like the more famous TeX, Xfig hasn’t seen significant updates in several years—and for the same reason: it’s just about perfect like it is. It is showing its age in the style of its graphical interface, and it does have some fundamental limitations compared to more modern graphics tools, but for the simple technical diagrams it was intended for, it is still hard to beat.

Including Dia in this series is just a bit of a stretch, because it is not a conventional “vector graphic editor”. Instead, Dia operates at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. But since that abstraction is very appropriate for dataflow diagrams (such as the one I picked as a comparison project), I think it’s important to note what it can do. Dia is very useful, but it’s sometimes frustrating, because the idea of it suggests expectations well beyond what it can actually do. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

A constant pattern in the corporate environment is the gathering of resources, but with the free exchange of information inherent in community-based projects, the pattern of choice is the dispersal of resources. This presents certain design challenges, which manifest themselves in the Unix-style “small sharp tools” specialization approach, “bottom-up design”, and most importantly in easy-to-obtain, shared, free standards for data interchange between programs. When every train car is to be made by a separate builder, it is essential that the rail gauge is constant and known. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country. Get all the gory details at Freesoftware Magazine.

The seventh iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 7x) was held the weekend of February 20th 2009 in Los Angeles. SCALE is an annual conference that has several tracks and has special tracks on Friday. Along with the program tracks, there is an extensive vendor Expo Floor, which includes a Org Pavilion containing several free software organizations. The special tracks on Friday were the Open Source Software in Education, Women in Open Source, and SCALE University run by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA). Read the full account of this Linux Expo at Freesoftware Magazine.

The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a “scripting” language with features that enable the programmer to create even complex multi-threaded applications. It mixes several different programming paradigms into an unique blend of constructs, overcoming the limitations and partialities of other languages. The objective of this brief article is to be very practical with code examples as well as step by step simple instructions. Read the full tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

Need to connect to a Windows server from a computer running GNU/Linux? pyNeighborhood gives you an easy and graphical way to do just that. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

At a recent free software advocacy event I encountered a great example of free software being used in the community. Chris Kilby has been running an IT suite for residents of his local housing estate in Stepney, east London. A suite of desktop PCs running Edubuntu with a Fedora-based server has been built and runs on a shoestring budget. I recently caught up with Chris to ask him more about the project.

I am a great fan of the Gutenberg project, a noteworthy and honorable effort to digitize copyright-free texts. This project has released into the public domain over 20,000 classic books. This article will explain how to integrate this huge body of material with the Ubuntu desktop. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

In the first part of this piece I introduced zenity : the handy tool for providing GUI interaction with your shell scripts. In this second part I’m going to delve a little deeper into the type of things you can do with this versatile tool. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Everybody needs diagrams. Most users need to create one more often than they think: that flowchart for a presentation, that sketch of the bird feeder to build this weekend, or a time line. Getting more technical, there are always circuits and blueprints and the like. Stop wasting time with an office app, the GIMP, or a paint program: use Dia, an easy yet powerful made-for-diagrams editor.

If you have ever read any of the articles I have written on Free Software Magazine you might just have noticed that my opinion of politicians is lower than a limbo dancer’s pole. A brief brush with political activism many years ago left me with a deep and visceral distrust and dislike of everything political and a determination never to become entangled with politics ever again. So, I was not exactly impressed when I read that George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor of the British Conservative Party, had recently advocated the adoption of “open source” in government IT contracts to reduce costs. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? But it isn’t and here’s why. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Let me issue a disclaimer right off. Before I ever typed my first GNU/Linux command in a terminal the Free Software Foundation was fighting the good fight for free software and all the issues surrounding individual freedom and privacy both on and offline. All of us owe it a debt of gratitude for the work is has done and continues to do on behalf of the principles of a free society and free computing. It’s commitment to these things is unswerving but one of the down sides of this unremitting focus is the danger of a loss of perspective on certain campaigning issues. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

In the near future, the semantic web data will be precisely tagged and thus a whole lot easier to find. This will further spur the trend of the web and global society becoming tight networks that are increasingly interdependent and transparent. Do we have to sacrifice anonymity on the web in order to retain trust for collaboration? Or could we see a web emerge that functions as a kind of operating system with different users and permissions to run this global machine which we call the internet? Read the full article at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/semantic_web_op...">Freesoftware Magazine.

There are several layers at which a GNU/Linux system’s appearance can be customized. By far the most visible, especially on a multi-user machine, is the login manager screen. KDM (the KDE desktop manager) has a highly-flexible and easy-to-use XML-based theme system. If you can draw what you want, you can make it happen with a KDM theme. I’ll talk you through the construction of one simple theme I designed for my ASUS Eee PC. Read Terry Hancock's tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.