Showing headlines posted by scrubs

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer’s memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that’s allowed: he’s a “mad” corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention. Taking about Internet applications being popular, he wrote: “But we also need to make sure developers have the .NET skills to write unique Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation”. Which begs the question: does anybody still develop Microsoft Windows applications? Really?

If you like free software, Blender, cartoons and animations then Terry Hancock at Freesoftware Magazine has the lowdown on the latest offering: Big Buck Bunny, a product of Blender's Peach Open Movie Project. You can read the background and details of the movie and the project at Freesoftware Magazine

When most people install a free software mail transport agent (MTA) they plumb for Postfix, Exim, qmail or Sendmail. Whilst these are all fine, they can be a little over the top for some smaller systems or systems where all you need is some kind of local MTA functionality. In these cases many people will install their favourite MTA anyway — but there are more lightweight alternatives. Here I look at one of them: Smail. Before I go any further I should clarify — for those who don’t already know — that Smail is not a mail client. It won’t do what Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail and Mutt do. It delivers email for those programs. It also does not provide POP3 or IMAP services. Like most MTAs it performs a single core task; it routes email from one place to another.

Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the speech marks): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project. Here is why.

My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years, and we’ve shared this interest very effectively with our children. Now I am the victim of my own success: my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal Local Area Network (LAN) with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each. Some of the computers are also running services. I also have two computers sitting in a box, which will probably be added to this mess soon, plus my wife plans to get a laptop. Like it or not, I now manage a network bigger than many small businesses! But I can’t afford to pay a system administrator, and the tedium of “network plumbing” is my least favorite part of computer technology. Surely, there must be a way to automate this mess? Enter Zenoss…

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. Ryan questions, "I mean how can you tell how many Ubuntu installs came of a single CD"

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.

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. Scott Nesbitt at Freesoftware Magazine tells you what Prism can do to boost you experience of the web on your desktop -and more importantly, how to do it.

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?

Gary Richmond at Freesoftware Magazine looks at Acers' Aspire One, the leatest ultra portable laptop computer to feature GNU/Linus. It runs Linpus Linux Lite (a hacked version of Fedora 8) and so at last we have a version of Linux not tainted with kernel source code issues and GPL violations which characterised Xandros on the Asus EeePC. Read the full story at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/acers_linpus_lin...">FSM

A lot of software users I meet seem to feel they are not using their software as efficiently as they could. If that includes you, then listen up. Here is my list of the ten, lesser-known, OpenOffice.org Writer keyboard shortcuts that will help you improve your productivity. When I say "lesser known" I should really say poorly documented or not documented at all. That said, when I've taught on keyboard shortcuts in the past these are the ones that fewer users seem to know of. Something else to note is that although these are all for Writer, you may find some of them in other word processors as well. Read the full story at FSM

In a recent interview with the British Sunday Observer, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, claimed that “it’s the next billion [internet users] who will change the way we think”. Such a big claim deserves some critical house room. Will the internet really change the way we think? Or are we just getting carried away? Gary Richmond explores the implications of the Wikipedia open source/free software knowledge paradigm and what it might mean for the way we think. You can read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

There is nothing more guaranteed to ignite a bad tempered, incandescent flame war that an outbreak of hostilities between the rival Gnome and KDE camps. Well, except perhaps a slanging match between the champions of the GUI and the command line. Enter stage left the compromise candidate which might just unite the warring factions: Hotwire. Gary Richmond takes a close look at this combined GUI and command line tool, a very useful piece of kit, software destined to find its way into the main distro repositories. You can read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Laurie Langham at Freesoftware Magazine catalogues his struggle to get his new hard drive bundled with proprietary software to work with GNU/Linux. It is hear rending stuff - but he triumphs in the end. A cautionary tale for anyone thinking of buying drives from Microsoft hell. You can read the full story at FSM

The fight against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard is continuing in many countries. In the UK the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) unsuccessfully, sought a judicial review of the British Standards Institute's decision to vote yes. UKUUG are now seeking to appeal against that rejection of a review and you can help them. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Encoding is a CPU-intensive operation. Whilst encoding, using optimised code is crucial. In this short article I will explain how I gained a 300% speed boost when encoding DVDs and will show how having the program’s sources and being able to talk to the maintainers sometimes really, really helps. Welcome to doing things “the GNU/Linux way”. For the full story go to FSM

I was at another meeting of the Editorial board of the Skibbereen Eagle yesterday. Hopefully you read the outcome of the last one. Some clever clogs suggested that it might be a spiffing wheeze to write something about the possible implications of the much mooted singularity (is that a proper noun, with a capital S?) and what it might mean for the future of both free and proprietary software. Read the full story at FSM

DOSBox is a freely available, cross-platform PC emulator. Rather than attempting to be the technology leader as a business-orientated virtualization environment like VMware or Qemu, DOSBox instead offers a rich set of features aimed at closely recreating the behaviour of a retro gaming PC. To this end, it offers a selection of accurate sound card emulations and facilities to throttle the emulation speed back to vintage PC levels, along with other features designed to make sure that the old games run properly and accurately within a protected environment. Read the full story at FSM

In an in depth look at Composer, Maurcie Cepeda at Freesoftware Magazine discusses the features of Composer that make it an ideal tool for the job as a capable HTML-based word processor. Read the full story at FSM

Once again, Freesoftware Magazine's resident Unix tech guru, John Calcote, presents another instalment on GNU/Linux's Autotools. This time it's all about automatically writing makefiles with Automake- and it's detailed! Get the full monty at the FSM website