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If you have ever suffered from that scourge of all computers users - RSI - Ryan Cartwright at Freesoftware Magazine has the cure. Workrave. It's a neat little piece of software which will take you profligate keyboard habits and discipline them in order to stop you having your wrists in splints. Read the full story at FSM

Gavin Baker at Freesoftware Magazine examines the implications for free software and the GPL in the face of the social, web 2.0 world sites like Facebook, Google Apps and Flickr. In particular, the reciprocity clause in the GPL can become an unintended loophole as web-based services can incorporate free software code which is not shared or redistributed. You can read the whole article at the FSM website

The last part of this four-parter series on the Asus EeePC deals in detail with all the tips and tricks you can use to conserve battery power, control the webcam and configure Firefox and Opera to maximize all the available screen space. Read the full story

Following on from my recommendation for [apt-buglist][]—where you can see the reported bugs on a package before installing it—I thought it might be useful to look at the other side of the coin, reporting bugs in Debian. The best way to do this is with the dedicated tool: reportbug. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/reporting_bugs_d...">Full story

Mitch Meyran is your guide over at Freesoftware Magazine helping you to navigate the moral maze to decide if Microsoft's "adoption" of ODF is a Pauline conversion or just another example of "embrace and extinguish". Read the full story and decide.

Peter Hintgens, writing at Freesoftware Magazine, explains why the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard is a dreadful development. More importantly, he tells us what can be done to combat such things. You can read more about it here

John Calcote has written a very detailed article on the GNU Autotools and you can read it all at the Freesoftware Magazine website.

Andrew Min gives you a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. You can read (and/or listen) to the full article at

There are few people who would deny that autoconf, automake and libtool have revolutionized the free software world. While there are many thousands of Autotools advocates, some developers absolutely hate the Autotools, with a passion. Why? Let me try to explain with an analogy.

In this opening salvo, I will reprise the technical terms and history of DRM and thereafter I will try to keep you abreast of the issues for computer users in general and free software in particular. Hopefully, I will in fact be chronicling the death throws of DRM. Read more at the FSM website.

For many years, there has been a growing concern about the emergence of a “digital divide” between rich and poor. The idea is that people who don’t meet a certain threshold income won’t be able to afford the investment in computers and internet connectivity that makes further learning and development possible. They’ll become trapped by their circumstances. Under proprietary commercial operating systems, which impose a kind of plateau on the cost of computer systems, this may well be true. But GNU/Linux, continuously improving hardware, and a community commitment to bringing technology down to cost instead of just up to spec, has led to a new wave of ultra-low-cost computers, starting with the One Laptop Per Child’s XO. These free-software-based computers will be the first introduction to computing for millions of new users, and that foretells a much freer future. read more here

Recently I had cause to buy a scanner. Being in a reasonably small home I was eager to save on desk-space, and so decided to upgrade my ageing inkjet printer at the same time. Having looked around I eventually went for an HP Photosmart C5180 device. This is my experience of installing it on Debian Lenny .

Suppose you’ve been good (or sort of good anyway), and you have a huge stack of CD-ROMs (or DVDs) with backups and archives of your old files. Great. But how can you find anything? I solved this problem today by making an index of all the files stored on these disks using a few simple GNU command line tools.

Using browsers which are Web 2.0 enabled whenever you just what to Google something is like calling out the Fire Brigade when you have just burned the toast. Definitive overkill. If you are just surfing for information, then you want the little browser on the low fat, low body-mass index, skinny latte diet with a low carbon footprint. If Dillo were a catwalk model, it would be size zero. Think of it as the Victoria Beckham of browsers— but better looking; where the big hitters like Firefox, Flock and Opera sometimes move like a Sloth on Mogadon, Dillo tears down the track like a Whippet on speed. read more here

Tony Mobily at Freesoftware Magazine interviews the developers of Ekiga, the free sfotware for making free 'phone call across the internet. By the time you have finished reading this epic article you will know a hell of a lot about Ekiga and VOIP in general. Catch these great guys here

Microsoft turn to free software? That’ll be the day. Some have suggested that Microsoft might embrace free software and thus resolve the present conflict. That actually would be a terrific strategy for them, but I don’t think that Microsoft is smart enough to do it.

In this post I will interview Paul Battley, the man who wrote the program that worked around the DRM loophole at the BBC. No GNU/Linux user needs to be told what DRM (aka Trusted Computing, aka Palladium) is and why it is a thoroughly pernicious and Hydra-headed monster that needs to be slain. I hope to make that the subject of a post in the very near future, but in the meantime here is a quick thumbnail sketch of what happened with the BBC’s iPlayer, to bring you up to speed. The interview with Paul Battley follows.

Terry Hancock, a regular contributor to Freesoftwaremagazine.com, offers a detailed critique of Google's App Engine which allows users to run we applications on Google's infrastructure. Google's mantra may be "do no evil" but does this seemingly generous offer disguise an unhealthy dependence on a company that has used Open Source freely but kept it's code closed?

Andrew Min, the distro fashion correspondent for Freesoftware Magazine, gives us the lowdown on what's great and new in these major Linux distributions.

Let’s face it: GNU/Linux software is not always easy to use. Especially command line software (at least the GUI programs have buttons and tooltips). Sometimes, the program will have a manual or some documentation at its homepage, but that is not always the case. The solution? The magical man.