Showing headlines posted by michux

Thousands of Polish high school students now have a chance to learn about GNU/Linux and the benefits of using free software as Polish FLOSS foundation together with school headmasters, supported by local authorities organize a series of lectures on free software in education. PolishLinux.org has a report — summary of the first 3 months of the campaign.

Do you know why do I admire Microsoft’s marketing whizzes? They made a deity out of their corporation. No, seriously. No figurative speech. Not a metaphor nor a parallel. Those nameless heroes did it literally.

BBC iPlayer after a lot of complains, petitions, talks and discussions is finally available for GNU/Linux as beta. I took a look at what BBC has prepared and in general I have to say: good job!

Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution. (Got it Microsoft? Got it Jasow Matusow? Any misread acronym can make sensational headline.)

It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years. This comparison is based on my experience with both systems during the last couple of weeks on two different computers.

In PolishLinux.org Command Line Tricks series they have described Getting help and Processes management. Now it’s time to understand how the file permissions in Linux work. The article covers topics such as the basics of Linux file access rights, useful commands that allow you to manage file permissions, as well as numerical and special access modes.

Certainly most of the Linux users would like to have their systems fully optimized for their rigs but do not have the stamina or enough knowledge to play with the Gentoo installation paradigm. But here comes the rescue — an apt-build goody available under every distro armed with the big gun - APT package manager.

This is the first of a series of articles about using Tex system. A good place to begin would be by asking the question “Why is it worth using TeX?” We’ll also take a closer look at the various tools available to us, which makes working with TeX much easier. In the next articles we will focus on Master Thesis writing, Presentations and Correspondence.

Each new release of Mandriva is called by its developers “the best of all editions”. We had the same situation with Mandriva Linux 2008. But is this really true? Hardly so.

Detailed and proper documentation of source code and programs is the milestone of Unix culture, as we may read in “The art of Unix Programming” by Eric Steven Raymond. The first application on Unix was the platform to prepare documents. The platform was used by Bell Labs to prepare patent documents. Effective work with documentation and searching for needed information is the key feature when working on unix-like systems.

You already know Pacman, the Archlinux software manager. Now it’s time to meet AUR and yaourt, the extra tools that can bring a fistful of apps on your desktop within just a few console commands. This article is part of the “Arch tools” series on polishlinux.org.

Recently I’ve laid my hands on the new IBM’s child — Lotus Symphony (beta version). It is an office suite based on OpenOffice.org. Lotus Symphony includes text editor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. I’ve, decided to try this new IBM wonder.

We are starting a short series of articles aiming to describe the key administration tools and packages used in Archlinux distribution. Today we are taking a closer look at Pacman — the Arch’s package manager of choice.

Listening to the music played back from original audio CDs on a home computer creates clear discomfort — the CD drive is being blocked and the CDs have to be changed again and again (unless you have a home jukebox). Now it’s time we learn to rip (grab) our own audio collection and save it to a hard disk in the form of .mp3, .ogg, or .flack files.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released today. I haven’t tested any alpha or beta versions of the new product from Canonical. I have decided to wait for the Release Candidate, since this has proved to work for me in the past. In short: it did not disappoint me. The new Ubuntu is more polished, more professional and in general, better than the previous one, which was already a great OS. Minor glitches? Present, as always.

One of my favourite tools (that I use almost everyday) is PuTTY. I use it both on Windows (very useful because Windows has no SSH client) and on Linux. It is a program that enables SSH connections using a graphical interface. It also allows for the establishment of SSH tunnels as well as omitting some of the restrictions to Internet access.

KDE 4 is coming. It’s starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction as to what you should expect from the brand new KDE that is due out later this year.

Here is another article of our “GIMP tricks” series. This time you are going to learn a simple trick: how to make your teeth look really white on a photograph. By the way, perhaps it’s the right time to visit a dentist?

ROX is one of the genuinely interesting file managers available for the major platforms - GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin). As can be inferred from the manager’s website, ROX-Filer is a project aimed to move the best features of RISC OS onto Linux and Unix platforms. Its small footprint and configurability are its unquestionable hallmarks.

System and enviromental variables define parts of the system behavior so it’s worth knowing what they are, what they influence and how to adjust them to your needs. This is the last part of the “console basics” series.