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I have nothing much to quote on the subject, so here's a fresh email. For me, the move to a completely free computing environment will take a long while, but for now I am happy to have my personal laptop running Ubuntu, practically right now, I rely on my Mac OS X running iMac to get certain things done, one of those is listening to MP3 files - something at CNUK, we deal with a lot.. Why? Because that's what artists deal with... the majority of our userbase is a Mac OS X running, MP3 using, QuickTime loving group of folks, who don't really know much of free software, maybe they've heard of Firefox, and quite a few even use it, but to them, reaching a large audience is something they DO get from MP3 music, and so we have a requirement to be able to listen to it. MP3 and Flash aside, I can probably do maybe 60% of what I currently need to do on Ubuntu, namely respond to mail (with GMail in Firefox), surf the web (Firefox), IRC (XChat), AIM/ICQ/MSN (gAIM) and SSH. So, I can't edit video (iMovie/QuickTime - makes sense to use those, as the content I'm getting is the very format those tools are built for), watch Flash (not so important, I'll concur), listen to MP3/drive my iPod (maybe it's selfish to have an iPod, but when you have a lot of MP3 and MPEG-4 music, it's great), create images (Inkscape is nice, but for bitmaps, GIMP doesn't quite have it, but I need to try GimpShop) I've yet to find an editor, besides Emacs that I really like. I'm all for suggestions, it should be a GNOME application, with Emacs keybindings and have syntax highlighting. The only non-free thing on my Ubuntu laptop was the Flash plugin, I just deleted it. Felt good, actually... It reminded me though, one of the things we're trying to do with the properly free software version of Firefox, is to stop it from suggesting you install Macromedia Flash player. I believe even the version in Debian does this - can someone test this by going to http://www.homestarrunner.com/ I have vrms installed, it confirms I'm free as a whistle... I think the main problem with free software these days is actually one of marketing and brand awareness. Firefox is free software, but actually the majority of users of it are using the non-free binaries from Mozilla's website, and yet in only a year, it's all over the press... yet, GNU? Nowhere, really. "Linux" gets a mention, as does "open source", but there's no mention of what's really going on, who these people are, etc. Part of the reason my involvement with the FSF has wained was that internally, it was very very difficult to get things done, or to make progress. They *should* have a nicely modern, easy to use, attractive website.. do it with CSS so not to upset the die hard Lynx lot, but it can be done. Sadly, any kind of forward thinking, or accessibility was over ruled by people without much of a clue, who just wanted to keep things in HTML 3.2 and use tables for layout. Something like the Blogger homepage, http://www.blogger.com/start - could really be a hell of a lot better than what we have right now... I mean, phrases like "Welcome to the GNU Project web server" just make me wince, they're so out of touch with the modern day, it's sad. Oh, we have that and a brown, tabled up Plone site... The biggest change I got made to the GNU website during the most active period was getting the stylesheet to use sans-serif fonts. But how to progress? That's the hard thing. I'd love to see Pledgebank, etc for developers of free software. I might even create it. matt -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html