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[LUG] [Fwd: [Fsm_newsletter] FSM Newsletter 25 February 2008]

 
Many topics relevant to the list are covered here in this weeks FSM
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Regards: Kevin Lucas Post Master (Sub) Minions Shop & Tea Rooms Minions Liskeard Cornwall PL14 5LE www.minionsbandb.co.uk
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FSM Newsletter 25 February 2008

By admin

Hello readers, and welcome once again to [Free Software Magazine] 
(http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/)'s fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to 
date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this 
week! Enjoy!

General announcements
=====================

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week
---------------------------------------------

1. **You can now add FSDaily news feeds to your sites!** --You can now add FSDaily 
news feeds to your website or homepage. The block will show the latest news from one 
of our great feeds. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/You_can_now_add_FSDaily_news_feeds_to_your_sites)

2. **Switching Office Suites from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org** --How to set 
up OpenOffice.org to work how you want it with templates and clip art, 
configurations, shortcuts, and more. I’m here to help. Think of this as a virtual 
guide to help you figure out things you’re not quite sure about. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/HighEnd/Switching_Office_Suites_from_Microsoft_Office_to_OpenOffice_org)

3. **Adobe Pushes DRM for Flash** --"...Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash 
Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 
9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of 
an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe 
protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out 
non-Adobe software players and video tools..." [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Opposition/Adobe_Pushes_DRM_for_Flash)

4. **OOXML: What's the big deal?** --The OOXML specification has been both 
criticized and defended by a number of people, leading many to wonder what the big 
deal is. This article illustrates the basis of technical, rather than political, 
objections to treating OOXML as a standard. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Legal/OOXML_Whats_the_big_deal)

5. **The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History** --" Let me teach you how to 
work efficiently with command line history in bash. This tutorial comes with a 
downloadable cheat sheet that summarizes (and expands on) topics covered here 
(scroll to the end for a download link). In case you are a first time reader, this 
is the 3rd part of the article series on working efficiently in bourne again shell. 
Previously I have written on how to work efficiently in vi and emacs command editing 
modes by using predefined keyboard shortcuts (both articles come with cheat sheets 
of predefined shortcuts)..." [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/EndUser/The_Definitive_Guide_to_Bash_Command_Line_History)

6. **The £99 laptop: how can it be so cheap?** --A new laptop computer for just £99 
sounds like the kind of offer found in a spam e-mail or on a dodgy auction website. 
But the British company Elonex is launching the country’s first sub £100 computer 
later this month and hopes to be making 200,000 of them by the summer. It will be 
aimed at schoolchildren and teenagers, and looks set to throw the market for budget 
laptops wide open. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/EndUser/The_99_laptop_how_can_it_be_so_cheap)

7. **Explore the Universe from your Desktop with Celestia** --While it may not let 
you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that 
lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar 
System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than 
the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/EndUser/Explore_the_Universe_from_your_Desktop_with_Celestia)

8. **Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia 
and Project Gutenberg** --Project Gutenberg, started in 1971, is the oldest part of 
the modern free culture movement. Wikipedia is a relative upstart, riding on the 
wave of success of free software, extending the idea to other kinds of information 
content. Today, Project Gutenberg, with over 24,000 e-texts, is probably larger than 
the legendary Library of Alexandria. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Impossible_thing_2_Comprehensive_free_knowledge_repositories_like_Wikipedia_and_Project_Gutenberg)

9. **Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free** --Linux isn't very popular 
on the desktop. It's a far third behind OS X, which is a very far second behind 
Windows. Most people cite pre-installed operating systems as the reason. But as a 
student of psychology, I see something most people don't. There's one big factor in 
why Linux isn't popular on the desktop. Linux is free. I know this sounds like 
complete dog's bollocks, but hear me out before judging my sanity. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Why_Linux_Doesnt_Spread_the_Curse_of_Being_Free)

10. **Google behind Photoshop's new Linux compatibility** --Google recently 
confirmed in a blog posting that it had paid Codeweavers to help develop WINE to 
make Photoshop usable on the well-regarded but still somewhat unpredictable software 
package, which aims to replicate Windows libraries to enable popular Windows 
applications run in a Linux environment. [Read 
more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Business/Google_behind_Photoshops_new_Linux_compatibility)

_Thanks to dave, Rubuntu, can.axis, peacemaker, extra, nemilar, tony, serdar, and 
bridget for these stories!_

Latest content
--------------

**Sharing without Microsoft Exchange** --By Ryan Cartwright. Microsoft Exchange is 
the name most organisations go for when thinking of sharing calendars, e-mail etc. 
However, there are free software alternatives—and of course you don’t have to go for 
the obvious or popular option. [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/sharing_without_microsoft_exchange)

**Free software Easter eggs** --By Alan Berg. It is grey a dull, overcast day here 
in downtown Amsterdam. The weather is rather oppressive, summer’s smile long gone 
and my wine cellar miraculously has grown to quiet emptiness. However, I know a not 
too-well guarded secret. Hidden in the cracks, just at the edge of your eyesight, is 
extra humorous functionality in your favourite free software applications. Silent 
professional Easter eggs are waiting stealthily to make you smile. [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_software_easter_eggs)

**Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and 
Project Gutenberg** --By Terry Hancock. Project Gutenberg, started in 1971, is the 
oldest part of the modern free culture movement. Wikipedia is a relative upstart, 
riding on the wave of success of free software, extending the idea to other kinds of 
information content. Today, Project Gutenberg, with over 24,000 e-texts, is probably 
larger than the legendary Library of Alexandria. Wikipedia is the largest and most 
comprehensive encyclopedic work ever created in the history of mankind. It’s common 
to draw comparisons to Encyclopedia Britannica, but they are hardly comparable 
works—Wikipedia is dozens of times larger and covers many more subjects. Accuracy is 
a more debatable topic, but studies have suggested that Wikipedia is not as much 
less accurate than Britannica as one might naively suppose. [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/impossible_thing_2_comprehensive_free_knowledge_repositories_wikipedia_and_project_gutenberg)

**All the C you need to know for GTK+** --By Andrew Krause. If you want to develop 
applications with GTK+, a graphical toolkit used by the GNOME desktop environment, 
it is essential that you are comfortable with the C programming language. This 
article is meant to give you a short refresher on the basics of C that you will need 
to know when developing GTK+ applications. [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/all_the_c_you_need_for_gtk_development)

**gedit: a powerful, underrated text editor for everybody** --By Andrew Min. Most 
computer users spend their entire life looking for the Holy Grail. In other words, 
they spend all their life searching for the perfect editor that supports all their 
languages, is free as in speech, has spelling, has highlighting… you get the 
picture. Obviously, there isn’t a perfect editor out there. However, some come 
pretty close. Ironically, one of them is one that any Ubuntu (or in fact, any Gnome) 
user has installed, though they may not know it. It’s called gedit (also known as 
Text Editor). [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/gedit_powerful_underrated_text_editor_everybody)

**Pimp your desktop: automate desktop wallpaper with Webilder** --By Gary Richmond. 
They say that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and if you 
want to make a good impression with computer lovers with artistic pretensions, a 
fancy wallpaper is a pretty good place to start. It can be a real ice breaker. Why 
stop there? Why spend fruitless hours dredging through the art galleries of 
cyberspace to retrieve a few hard-won digital morsels to decorate your miserable 
desktop? Just automate the tedious process with Webilder and free up some valuable 
time to hone your other more valuable Unix skills. Webilder won’t make you rich, 
improve your productivity or make you irresistibly attractive to the opposite sex 
(much) but it’s clever, fun and cool. What more reason do you need to use it? Enough 
already with the slick sales talk. Let’s pimp that desktop! [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/pimp_your_desktop_automate_desktop_wallpaper_webilder)

**Group interview: a graphic view of the open hardware movement. Part 1: 
motivations** --By Terry Hancock. Excitement in the Open Graphics community is quite 
high as it approaches its first production run of the FPGA-based “Open Graphics 
Development” board, known as “OGD1”. It will be available for pre-sale this month 
with the first units expected to ship soon thereafter. The board is targeted at 
hardware developers, with the specific goal of supporting development and testing of 
designs for a fully-documented consumer Open Hardware Graphics Card to be 
implemented using an ASIC (thus resolving one of the biggest obstacles to free 
software on the desktop). [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/group_interview_graphic_view_open_hardware_movement_part_1_motivations)

**Can we please stop fighting FUD with FUD?** --By Ryan Cartwright. It has long been 
the case that proprietary software companies regularly engage in FUD (fear, 
uncertainty and doubt) tactics against their opponents. This particularly seems to 
apply to Microsoft’s statements about free software in general and GNU/Linux in 
particular. Recently I’ve noticed a surge in the amount of FUD going the other 
way—from the FOSS community towards Microsoft and other proprietary software 
companies. Why do we feel it is necessary to fight FUD with FUD? [Read 
more...](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/can_we_please_stop_fighting_fud_fud)

Reminders
---------

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[here](http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/newsletters";)

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