Over the years I’ve tried numerous distributions, and there’s been a gradual progression from what were probably the early leaders in the Linux market—RedHat for example—through to the some recent and popular examples, particularly Gentoo and Kubuntu.
Tag Archives: Free Software Magazine
Gallery 2.0 Review
My review of Gallery 2.0, part of the ongoing hosting service FOSS technology series for Free Software Magazine, has now been published.
From the intro:
Sharing photos has become one of the more popular methods of sharing information on the internet. A wide range of different people, groups and organisations are using photo sharing as a way both to promote their activities or simply to share their photos with friends and family. Some companies, for example, are using online photo systems to show product shots, others to enable users and customers to provide examples of the company products in use. Many professionals are using photo software to advertise and show off their expertise and portfolios.
Read the full review.
You might also want to read my review of WordPress and the Hosting services and free software introduction to the series.
Agile Web Development with Rails
My review of Agile Web Development with Rails (by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz) has just made it to the the front page of Free Software Magazine.
It’s an excellent guide to programming Ruby and Rails and if you want to do any kind of web development and are tiring of the tradtional web programming environments.
The full review is readale on line.
Using awk
Awk (and Gawk, the GNU alternative) are as old as the hills (well, as old as Unix) and remain as one of the original programmable elements of the Unix operating system, along with the various shells (Bourne shell, Korn shell and C shell, in the original Unix editions).
Using awk
Awk (and Gawk, the GNU alternative) are as old as the hills (well, as old as Unix) and remain as one of the original programmable elements of the Unix operating system, along with the various shells (Bourne shell, Korn shell and C shell, in the original Unix editions).
I'm a tester of Gawk, responsible for checking the compatibility of new releases on different platforms, a job I first started when working on the BeOS and which I now do for Mac OS X, various Linux alternatives, Solaris SPARC and Intel and any other environment I happen to have available.
Awk is actually an incredible powerful programming language, although it is better known for many text processing tasks as an alternative to using the cut and paste tools or similar shell-level commands. The problem is many people don't know it exists, even though vast quantities of the Unix/Linux scripts and other tools use awk/gawk for a variety of different tasks.
There's a good introduction to using awk/gawk for text processing at Linux.com: Learning to talk awk.
Free Software Magazine Issue 10 is out (Free Browsers on OS X)
The latest issue (number 10) of Free Software Magazine is out. You can go straight to Issue 10 through this link.
You can download the entire issue if you are already registered, or download individual articles through the link above. For example, you can download my article, looking at Free browsers for Mac OS X.
To quote Tony Mobily (editor and creator of FSM):
In Free Software Magazine’s 10th issue Eddy Macnaghten helps to make X a little less unknown and “MC” Brown browses the browsers for Mac OS X. On a more political note: David Sugar talks about how free software is freeing Venezuela and Tom Chance reveals how the internet is beginning to aid in political campaigning. And more…
We even managed to get on to the digg front page.
Programming Ruby
I have a short, but sweet, review of Programming Ruby available at Free Software Magazine.
Basically, I love it and it should be in every Ruby programmer’s bookshelf.
WordPress Review
My latest Free Software Magazine newsletter article is on WordPress - a package I use quite a lot for my own blogging.
The article is part of the newsletter series on Hosting Service open source software.
Read on for my thoughts on what makes WordPress so appealing to hosting services.
Hosting Services and free software
I’ve started a new series, through the Free Software Magazine newsletter, on the use of open source technology by hosting services, including the ready-to-run applications such as WordPress, phpBB and Gallery.
The aim is to look at these individual products and how they can provide a quick and easy solution to building your websites, communities and brand.
The first in the series, an overview of FOSS technology in hosting services, can be read here.
You can also subscribe and get the newsletters sent to you automatically. Subscription is free once you’ve filled in a form
Open Source Bubble
Ben Rockwood has a brilliant discussion about the supposed OpenSource bubble, which is itself a response to this piece by Martin LaMonica.
Many of us have been through bubbles before, the dot.com bubble being the most recent (and possibly the most extreme) example. Read both before you make up your mind, but I'm beginning to wonder if there will be some kind of fall out. I think this is especially true if consider the comments made by Jason Matusow, best covered and described by Jason himself here.
I don't agree absolutely with Jason's comments, but I think he makes some valid points, as do Ben and Martin.