Hi everybody, and welcome to another fortnightly edition of Free Software Magazine’s newsletter; keeping you up to date in the world of free software! And do we have some good stuff for you guys this fortnight!
General announcements
Firstly, we have just released Issue 17, and it is packed full of good things for your reading pleasure. Highly recommended, even if we do say so ourselves! Secondly, we are finally running our web site using Drupal 5! Not noticing anything different? Excellent. That means everything is working as planned. We rewrote our article management system, and are about to release it under the GPL as a Drupal module. This means that we are about to roll out several exciting features, which we have been hoarding up until the new site was out. So... stay tuned!
Latest content
Welcome to Free Software Magazine—again!—Tony Mobily describes the evolution of Free Software Magazine to that glorious CMS, Drupal... Read more...
3D drivers matrix—the evolution—Wanna know about 3D drivers? Mitch Meyran can help you out! Read more...
FOSS fight in the UK— Chris Holt looks at some of the reasons companies reject the FOSS switch. Read more...
Towards Wengophone 2.1—Marco Marongiu conducts an interview with Philippe Bernery and Dave Neary of the OpenWengo project. Read more...
Save time—buy a hard drive loaded with porn!—Steve Goodwin looks into the latest craze sweeping the hardware market... Read more...
Latest content continued
Free software games, the return—Never thought about using free software for gaming? Mitch Meyran fills you in on what you’ve been missing... Read more...
Play and touch-type with TypeFaster—10 year old Nelson Berg describes the ins and outs of TypeFaster! Read more...
Non-free repositories!?—Jonathon Roberts tackles the sticky topic of the inclusion of officially supported non-free repositories in distributions. Read more...
The free Tron Universe—Armagetron—Alan Berg has found out how to relive the old Tron days... with Armagetron. Hold on! Read more...
Latest book reviews released
Bounty Hunters (Metaphors for Fair Intellectual Property Laws) by Greg London Terry Hancock looks into the problems with copyright, as metaphored by Greg London. Read more...
Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson & Jo Walsh Brian Turner considers the wonderful world of maps. Read more...
Book competition announcement for this fortnight
This week we are giving away a copy of Beginning GIMP—From Novice To Professional by Akkana Peck and a copy of Design Concepts with Code: An Approach for Developers by Stanko Blatnik and Kelly Carey.
All you need to do to enter is check out the latest book competition announcement on our blogs page.
GOOD LUCK!
Thanks go to Apress for providing these fantastic prizes.
Winner of the book competition from last fortnight
Thanks to all those who entered, unfortunately there can only be one winner...
Congratulations Johannes Hutabarat of Jarkata, Indonesia!
Johannes has won copies of BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT.
Thanks to all who entered.
Thanks also go to Addison Wesley for providing these great prizes.
Winner of the book competition from the 26th of March
Thanks to all those who entered, unfortunately there can only be one winner...
Congratulations Mike Schwartz of Phoenix Arizona in the USA!
Mike has won copies of Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse and Red Hat Fedora Core 6 Unleashed.
Thanks to all who entered.
Thanks also go to Sams for providing these great prizes.
Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition
Poll Results—What is the primary way in which you contribute to free software?
The results of this poll were pretty clear cut! 70% of our readers contribute to the free software movement by advocating the use of free software by teaching and installing it for people. A big thank you to you all! This was followed by 12% of you contribute by writing code and releasing it under a free license, 6% of you contribute financially to free software, 6% of you don’t contribute at all, 3% of you write documentation, and 4% do something other. What an excellent community we have! Read more here and stay tuned for...
This fortnight’s poll
Would you install GNU/Linux on your grandmother’s computer?
So, would you install a GNU/Linux distro for your grandmother (or other computer illiterate person (...not that we intend to suggest that grandmothers aren’t computer literate. We’re sure there are plenty of computer savvy grandmothers out there. In fact, there would be more and more every day. Please post a comment if you are tech-savvy granny.)) if you could? What distro would it be if you did? Why wouldn’t you install it if you couldn’t? Let us know your thoughts.
Reminders
Comments
Your comments on articles, issues, and blog entries are very welcome. They provide other readers with insightful suggestions, further information, and the feeling that they are not alone. They also provide our authors with the feeling that they are being heard. Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition.
Avatars
Avatars are a great way of expressing your personal identity, whether it be a photo or an image that you feel represents the you you want to be. Read more about avatars here. To add an avatar: log in, go to “my account” in the menu on the left, go to the “edit” tab and scroll down to where it says “Upload picture”. Now, hit the browse button, find the image on your computer that you want to upload and go to the bottom of the page and hit the submit button. That’s it; you now have an avatar image.
Donate
As you might know already FSM is a low profit project with all funds raised going back into producing the fine magazine you can download for free.
Think about how much you would normally have to spend buying a magazine of this quality. We provide it for free!
Your donations will help us to continue spreading the word about free software and producing more fantastic issues.
Contacting us
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Thanks
Thank you for subscribing to Free Software Magazine. You are a part of a growing community who help to raise the awareness of, and educate new users in, the joys of free software. Without you we would not have this community and without you we would not have a magazine. Happy reading!