Club Linux Coffs Harbour

My old Dell Inspiron 8500 beast has carked it, so I'm in the market for a new lappy. I'll do my usual humming and hah'ing for a few weeks then eventually by some other boring hunk of plastic and wires. In the meantime would anyone like to entertain me with suggestions of what I should buy? My needs are pretty basic up to a point. 90% of the time I'm in a web browser 9% of the time I'm editing text/code and 0.9% of the time I'm watching Dr. Who, The IT Crowd or some other teev.

Some people were asking for Free Software for MACS on SFD

check this out - and add your own here if you find some more

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/

The copyright to CUPS, the printing system used by most free software operating systems (and a number of proprietary ones), has been purchased by Apple Inc., and the former copyright holder and creater of CUPS has been hired by Apple to continue working on it. He has stated that "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms".

Reaction to this has been mixed, ranging from congratulating Apple on supporting such an important project, to concern about possible ulterior motives, based on Apple's mixed track record on working with the free software community.

Back when OS X was released, I personally thought Apple was seriously moving in the direction of freeing it's software completely. This would have made perfect business sense, as the distinguishing feature of Apple's products at the time was the awesomely cool hardware; giving users the freedom to share and improve the software that Apple provided to run on it would only serve to make the overall product more attractive. Ultimately, of course Apple evolved into as much an entertainment company as a technology company, with a strong motivation to release software that was deliberately defective in ways that prevented you from doing things with it that the entertainment industry didn't like, and which was therefore licensed to users in ways that prevented them from fixing these bugs.

In this light, one comment on cups.org strikes me as intriguing...

While Windows, Macs, and GNU/Linux all support long file names (some platforms for longer than others), exactly what "support" means differs in each case. This article explains the differences and suggests some good habits to get into when naming files.

Mark Pilgim, author of Dive Into Python and lifelong Mac user, recently made the switch to Ubuntu. His list of essential software makes a good shopping list for anybody new to free software. Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, EFF fellow, and wearer of a Mac tattoo (!) is following suit.