Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

I never get blasé about stuff like this. It always gives me the warm fuzzies.

Day one: I find what I think is a bug in a Drupal module I'm using on a web site, and find someone else reported the issue they day before.

Day two: I investigate the issue further and find it's a trivial problem and well within my capacity to fix.

Day three: The fix is accepted by the module maintainer, and integrated into the code in the Drupal version control system.

Day Four : My Drupal site tells me that an updated version of the module is available, containing the bug fix. Not just me, but everybody else in the world who is using the same module gets the benefit of the few minutes work I put into fixing the problem for my site.

Contrast this with proprietary software: You know there's probably a bug somewhere, but it's illegal and probably technically impossible to investigate further. You report the bug, hoping that the company that owns the copyright on the product (or the company from whom they have licensed the component containing the bug) feels that paying someone to fix it will be in the interests of their shareholders. You cross your fingers and patiently wait for the next Service Pack, or Patch Tuesday. In all likelihood the problem isn't fixed, but for your troubles the update includes a bunch of antifeatures that you never asked for, making the software even less useful.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

Hi All,

Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.

I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:

http://www.diva-project.org/

I expect there are a fair few of you who have bought one of those cheap MP3 players from The Good Guys or WOW. I know I have one which cost me about 30 bucks and plays half an hour of audio which gets me to work and back on my bicycle.

I've been looking around the new features in Gutsy, and was interested in what's new with the "restricted drivers manager", the gadget that looks after any non-free software required to make unfriendly hardware work. Tried to launch it and was told:

Could these be the eight sweetest words in the English language?

Here are the slides for those presentations which used slides this year.

Lugradio's Stuart Langridge (who must I'm afraid get used to the idea that he will probably never receive as much noteriety for anything else he does as long as he lives), after a laptop purchase which can fairly be described as a fiasco, asks the question "Which video card should I buy?" for his desktop PC.

Among the answers is a link to an awesomely useful page: http://free3d.org

The page uses the fairly rough and ready benchmark of the glxgears screensaver frame rate to rank different combinations of hardware and free software. I'm quite pleased with my 930 frames-per-second result (Intel Corporation 82G965 Integrated Graphics Controller, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz), and my masculinity is not at all threatened by the >6000fps results at the top of the table. With figures like this, and two out of the three major 3D hardware manufacturers (AMD/ATI and Intel) actively providing free driver software (not to mention in one case complete hardware specsifications!), it's time to bury the myth that free software operating systems don't do good 3D.