June 2005 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

ActiveState on Mac OS X
by Craig Box 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Sent to me by one of our generous benefactors. -- Craig Dear Daniel, ActiveState is thrilled to announce today the release of ActivePerl, ActivePython, and ActiveTcl for the Mac OS X platform. The release of this world-renowned open source language distribution on OS X marks the beginning of ActiveState's commitment to Mac OS X developers. This brings the number of free language distributions to four platforms - with the existing Linux, Solaris and Windows free downloads. You may be interested to know that we are busily working on bringing Komodo to Mac OS X. We expect to offer a beta in August and release later this year. To keep up-to-date with our Mac OS X progress, betas and announcements, we invite you and your group to join our new mailing list: osx-announce(a)ActiveState.com You can join the OS X announce list on the ActiveState Programmer Network (ASPN): http://listserv.activestate.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-announce Looking to update your Perl, Python, or Tcl distros on Mac OS X? See www.ActiveState.com/osx Please pass this information on to the members of your user group and we thank you all for your ongoing support of ActiveState and our products! Thank You, Shezmeen Hudani Marketing Associate shezmeenh(a)activestate.com Tel: 604.484.6809 Web: www.ActiveState.com ActiveState, a division of Sophos

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WLUG Meeting this Monday
by John R. McPherson 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

WLUG Meeting - 13th June 2005 Location: LitB, 7pm. Nandor Tanczos of the Green Party is scheduled to discuss his views on Open Source software. (taken from http://www.wlug.org.nz/MeetingTopics.2005-06-13)

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RE: [wlug] Introducing Software Freedom Day 2005!
by David Nicholls 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

I know a journo/writer who might be keen to help with this. -----Original Message----- From: Craig Box Sent: Tuesday, 7 June 2005 12:08 pm Subject: [wlug] Introducing Software Freedom Day 2005! -----snip------ Writing: We would appreciate well-written articles about SFD or about FOSS in general that can be submitted to local media or distributed on the day. Form letters that can be sent to schools, businesses government organisation, etc. will also be useful. Material Design: We have some artwork already, but we need designs for the SFD 2005 CD labels and covers, as well as T-shirts, balloons, stickers, or even temporary tattoos! If you or your friends have some artistic inclinations feel free to pop into the SFD Forums to share your ideas and your work. Donations: SFD funds cover the costs of material and logistics support that we provide. The more funds we have available, the more material and logistical support we can provide for teams world-wide. So don't feels shy about donating :) Any surplus funds can be used for advertising in the week before the event. Donations can be made online at the SFD website.

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Introducing Software Freedom Day 2005!
by Craig Box 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Henrik Nilsen Omma writes.. Hello, Mark September 10th 2005 on your calendar! It is the second annual Software Freedom Day. We will be staging a range of events around the world to raise public awareness of Free and Open Source Software. This is a global grassroots effort, and we invite the Free and Open Source Software community around the world to join in the celebration and help spread the word! Over 70 teams joined the celebration in 2004, organising a range of events at schools, universities and public places. This year, we have every opportunity to grow and make an even greater impact on community awareness. What will happen? ----------------- You may celebrate the day locally however you would like, but we encourage you to engage in some sort of outreach activity to spread the FOSS message in your community. For example, you could organise a seminar or an installfest or simply invite people to meet up in the park for a picnic. If you want to participate, please stop by the SFD website [1] and register a team so that others in your area can find you and hook up. Our website and wiki have pictures and reports from some of the SFD2004 events, so you can get an idea of what worked well. If you participated last year, please join us again, and please share your experiences with the new teams. How does it work? ----------------- As last year, we will prepare special promotional materials for distribution by the SFD teams. In 2004 this included ISO images of a custom version of TheOpenCD and a custom version of Knoppix along with some printed materials. Due to our budget constraints we were only able to produce CD covers while the local teams did a great job of burning their own CDs and copying materials. This year we will create a single CD containing both a Live Linux image and some Windows-FOSS for this purpose. We have funding from our primary sponsor for up to 15.000 of our custom CDs shipped out to 150 teams world-wide! We In addition, other supplies (such as t-shirts and balloons) will be available, but the quantities and distribution process of these items is not yet determined (depends in part on the availability of additional funding). By June 15th we will provide a simple supply request form where established teams can request CDs and possibly other materials for SFD. Be sure to get in your application for supplies before the July 1st deadline so we can get the supplies produced and distributed in time for the event. What can I do? -------------- The best way to participate is to start forming a SFD team and start planning local celebrations. Make sure you register as an official team [1] so you can apply for sponsorship of materials. We also need help with lots of things on the global level: Writing: We would appreciate well-written articles about SFD or about FOSS in general that can be submitted to local media or distributed on the day. Form letters that can be sent to schools, businesses government organisation, etc. will also be useful. Material Design: We have some artwork already, but we need designs for the SFD 2005 CD labels and covers, as well as T-shirts, balloons, stickers, or even temporary tattoos! If you or your friends have some artistic inclinations feel free to pop into the SFD Forums to share your ideas and your work. Donations: SFD funds cover the costs of material and logistics support that we provide. The more funds we have available, the more material and logistical support we can provide for teams world-wide. So don't feels shy about donating :) Any surplus funds can be used for advertising in the week before the event. Donations can be made online at the SFD website. Getting in touch ------------------ Please stop by our forum or join #sfd on freenode IRC. We have set up a temporary mailing list here [2] where people can hook up, but we will provide more regional lists as the needs arise. Best wishes and happy Software Freedom Day 2005! - The SFD Team [1] http://softwarefreedomday.org/ [2] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/theopencd-sfd2005

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RE: [nzlug] Sarge is out
by Michael Honeyfield 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

w00t.. now ubuntu, linspire and libranet will be able to update their base.. oh wait.. ;) -----Original Message----- From: James Clark <jamesc(a)bofh.co.nz> Sent: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 10:05:11 +1200 To: Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>, nzlug <nzlug(a)linux.net.nz> Subject: [nzlug] Sarge is out http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050606 James. ------------------------------------------------------------------- To remove yourself from this list, email nzlug-request(a)linux.net.nz with "unsubscribe" in the body of the message.

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Website Redesign
by Matt Brown 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

The more observant of you may notice that the WLUG Wiki is sporting a fancy new look. We'll probably roll this theme out across the other resources (Library / Webmail, and Planet WLUG (coming soon)) when we get some spare time. As with all new things there might be a few bugs lurking in the new theme, if you spot any please let me know. While I am semi-interested in comments on the new layout, I'm going to have a very low tolerance for comments like "the fonts look ugly" or "the fonts are too big" unless you're actually interested in making a positive contribution to improving the situation (and that generally means the email includes a diff for the .css that you think fixes the problem). Thanks to John, Perry and the others who have helped in the implementation of this new theme. Graphic design credits go to my wife Katalina. Kind Regards -- Matt Brown matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +64 275 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz

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Kiaora CD is 'piracy' ?!!
by zcat 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

I gave my wife a few spare copies of Kiaora CD to sell on Trademe (mostly just to get the name out there) and they were pulled. When I asked why, we got the following reply; Dear Susan, Thanks for contacting us. You are not allowed to list CDs containing programs that you do not hold the copyright for. These CDs contained a number of programs freely available on the internet. CDs of this nature are considered piracy and will be removed. If you have any further questions or if I can be of any further help please do not hesitate to contact me. Regards, Sophie I sent a fairly grumpy reply back citing the GPL, RMS's page on 'selling free software' and so on, but now Sue's quite upset and refuses to have anything more to do with it. What else can I do. TM seems to have some 'very confused' ideas of what constitutes piracy, and I have a hard time calmly explaining the issues when I feel like they're calling me (or Sue) a criminal and removing perfectly legitimate listings with no compensation. -- Disclaimer: Any disclaimer attached to this message may be ignored.

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Gnome 2.10
by Oliver Jones 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

Hmm. After all that fricking around with Synaptic I can hardly notice the difference between Gnome 2.10 and 2.8. *sigh*. There are a few cool new applets, CPU freq monitor, trashcan, etc. And I think some of the games use SVG for graphics instead of PNG's (though I'm not sure if 2.8 didn't have that already). It doesn't seem as stable... in some areas. Though the package quality of the nrpms.net Gnome RPMS is not so great so this is probably more a problem with the RPMS than GNOME 2.10 as a whole. There are a few nice new apps. Seahorse (GPG encryption key manager), Evince (Cairo based PDF & PS viewer) considerably slower at rendering than gpdf :( but does provide nice thumbnails in Nautilus. Of course nothing beats Acrobat for rendering PDF but Acrobat takes an age to start. "Fast task switching", aka starting a new X session on another VT, is kinda neat. Remote desktop sharing would be handy in some cases. Coaster is an extremely simple CD/DVD burner which looks good/useful. GnomeBaker on the other hand looks like the startings of a K3B replacement, but with not as many features yet. Other than that, not a whole lot of difference. Of course the RedHat menus have gotten all buggered up with weird entries. Mainly from 3rd party rpms. As for some of the mono apps... well I've not played with them too much. Had a brief look at Muine, tomboy, f-spot and Beagle. Beagle will be cool. But it is quite rough around the edges at the moment. f-spot is good but 'alpha'-ish. Muine will be excellent when it supports more than mp3. Nearly all my music is in .m4a (AAC) format for my iPod. Muine uses GStreamer as a backend but GStreamer as shipped by NRPMS.net doesn't support AAC. Ah well... life on the bleeding edge... ;) Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com

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