Internetling

Lenny was expected to be out in September but there has been a protracted debate going on over whether it should be released with firmware blobs or not.

Debian Lenny

Always when a type of application is missing, there is bound to be a version in development. For difficult and complicated programs, the case is not the same but most of the powerful apps have a steep learning curve and although developers are already working hard on user-friendly alternatives, due to the complicated nature of the software, not many resources are available and the development time is much slower.

In order to attract some interest for certain slow, but extremely important projects I’ve picked out a few attractive apps which could become powerful contributors to the widespread adoption of the Linux desktop. We need to get stable, functional, user-friendly apps out. Linux does have some cool stuff available, but we often forget that a lot of it also depends on the interface.

Let us build a cool desktop! I am aware of the awesomeness that is customization, though many people forget that most desktop users want to simply start working. I love tweaking my Arch system for a whole weekend, it is just that I do not believe your typical grandmother is interested in such stuff. You see, she does not know the difference between tiling and floating window managers and the advantages of using virtual desktops, but she will like a prettier out-of-the-box experience, along with free applications for every task you can think of, which look good, do the job well and are easy to work with.

Jokosher

A garage-band like package, Jokosher can be a great tool for audio production, it just needs more functions.

Update: Mr. Ignorant hasn’t checked the dates last version was released in October 2008. Go Jokosher!

It works fine on most distributions and is good for basic tasks, though there is a lot of work to be done to ensure stability and better functionality. I’d be very sad to see this project die.

KdenLive

Even though the project released a new version of their sexy video editing application, I’m not sure whether they will be able to keep up. More contribution would be needed, since amateur video editing (except for the high-high end) is pretty weak on Linux (thank goodness for Kino and Cinelerra, but they just don’t cut it for the ‘middle market’) and I believe many dev resources and energy are required for such a complicated project to mature.

Gogh

A personal favorite of mine. It is something like an equivalent of OpenCanvas. Along with the linuxwacom project the Gogh project wishes to make the perfect drawing app for tablet users. It is very important for sketching, also it features layers, colour palettes and other basic features. I’d like for Gogh to get more publicity, since it is quite a simple project, but crucial for tablet users to get to know GNU/Linux better.

Are there any special projects that you like and would like to get them featured on the blog? Please write a comment!

If you have been following the news last week, you may have stumbled upon a quite shocking news item. A teacher from Austin, Texas confiscated a bunch of CDs containing free Linux distributions from a student who was demonstarting GNU/Linux on his laptop and handing out the CDs. After this, the teacher sent an angry email to Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, where the student got his Linux CDs from.

“This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”

Yes, the teacher is clearly a person who doesn’t know a lot about FOSS and the comment sections of every site that published the snippet exploded with comments such as:

“If the teacher is reading this…… you should be fired. Imagine if that same attitude was taken during the women’s rights movement. Basically, the equivalent comment would be, “do not teach women about science, math, or business because its not preparing them for the real world.”

Its people like this that encourage me to homeschool my children. As Helen Lovejoy would say, “Won’t somebody please think of the children!?”"

I believe the comments were a bit too harsh. As Ken Stark admitted after a few days, he never meant to attack anyone personally. Now the teacher is in quite some trouble, because the news was published in the local newspaper and of course on numerous sites on the Internet.

In my opinion, what the teacher did wrong was being too aggressive and not doing enough research before sending the email. The teacher’s mistake was threatening the HeliOS project, because she didn’t know there is such a thing as Free licenses, especially the GPL and along with that a mountain of powerful open source software. In addition, the teacher based her opinion on the bad experience she had with Linux in college. We all know, of course, how much the OS has changed and improved since then.

However, judging this is too much:
“I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.”

Obviously, she planned on doing some research. Isn’t that actually a good thing? I don’t really know what would happen (the teacher had a talk with her superior, I think and now the CDs have been returned) if Ken Starks didn’t respond so emotionally, but research would surely lead her to realise Linux is a great, legal operating system which people can and should use, especially students. The thing would end well (even though yes, it was the teacher’s email who caused the whole commotion) without the ruckus. Luckily, Ken Stark did a great follow-up post, commenting how she actually is a good teacher and that we all have to handle stuff like this more maturely in the future.

See, all of this brings me to my point. The type of ignorant people we saw here could hypothetically be a good thing for Linux adoption – the type of people which loudly express their bad opinion about Linux. Their “shouting” gives us a chance to respond as a community with even more power, while attracting many people due to the commotion the first negative comments started. It actually promotes Linux to those people, who realise Linux always wins in these cases, especially theses famous “School teacher says this and that about Linux” headlines. Such “enemies” can only help.

What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Austin teacher threatens to sic cops on Linux group because “No software is free”
• Epilogue: Austin schoolteacher who didn’t believe Linux existed

Even though I am a strong advocate of learning as much as you can about using the command line, I admit I like my GUI a lot (and Compiz of course ). The CLI can be really useful for repairing your system or just doing some task that takes far more clicks in the graphical interface. For instance, in Debian it is much easier to open the console and write apt-get install abiword than to wait for Synaptic to load, search for Abiword, click the check-box, confirm the install and close the front end.

Sometimes you will find yourself in a situation when you don’t want the app to stop working when X is restarted or broken. Sometimes you just want a very light application, and nothing is faster than a text interface. For example, when I install the new nvidia drivers on Debian it sometimes breaks my system – but I want to listen to a podcast while doing the repair work. If I used Banshee, the thing would stop playing when I restarted X. By opening a virtual terminal, by pressing say Ctrl+Alt+F4, I fire up sox and play the mp3 in there. Works great and X does not interfere with the playback!

So what can new users do with the command-line while enjoying the GUI? There is a multitude of applications that do the same jobs as their graphical equivalents, but are not dependent on X. Using them is just a matter of learning a few simple commands. You’ll be up and running in no time.

Also, check out CLI-apps.org where you can find lots more!

1) rtorrent is a powerful CLI torrent client. While the interface itself is very “empty”, it can do most of the things other full-featured torrent clients do. Find the torrent file by pressing Return (or Enter) and navigating to your torretn file. rtorrent.rc configuration file, you can normally find an example in /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc

Even though the program will warn you there is no such file on first start, you may use this exampel configuration file to setup rtorrent for maximum speed, IP masking etc.
You can find out more about configuring it and a few mroe tips and screens here. An alternative to rtorrent is a similar program called (Enhanced) ctorrent.

2) w3m is a great little web browser for the console. It features tables, tabs, frames, SSL connections, color and even inline images on suitable terminals.  When you are not in X, w3m becomes a great way of searching Google and forums when you are troubleshooting. The navigation is very easy when you get used to it and w3m renders pages surprisingly well, even Gmail. Emacs uses w3m to display pages in the text editor itself.

Note: w3m’s homepage hasn’t been updated, so I’m not linking it. Just Google w3m to find otu more about it. Also, every distribution should have w3m either installed or in the primary repos.

3) bashpodder As a podcast listener, I must not forget to add bashpodder to my list. It is an extremely simple and robust command-line podcatching client written by Linc from the Linux Link Tech Show podcast. While the setup requires you to do some manual work, the program itself actually uses wget behind the scenes and is the perfect client for older computers or people who just like it simple – you only need wget, sed and bash.

There are GUIs available for bashpodder, too (like the depicted KPodder).

4) finch is probably already on your computer, if you installed Pidgin. This surprisingly advanced CLI multi-protocol instant messaging client enables you to use most of the features you get in Pidgin, without the need of a graphical interface. The UI is pretty simple, but at the same time easy to understand. Just run ‘finch’ in the shell and try it out, if you already have Pidgin on your machine.

5) Mutt and 6) Alpine are email clients for the command-line. They are the ‘mammoths’ of email, as they have existed for almost about ten years now. Bot have their advantages and disadvantages (for instance, Newsgroups support is much better in Alpine). Personally I would recommend using Gmail in w3m if you already want to have email in the CLI, though many people use text-based email clients, especially Alpine, which is a descendant of Pine.

Read more about these two mail clients here, where the author is much more knowledgeable about them than me. Even though it is a ghastly translation of a German article, I believe you won’t have any trouble understanding it.

Do you still use any CLI apps? What do you think about CLI applications? Tell us in the comments.

Some people will argue with me in that these GNU/Linux distributions are as advanced as you want them to be. Well, of course Linux is all about choice. I took the user base perspective though and what I have for you today is a few distros which do not hide the manual (or for people like me, beautiful) underlying configuration. Also, by using the distro itself, you will learn a lot about Linux and how an operating system works. It is a fun and useful experience, believe me and never be scared of the command line It is your friend.

Arch Linux

A distro I am currently playing with right now, Arch is focused on simplicity and elegance. A great Beginners Wiki Article guides you through the process of setting up your first Arch Linux system. There is a lot of manual editing in nano and other command line tools, but it is not very difficult and it is all explained in great detail and a very beginner-friendly manner. Arch’s pacman package manger system turned out to be a very lightweight and quality tool for managing the software installed on your system. If you cannot find something, just check the community repository. The resulting system is always pretty stable and fast. Plus, as it is a rolling-release distro, pacman takes care of your packages so you’re never behind on the newest in FOSS. Two thumbs up!

Slackware

While I am not very familiar with the original Slackware (I have used many derivatives, like SLAX and Vector Linux), Slackware also concentrates on a type of KISS principle, in part at the cost of user-friendliness. Many people run Slackware on servers, some even on laptops. What they like is the stability and the experience gained from using such a system. As for package management – Slackware’s can do the basic tasks, like remove, install and upgrade, however it cannot track dependencies, so it is up to you to solve them or you can use one of the many automatic dependency-resolving tools such as slapt-get.

“In this context, “simple” refers to the viewpoint of system design, rather than ease of use. Most software in Slackware uses the configuration mechanisms supplied by the software’s original authors; there are few distribution-specific mechanisms.”

Gentoo

By the way, I would like to hear a Gentoo user in the comments explain some more about what the benefits of Gentoo Linux are. Most of the newer Linux users connect Gentoo with compiling apps locally. I personally like to use other distros, because I mostly just use binaries (Gentoo has some binaries too) for some programs and in other cases compile my apps when I really want to, which I am already able to do in any other distro. So, why would you choose Gentoo? Well, first if you would like to learn how compiling works, Gentoo is an excellent choice. You will be able to get a distro specifically tailored for your system (brings in a slight increase in overall speed). The package management system is called Portage with the emerge tool (I think it is written in python), based on Ports in the BSDs (what is different is that Portage contains ebuilds). Compiling everything enables you to have softer dependencies, more bleeding-edge packages and you can install the system in three different “Stages”, depending on how much of the system you wish to compile yourself (only Stage 3 installs are officially supported!).

• Stage1: System must be bootstrapped and the base system must be compiled.
• Stage2: System has already been bootstrapped, but the base system must be compiled.
• Stage3: System has already been bootstrapped and the base system already compiled.

Well, I hope this short article made you at least a bit curious about how it is to use these distros. Why not give them a try? At least visit their homepages and take a look at some more information. Is there anything you’d want to add? I’d love to read some comments from users and people new to Linux!