The Fylde & Wyre Antiquarian

If any one wants a free, legal, easy to use, polished, alternative to the expensive, bloated, restrictive products of the "Microsoft corparation" please get in touch. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it but its not. It exists. Its a comunity based system which is virus and spywre free all programs are FREE and just as good as the comercial alternatives.
Its currently being adopted as a standard operating system by dozens of prestigious organisations inc groups such as "Oxford Archealogy". All files and documents are compatible with other operating systems. Great for reviving older machines dig out your old systems and bring them back to life!

Which game was it in the end and where did you find it ?

Yes, free as in beer and free as in speech. I take it you are using Gimp for graphics editing and OpenOffice for word processing etc. Which Linux distribution have you installed? I've used a linux-based system for almost 10 years now.

21st Centurey Brian.

Ubuntu is a good choice because it's based on the Debian distribution and that has thousands of software packages available for installation. Welcome to software freedom!

Phil,

22nd or 23rd Century at least...Windows is sooo 21st Century.

Chris,



Okay, that's lost me already. All I know is it works faster, smoother and better than Windows and the software is superior and free. (Gimp will just take a bit of getting used to, that's all. Everything's there that's in Photoshop...it's just in a slightly different place.)

That's not just the old socialist in me talking either...although the old socialist is probably sat in the back of my head somewhere grinning.

Brian ment to type "SKYPE" Chris what distribution are you using ? I tried linux a few years back was clunky and very geeky but new versions are VERY user friendly and an excellent alternative to Mr Gates offerings keep progressing like this might replace widows os totaly

Right - a quick tutorial on Linux-based distributions. Firstly, lets dispel the idea that what you get when you buy M$ Windows is just an operating system. The operating system is, very briefly, the software that controls the hardware and allows the applications access to the hardware. All the rest are applications. So the desktop, clock, menu and other gadgets that you see when you boot Windows are just applications. To the operating system, the desktop and its various gadgets are no different than, say, Photoshop. They are just applications that get a share of the computer's resources.

Following that model, Linux is the operating system. It is developed and maintained by a project that is led by Linus Torvalds, who wrote the first version when he was a student in Helsinki (and owns the trademark). There are literally hundreds (and over the years, thousands) of contributors (including, in a very small way, me) (www.kernel.org, www linux.com). Some of the contributors are employed by big-name companies - IBM, HP, Oracle, Google, Fujitsu, Nokia, Sony, AMD and Intel to name but a few. Others are employed by the some of the larger companies that produce the distributions - Red Hat, Mandriva, Novell to, again, name a few. The developers of Linux-based distributions take the operating system and then add the applications to it. As with Windows, that set of applications includes the desktop environment as well as games, email client, web browser, multimedia players and so on. But it also includes some combination of office applications, multimedia creation applications, scientific applications and many other types of software.

There are dozens of distributions - see http://distrowatch.com/. Prominent ones are Debian (www.debian.org), Red Hat (www.redhat.com), Mandriva (www.mandriva.com), Slackware (www.slackware.com), SUSE (www.novell.com/linux) and Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org) as well as Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com). (Ubuntu, by the way, is headed up by Mark Shuttleworth, who, some may remember, is the very wealthy South African who was one of, if not the, first space tourist.).

Anyway, rather than starting from scratch, when the Ubuntu distribution was developed, they started with an existing version of Debian and dropped some bits, added others, updated others, etc. This has been done many times. The distribution I use, Peanut Linux, is now defunct but was based on Slackware. I installed it 7 or 8 years ago and have upgraded bits here and there along the way so that now it looks nothing like the original. For the purpose of doing a backup of my main distribution, I also have a distro (a commonly-used abbreviation) called PCLinuxOS installed and the developers of that based it on Mandriva.

Moreover, there are often various "flavours" of a distribution as is the case with Ubuntu. The vanilla version comes, IIRC, with the Gnome desktop (has a footprint as its logo), so I guess that's what you chaps have. There's also Kubuntu that comes with the KDE desktop (my preference) instead of Gnome, Xubuntu with the XFCE desktop (very lightweight and especially good for old, low-powered computers) and Edubuntu (not sure which desktop), but, as its name implies, it comes with a set of applications that focus on education. Some of these are developed and maintained by the Ubuntu project and others are spin-off distributions that closely track Ubuntu.

As you will have noted above, there's a choice of desktop environment - there are others besides the ones I mention. There's also more than one office package to choose from. For example, the KDE project produces KOffice, which whilst not as functionally rich as OpenOffice, is still very good. There are choices in almost every aspect of your software requirements (see www.freshmeat.net and linux.softpedia.com for an idea of how much free software there is available). The distros mix and match these choices to meet the user-base they are aiming at. The advantage of basing a new distro on Debian, is that the Debian project has a repository of thousands of these applications. The downside is that Debian is a slow moving beast, each new version takes ages to develop and test and thus often lacks the latest version of many applications. Ubuntu is much faster moving, and sometimes will sacrifice the compatibility of some of the Debian applications packages in favour of being a bit more up to date.

Possibly without knowing it, you will have bumped into free software many thousands of times. The Apache web server with, perhaps, a MySQL database, running on the Linux OS is the technical platform for thousands and thousands of web sites.

There are also a number of other free operating systems - google for OpenBSD, FreeBSD, netBSD, PCBSD. As the names indicate, all of these have a common ancestor but have been developed to focus on different aspects of the services that operating systems provide. What makes them different from Linux is that the developers also maintain the repositories of applications that run on the OS. So they are a fusion of OS and distro development. I think that Yahoo was based on one of the BSDs at one point in its history.

As you can tell, I am a free (as in beer and as in speech) software enthusiast. If you want to know more about what's available, PM me or we can talk before and/or after the next Wyre Archaeology meeting.

Cheers

Chris,



How about during the minutes? They always drag on forever anyway.

One of the advantages I've already noticed is that Gimp has a facility for measuring angles -- something Photoshop doesn't appear to have. An extremely useful tool when applied to close contour survey compilation.

By the way if anyone doesn't have home broadband and wants it easily and cheaply with no contract involved PAYG broadband prices have fallen dramaticaly in the last 6 months. "USB MODEM DONGLES " about the size of a packet of chewing gum and no cables involved can now be got for less than £20. Running costs are quite reasonable mine costs me £10 a month. top up is easy just buy like phone credit ie as and when you chose.