No Turning Back!

My quest on free softwares started when I’m looking for C compilers while I was working as Lab facilitator in one of the well-known learning centers in Quezon City in the late 90’s. I mean, free as in beer. I didn’t know yet about Free Software of Richard Stallman. Though it started in early 80’s. From that time, I kept on searching for free softwares. Among the programs that I will never forget were Rapid-Q (still active) and Euphoria Programming Language (which is now open-source). I did not support Turbo products of Borland such as Turbo Basic, C, C++ and Pascal, and Microsoft products such their QBasic and Visual Studio. Even though I learned from them (i.e. in school). Sorry! 🙂 What I knew, these were proprietary softwares. Old Borland products, I think some, are now free.

Until year 2004, I discovered Linux Distros. I can’t consider Slackware which I learned in the late 90’s. Because the purpose is for the server side. My first distro that I’d tried as desktop OS was DamnSmallLInux. I will never forget the experience. This was my reason on distro hopping. And in 2005, I introduced Linux in one of the University in Rizal. Somewhere in Rodriguez (Montalban). We successfully implemented in the 2 computer laboratories. I left in 2006. I hope they’re still using it 😦

I had a newly purchased laptop but I intentionally left it in the Philippines to challenge myself that I will completely use an incomplete but a complete desktop 🙂 Last May, I assembled a desktop computer without a hard disk. I was thinking, if we survived in the early 90’s using a single floppy disk for the operating system (i.e. DOS) and application programs (e.g. Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 123), why can’t I nowadays. This is through USB flashdrives. In this system (a 2GB flashdrive) I have the following but not limited to these programs: (Actually, I have 2. One for exploring,testing and development. And the other one as my main OS)

a) KOffice, Gnome Office + a standby Open Office

• Wordprocessing : KWord, Writer, Abiword
• Spreadsheet : Kspread, Calc, Gnumeric
• Presentation : KPresenter, Impress

b) Movie/Music Player : Mplayer, KPlayer, VLC, XMMS

c) Browser : Konqueror, Opera, Seamonkey

d) Graphics : GIMP, Gwenview, KolourPaint

e) Programming : GCC/G++, PHP, Java, Gambas, Rapid-Q, CodeBlocks, Perl

f) PDF Converter/Viewer

g) File Transfer : Transmission, gFTP

h) Webserver : Lighttpd, Abyss

i) CD/DVD burner : K3B

j) Zip Viewer/Archiving Tool : Ark

k) Instant Messaging : Kopete, Skype

Amaze? 🙂 Pirated? 🙂

( I’m wondering why some educational institution cannot embrace  Free and Open-source Softwares.  Some tried, but they dumped! I’m very disappointed about this. They are educators! They shouldn’t do this. Their spending almost a million. Instead of buying softwares, why not improve their facilities or give the money to their teachers as honorarium. Right? 🙂 Special mention to the University of the Philippines Diliman. I admire them for this matter. )

I’m enjoying using Linux completely for almost 5 months now without worries like virus infections or system crashes and most especially LEGAL issues. I’m only encountering system crashes when I’m exploring a new distro or testing a program. But I’m doing this using a live CD or without persistent changes.

These are the nice things that I like in Linux compared to other O$. Bow! 🙂

Amaze Yourself!

A picture paints a thousand words… Don’t just stare… try… use your paint brush 🙂

Linux Desktops

KDE

GNOME

Xfce

Enlightenment

LXDE

Openbox

IceWM

JWM

Fluxbox

An Art of Sharing

I love this philosophy of Richard Stallman.

Free Software : 4 Essential Freedoms

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Students will benefit more from this.

Ok, class! spread the word! 🙂

U HAV IT! WE HAV IT!

“Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.”
– St. Augustine

Flexibility — In all aspects of life, the person with the most varied responses “wins.”
– Kelly Perdew

Afraid of entering Linux World? Is it hard to leave your friends in the other world? Don’t worry you’re entering to your original world.

Meet your genuine friends here:

Continent 1 : The Linux Alternative

Continent 2 : Linux App Finder

Continent 3 : Free Software Directory

Continent 4 : List of Open Source Software Packages

Continent 5 : Open Source as Alternative

Continent 6 : Catalog of Free and Open Source Software for Education

Continent 7 : Alternative To

Flocking of Flock : Yet Another Bird Again?

I remember the popularity of Netscape Navigator before. That was in the late 90s. Internet Explorer entered the scene. Remember Windows 98 + I.E? Huh! Anyway, we can still feel the spirit of Netscape Navigator. i.e. through Mozilla. We cannot deny the fact that Mozilla’s Firefox is gaining popularity over Internet Explorer. Another browser which is related to it is Seamonkey browser. And another one, that I’m testing right now is Flock, a multiplatform browser and also based on Firefox.
I downloaded the Linux version, extracted the compressed file, and ran the flock-browser script and voila!

By default, there’s no flash plugin to play youtube videos. What I did, I copied libflashplayer.so from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins of my distro. In case you don’t have a copy of this, you can download it from Adobe’s website. If there’s no package for your distro, just get the tar.gz version. Extract it to the plugin directory of Flock. e.g. /home/flock/plugins (the directory where you extracted Flock)

Update : the birds crashed 😦

RMS’ Ideology

Just a few minutes ago, I came across with Miguel de Icaza’s blog. One of the programmers I admire and the man behind Gnome and Mono. I read about his message to Richard Stallman, father of Free Software. I can’t blame Mr. Stallman for his criticism about “open source” vs. “free software”, “Linux” vs. “GNU/Linux” and recently, the use of Mono. In the name of his principle, he is right and he is just protecting the objective of Free Software. He stick to it no matter what happens. Even MS (Microsoft) offered him a million bucks. Without him, there’s no such thing as Linux today. And maybe, no Microsoft that we know and there’s no Bill Gates as the richest man in the world today. There’s no good story without a protagonist and antagonist. This is also true in computing, i.e. free software and proprietary software. The problem that I see today is Monopoly taking away Competition… and Freedom! 😦

Go rms!

FSF 7 Examples of Abuse Committed by MS

My Domestic and Exotic Pets!

Meet some of my pets. Sorry, not for Sale! 🙂