Month: September 2005

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Linux in Italian Schools, Part 3: DidaTux | Linux Journal

Linux Journal has an article about the use of open source software in Italian Schools. One teacher has tailored a LiveCD to focus on education, and is fighting to have open source mentioned alongside the teaching of proprietary software.

First of all, she notes, this is software that can be installed, modified and shared freely, without choosing between the risk of heavy fines and the use of expensive licenses that software companies use to lock in millions of end users.

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NTFS for Linux review by PC Magazine

PC Magazine reviews NTFS read/write code for Linux. It comes with its own bootable cd, and they even review it using a Knoppix CD. In short, it works, it costs money, and I can’t find downloadable source code or the acronym GPL anywhere.

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LiveCDs Helping with Katrina Disaster Recovery

PublicWebStations.com is helping to setup Public Web Stations for the people affected by Hurricane Katrina. These stations are run off a modified Damn Small Linux LiveCD and allow web access to various disaster relief information websites. They are also assisting in organizing donations of computer hardware, and with the DSL’s requirements of a 486 with 16 MB of ram, a lot of unused computers can be made useful again.

“A working web station would take no more than 5 minutes to set up, and requires no ongoing maintenance except in the case of hardware failure,” Hargadon continued. “In case of any difficulties, the machine is just rebooted.”

Ars Technica has a related story, but addresses the problem of FEMA’s IE-only disaster registration website.

The issue isn’t only security. XP hardware requirements, while not impressive by today’s standards, rule out using some donated hardware as well. Furthermore, legitimate copies of Windows also cost money, and relief workers are trying to stretch their dollars as far as they can go.

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Ubuntu Colony CD 4

Ubuntu Colony 4, the “last Colony CD release before the Breezy preview, has been released. My Ubuntu Breezy install recently updated itself to include a spiffy framebuffer-using bootup, with a black and gold(?) theme. This is most likely the same theme they’re talking about at the bullet point which says “Many fixes to the live CD, including usplash integration”.

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Elive: Where Debian meets Enlightenment

OSDir.com has a review of Elive. If you like visual effects, you owe it to yourself to try Elive. The screenshots are good, but don’t come close to actually using this desktop.

In a few moments the Elive desktop was loaded. Unlike earlier versions of Enlightenment the vertical curtain effect was not present. Elive uses the ‘elive’ theme as opposed to the Enlightenment default. Wow, where do I start with this crazy desktop. Beautifully polished would be a fit description. It is truly only rivaled by OS X.