Special Holiday Episode and a Poem

Hello Readers!
This is a special holiday episode of the podcast. It is a discussion about software distribution and the pros/cons of having an app-store type method of distribution. I have also written a short poem for the holidays, which can be found below.

Twas the night before Christmas, some people say,

When old Steve Jobs took the holidays away.

You opened your gift; A laptop, alright!

But as you read the manual you shuddered in fright.

Although you had payed for the best laptop there is,

You found that your new macbook was actually his.

No freedom here, as in beer or in speech,

Step out of line, and a contract you'll breach.

But then out of nowhere you see a large sleigh,

With a penguin at the reins, here to save Christmas Day.

You say to the penguin, "This macbook, it sucks",

The penguin looks up and replies, "Hi, I'm Tux".

He hopped from his sled, with a "HeHeHe"
and whipped out a Linux live CD.

Your eyes light up, could it be true?
So many choices, like Arch or Gentoo

There's Red hat, and Suse, and quite a few more
Such as CentOS, Mandriva and Tiny Core

With a tip of his Fedora and a quick wave goodbye,
Tux jumped into his sledge and flew into the sky

So try a new distro, there is nothing to fear
And from GuysOnFOSS have a fantastic New Year!

Music credit: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Humble indie

Well a couple of exciting things has happened with the Humble indie bundle. First of all, all of the people who purchased it now have a code which they can use on steam to get another way to download them. Secondly there running it for the second time. I would personally say that its a great thing to purchase the games from as you can choose what you wish to pay and can dedicate how ever much you want to different thins like the developers or to the charity they have selected. The games are also released for all major os's meaning Windows, Linux and Mac.

Heres the link and if I don't post again have a great Christmas.

An Update

Hello,

Sorry about the long gap between posts. It seems like things pile up all at once.

So whats new with the GuysOnFOSS? We've all been involved at some level with a website design project, which has taken up much of our time. In addition, it is that time of year when things really get busy in the tangible world with exams and the holidays. I will make a greater attempt to update my Twitter feed more often when I come across things that I find interesting, and perhaps just to let you know what we're working on. If you haven't followed me on twitter yet, you can do so by following this link: http://twitter.com/the_thoth.

As for the podcasts, those seem to have been put on hold as well. We'd like to start them up again, but don't hold your breath, at least until the new year. We still have one episode that was recorded several weeks ago, but the news is outdated by now. The reason I bring it up is that it contains an excellent debate between Mekapaedia and Crazy2be. Perhaps I will release that as a bonus.

Stay tuned!

-The Thoth-

Why webcomics hate Woofy

Awhile ago we had some one who came across the blog through a search for why Web comics hate Woofy so I figured I would give a fairly basic explanation why. The most basic reason for the upkeep of the server. If you had every one just download the web comics through Woofy or some other script you would have a serious drain on a server but method to pay for the bandwidth. The only way most web comics are able to continue there hosting of the comics they need ads to earn them revenue so that they can afford the server hosting. While this issue does arise most people still often complain that people are leeching the bandwidth from the people who read the comic through the site and not through a separate download method. I personally have to disagree with people who complain about web comic downloaders because I use it purely for the purpose of having a backlog of comics so if I go some were with out wi-fi I can simply enjoy a whole bunch of comics and even make up for ones I might not have read. Any ways the next reason why people do not like Woofy is copyright concerns. Some artist's I assume believe that when people download there web comic through something like Woofy there work is being pirated like people pirate games. These claims I find less legitimate as they can just as easily add were to find the site and who the author is under the strip with an extra 10 pixels to the border. Any ways I hope you guys enjoyed my tired rant that should have been written like 3 weeks ago. Also I'm sorry if my writing wanders a lot if you have any questions leave a comment and I'll reply to the best of my ability.

No Podcast This Week

Hello readers,

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you all know that there will not be an episode this week due to all of us having commitments. You can stop staring eagerly at your computer monitor waiting for the podcast. We will be back (I hope) next week with episode 9.

Happy Halloween from all of us at GuysOnFOSS!

A Quick Primer to SSH

A quick guide to SSH:

Have you been at work and think "Hey I can do this so much faster with x on my computer at home!" Well, SSH will solve your problem. SSH - Secure SHell - is a protocol for calling a remote system and controlling it via the shell. Designed in 1995, it has been put through the tests of time and now in version 2 it is one of the best ways of remote shell access.


"Wait. I want to use Firefox (or any other graphical program). This only gives me shell"

SSH offers x forwarding, enabling you to use programs with GUI.


"The Internet says that remote control is insecure"

SSH is secured by a public key system with a choice of another symmetric cipher (invoked by -c)


"Ok, it seems cool, how do I use it?"

Setting up the client is easy. For Linux and Mac users this is already built in. For Windows users, there are many clients available such as PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

Linux/Mac:

0. Make sure that you have an account on a remote system with SSHd running.
1. Open a shell session.
2. Type: ssh user@ip
(replace user with your username on the remote system and ip with remote ip)
3. It will prompt for a password, type it in
4. Use normally, but remember, you are in the remote system.


Windows:

0. Get PuTTY
1. Type in your credentials
2. Login!


For more info, use man ssh

The Eighth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

Inerg and The Thoth fly solo... For about 8 minutes. The show is shorter this week due to audio problems, hopefully these will be fixed by next week. Enjoy the 8th episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast!

News:

Gene Simmons gets ddos'd

Pirate Bay Going to Space?

Google Chrome 7

Radon 6800 series

Officer Bubbles

Officer Bubbles Original Video

Laptop Thief Returns Data

WD 3 Terabyte hardrive

Restraining Order Served Over Facebook

NASA 100 Year Spaceship Program

Topics:

Learn how to use man

MenuetOS

Program For The TI-8x Series Calculators

Novell For Sale

Troll Physics - Just for fun

Try it For A Week: Peppermint

Due to audio problems, Inerg will be publishing his 'Try it for a week' on a separate occasion.

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Seventh Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

Join The Thoth, Inerg and Mekapaedia on a roller coaster ride of a show. This week learn about what Mekapaedia knows about China, what The Thoth knows about AROS, what Inerg knows about geography and what the pope knows about technology. All this and more on the seventh episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

News

Google tests driver-less car

Pope warns about illusions vs reality

Polynomial - Space of The Music

Skydive from space canceled

People are not choosing effective passwords

London stock exchange runs Linux

USA is most bot infected country... In The World

Topics

Make your own dropbox-like backup service

Free Public Wifi?

Try it for a week: AROS

-Part 1

-Part 2

-Part 3

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 3

Alright, so here is the third part I promised.

AROS was originally called the Amiga Research Operating System. This was later changed to the recursive name AROS Research Operating System. It is based around AmigaOS, which was originally developed by Commodore in the mid 80's for the Amiga computer. However, the Amiga was not doing well, and rather than lose it entirely a open project began. This is where AROS came in with the goals:

1. Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
2. Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
3. Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
4. Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.MorphOS
5. Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.

-From aros.sourceforge.net

In fact, software that is designed for AmigaOS usually compiles and runs fine on AROS. This was important as AROS was supposed a parallel to AmigaOS. Even though AmigaOS is still around, and on version 4, many people prefer AROS due to the convenience of having it run on any system you want.

AROS is not the only company cloning AmigaOS, there is another. It is called MorphOS, and it contains several key differences between AROS. For example, it only runs on Powerpc architecture and contains proprietary software as well as some open software. Some of the open code in MorphOS actually came from AROS.

This image represents the development of AmigaOS

Final Thoughts

Well, I tried it for a week and I must say I am impressed. Although I had problems at the beginning of the week, the important thing is that I was able to resolve them. AROS would function as a desktop OS if it weren't for the same problems that all 'alternative' OS's have and that is compatibility with standards like windows. I can't wait to see how far AROS will progress in a few years.

Remember to check out the website at aros.sourceforge.net, and give AROS a try.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 2

I spoke too soon:

As you can see Icaros is working just fine. For some reason, even after I got it to boot properly by disabling DMA, I was still having problems. Every time I tried to start my browser (OWB) it hung while it was "generating font cache"

I tried re-installing it with the full image instead of the Lite image and I got it going. It looks good. I will do a couple more tests and try some of the included apps so I can do at least one more post on this interesting OS. Stay tuned.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 1

Hello Readers!
I hope you have been enjoying our podcasts as much as we have enjoyed creating them. If you have been listening to them you will know that we recently kicked off our new segment 'Try It For A Week'. If you haven't been listening, I am not talking to you.

For my 'Try It For A Week' I chose AROS. Things have not gone well thus far. I though I'd have no trouble with this, but I am. The distribution I have been trying out is called Icaros and can be found here. Booting the live cd was no problem on both Virtualbox and later Qemu. The problem came after installation when I tried to boot into AROS for the first time. I got GRUB but no OS.

That is all I can really do for you for the time being. I will continue working on getting it to boot correctly as time allows. Until then, stay tuned for an AROS history lesson.

Interesting find in google maps

As I was wasting time going through Google street view I found a tank. While this is a a tech blog I thought I would share this interesting find since its related to Google's street view. Here's a direct link if you prefer.


View Larger Map

The Sixth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this week's show Inerg and Mekapaedia join me, The Thoth, for our sixth excursion into the land of podcasting. Remember, you have one more week to enter our contest to win a free beta key for Starcraft 2 or Plain Sight. We introduce our new segment - 'Try it for a week' - listen for more details. Join us for this and so much more on The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

Errors: I don't know who was pronouncing Maemo correctly, but there seems to be a bit of confusion about it on the Maemo forums. If you know how it is pronounced, let us know. Also, The Thoth said that Moblin turned into Maemo. This is false, Moblin and Maemo merged, making MeeGo (Try saying that 5 times fast!)


News:
IE Browser Share Drops Below 50%
Toshiba 3D TV
US Army Testing PIPBoys
Firefox 4 Beta Released for Maemo and Android
Nixie Pixel Wins Logitech 'Host with the most'

Topics
AROS
Toybox
Microsoft Expression Encoder

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Fifth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this episode of the podcast... The Thoth, Inerg, Mekapaedia and Crazy2be discuss their favorite distros and why they like them. Also, a new segment is introduced called 'Try it for a week'. Remember to enter our contest to win a Starcraft 2 Beta key, or Plain Sight. All you have to do is send an email to Guysonfoss@gmail.com telling us you want to be entered. Keep in mind, if you want your voice to heard on the show, send us an audio clip of you saying what you want to say and we'll probably play it on the show. Another note, we are now on itunes so if you have one of those newfangled ipods, you can download our lovely voices directly onto your device. Show Errors: Meakapaedia accidentally said Fujita instead of Fujitsu; XGA instead of XFX and Pacman -Syu instead of Pacman -Sy.


News
Netflix comes to Canada
Sidux is Sidux no more 
Google Turns 12
They're rooting everybody out here
Mandriva forks
LibreOffice
Go-OO 

Topics
Peppermint
Moblin
Chromium-OS
Mint
OpenBSD
Arch Linux
Gentoo
Plan 9
Mandriva
Windicators

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

House cleaning

If you've been following our twitter account, or our facebook page (@guysonfoss and Guys on FOSS respectively) you might have noticed the massive torrent of updates suddenly appearing.

Do not panic.

We're merely updating our tagging system, which was lacking. It varied from none (inerg) to excessive (Thoth) to irrelevant (Me). It's been overhauled, and rules are now in place. Hopefully, searching for posts in the future should be greatly optimized.

Podcast tomorrow! It's been hailed our best one yet.

Why I hate Ubuntu

This isn't a rehash of the same things I've been saying for quite a while, it seems, it is a clarification of why I am saying them.


Certain people might say "You're saying them because you like to be controversial, annoying and contrary!", and they would be right. But that's not the entirety of my reasons.


The original hatred stems from use. I used Ubuntu for quite a while, under the guise of Linux Mint, and it worked fairly well. The packages were about as recent as the Pre-Cambrian era, but at that point it really wasn't an issue. I then moved to Arch, because largely, I was bored and wanted to try something new. My skills with Linux grew exponentially during my use of Arch, and I went from nearly no knowledge of the internals to what I would call a fair knowledge of the internals. I can't hack the kernel yet, unfortunately. Lack of C experience.



What did happen though, is when I went back to Ubuntu, the experience was frustration. While Arch made you work all the time, and Ubuntu didn't, when you did want to work Ubuntu got in the way. It is nowhere near as compliant as Arch, and gnome doesn't help. XFCE helps a bit, but my the package manager is the same. And oh, how I hate apt. Why? Because it doesn't have a "force" option. In pacman, I could delete the kernel for all it cared. Why is this important? Let me refer you to a more experienced man:


"UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn


The reason the "force" option is important in a package manager is because sometimes there are package conflicts that the package manager cannot sort out, so you need to yank out one dependency and install a replacement, or install the conflicting package first and then the dependency, etc... The inability to do so is infuriating. The obsolescence of packages wasn't great, either.


And then came the time I tried to run Xubuntu off a USB stick. It was slow as all hell. Arch Linux? As fast as normal.


After the noncompliance and the slowness of Ubuntu made me leave it for Arch, and occasionally along the road, Gentoo, I started to grow in a more philosophical way in all aspects. Then I looked at computing.



What did I realize?


Ubuntu, OS X, Windows and all those kind of purported "user-friendly" operating systems actually make computer user harder for the average person. "What?", you might say, akin to my mate Crazy2be, "That doesn't make any sense.". It does, actually. It does because it makes it so the average user requires no skills, and thus develops no skills, in using an operating system. I understand using a stable, supported and easy to use system in a business environment, but in that case you're probably using AS/400 and Windows XP, so the point is moot.


I suppose there is an argument that people should be able to choose. Sure, you annoying libertarian, but then you can choose with Arch Linux. The choice comes down to "pacman -Sy kde" or "pacman -Sy gnome". If you're not sane, that is. The real answer is "hg http://hg.suckless.org/dwm"


So what I'm saying is basically I hate ubuntu because I hate using it, and it is a symbol of what I consider the unskilled corruption of a hobby OS. I'm also telling the average computer user "Go and install Arch Linux so you can learn some skill. For your sake as much as mine."


With your help, we can eliminate things such as this from being needed to be hung up:

The Fourth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

This week on the podcast: Waffle Monster makes his return and we talk about stuff! Remember to enter our contest by emailing us at Guysonfoss@gmail.com! Also, if you don't already have Dropbox and you have been considering it, help us out by signing up with our link by clicking here!


News:
Mint Debian
Sidux
Uberstudent
Schools Spy on Students Through Webcam
Engineer Terrorists 
Dell's New 7" Tablet
FCC Opening TV Airwaves
Facebook Down
IBM Single Atom DRAM
GOG down then up again
Garry's Mod For Mac

Topics:
Diaspora
Microsoft Security Book
OpenBSD
Installing Gnome on OpenBSD

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Third Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

This week... On The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.




News Topics
Data Deduplication Comparative Review on Slashdot
Baremetal OS
The ACTA
Google Bounty
Torvalds becomes an American


Topics
Firefox Beta/Nightly builds
Portable apps
Acid3 test
Sunspider test
Peacekeeper Test
Google Phone
Google Spies on Teens
Commodore Phoenix 
Apophysis Fractal Flame Editor
Helpful Youtube Video for Apophysis
Another Apophysis Video

Helpful contact info
GuysOnFOSS Twitter - GuysOnFOSS Email  - Facebook Page
Mekapaedia's Twitter - Mekapaedia's Email
The Thoth's Twitter - The Thoth's Email
Inerg's Email

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Woofy tutorial

Woofy: how to setup download script.

Tools used:

Notepad ++ (You can use just Notepad if you prefer)

Expresso

Woofy

This is a tutorial explaining how to create the xml file required for allowing Woofy to download all the comic strips from a particular webcomic. The example webcomic I’m using is Nerf now.

To start heres a basic template for a web comic definition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<comicInfo friendlyName="">
<startUrl><![CDATA[]]></startUrl>
<firstIssue><![CDATA[]]></firstIssue>
<comicRegex><![CDATA[]]></comicRegex>
<backButtonRegex><![CDATA[]]></backButtonRegex>
</comicInfo>

To start enter the name of the web comic inside of the quotes beside friendlyName. One thing that should be noted is that it uses this for the file name this is fine but it can’t download to a file with a space in it. My suggestion is that you don’t use spaces in the name.

<comicInfo friendlyName="NerfNow">

After this you have to enter the start url which is the base url. An example is shown below.

<firstIssue><![CDATA[http://nerfnow.com/]]></firstIssue>

Next up is the link to the first comic.

<firstIssue><![CDATA[http://nerfnow.com/comic/4]]></firstIssue>

After this it becomes a bit more complicated as you have to define search terms with expressions. The tool I use is the same one as the creator of Woofy which is Expresso. The only reason why we need this is mostly to make sure that the search terms with work. A basic tutorial for how expressions work is here. The first thing were using it for is the search terms for the comics name. Which for Nerf now should look like what is shown below.

<comicRegex><![CDATA[http://nerfnow.com/comic/image/[0-9]{1,}]]></comicRegex>

After this we need to setup a search term for finding the back button on the webpage. One thing that I would like to note that is important is putting brackets around the link and the ?<content> I’m not exactly sure what it does but from my understanding it tells Woofy that its the link or that its the final portion of the link depending on were you place it. For this example it is showing Woofy that its the entire link.

<backButtonRegex><![CDATA[<a\shref="(?<content>http://nerfnow\.com/comic/[0-9]{1,})">Previous]]></backButtonRegex>

Finally for Nerf now we need to set a renaming parameter because the comic downloads without a extension. This is a fairly simple one that uses the original name and then adds the proper extension for it.

<renamePattern><![CDATA[${fileName}.png]]></renamePattern>

Finally this comic wasnt the best example but its a pretty good example. If you want to look at the tutorial made by the programs author you can look at it here.

Lastly I would like to explain the contest a bit better. The contest will be running 4 weeks from last saturday and the winners will be emailed there prizes. A post will be made stating the contest is over.

The Second Episode of TheGuysOnFOSS Podcast

Here it is ladies and gentlemen, the second episode of the podcast! Remember to get in on the contest, simply email guysonfoss@gmail.com with "contest in the subject line. You could win a Steam Key for Plainsight or a Trial Key for Starcraft 2 In a few weeks we will randomly select a winner. Errors: There was an error in the show where The Thoth mistakenly refered to polishlinux.org as polishlinux.com.



Links Mentioned in the show:
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta
Blender Beta
Distrowatch
Polish Linux
Linux Tracker
Puppy Linux
GraphicALL
Pendrive Linux:


Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The First Episode of TheGuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this, the first, GuysOnFOSS podcast, Inerg and I talk in an informal manner about jcut, Woofy, and what to expect from this podcast. Keep listening for the next episode, which should be quite a bit better. Until then, sit back relax and listen to us ramble for 13:26.


Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Best/Worst of 2009/2010

The past year has been filled with hits and misses. Stokes of genius and catastrophic botchery. Triumphs of the human spirit, and humble defeat. Inspiring successes and... well you get the idea. Now on the one year anniversary of the creation of the GuysOnFOSS blog, we would like to share our favorite hits and missed from the year past in this collaborative article

Google Wave
The Thoth
The bigger they are the harder they fall, and what a fall it was for Google. There was so much hype surrounding this open source project that it seemed like everyone simply had to get their hands on an invite (some even going for $70 on ebay!) When I got mine, let me tell you, I was ecstatic. Wave promised to be ‘Email 2.0’. Wave was supposed to change the way people interacted on the internet forever. You could integrate video, pictures, maps, files, and even translate text in real time. How could it fail?

In short, nobody could figure out what to do with it. After all of the anticipation, it turned out to be just another Nintendo Power Glove. In the past everything that Google released was very self explanatory as to what it actually did. It was obvious what Gmail was, or what Picasa did, but it took Google along time to actually tell us what Wave was for. The early confusion lead to the misuse of the product among the many beta testers. People were unclear on how to integrate it into their lives. This misuse turned Wave into a weird IM tool with hundreds of clutter inducing messages all over the page. It was difficult with the Wave not being organized in chronological order. When Google had designated the product it was not intended to be used in such a way. Throw in bots, all making their own comments and things got hectic and messy very quickly. Google later came out with a handy little start menu (see picture)

This menu was supposed to suggest to people what they were supposed to do with Wave, but it was too little too late, as many of their users had already tested Wave and left. Perhaps under different circumstances, Wave could have worked. There were also a lot of other problems with Wave (For example, the scroll bar was messed up) but in my opinion, that is not why Google ultimately failed, as I think these problems would have been fixed eventually as the product moved out of beta.


Google Buzz
Systemtwo
Social networking has become one of the most used service on the net. Due to this, everyone wants a part of it. Of course, not everyone has been ultimately successful with implementing their site. Some are duplicates of popular items like Facebook, Myspace, ect. Buzz, Google’s idea of Twitter with their own branding was is an example of one of those failed ideas. Although there was a large banner like page that appeared when you signed on, not many were sure what to do with such a thing. An almost identical copy of Twitter, no-one wanted to update their status onto two sites with signing on and such. For me, I don’t use any social networking for the purpose they were designed for. I find that the act of posting your current action is quite impractical and not intelligent at all. Any good googler could search for you and determine where you live, eat, shop, and the list goes on. Is it useful? In my opinion, it is useless. Duplicates of a service (that do nothing but copy it, with no improvements) should be deleted immediately, for quite a number of reasons, such confusing users to what social networking is. Also it will help with the IPv4 problem. :)

Dell
The Thoth
For a while now, Dell has been doing a little bit of experimentation with desktop Linux. They have been offering Ubuntu pre-installed on a select few (very select) laptops and desktops. I think this is a [baby] step in the right direction. Although I think desktop Linux still isn’t completely ready, I think that it is approaching a point where it is a viable option for people who are frustrated with the current woes of MS. That is where Dell steps in. By offering Linux pre-installed, they remove much of the smoke and mirrors surrounding Linux and give Linux the opportunity to grow. We have always been painfully aware of the vicious circle which has kept Desktop Linux out of the mainstream: No software is developed because not enough people use it in their daily lives, People don’t use it in their daily lives because there is no software developed (when I say “no software” I am only really speaking about commercial applications which people require to do crucial tasks like taxes or banking). Dell is helping to break the cycle by giving folks the option to try something new which in turn will draw the game manufacturers and whatnot to Linux. Dell’s execution, however, is dreadful, for instance when I was looking on their website to find the amount of money one would save by going with the free software as opposed to Windows and MS office , I found something rather shocking: The amount of money you’d save on a popular Desktop pc (Studio XPS 7100) was $-9. That is not a typo. It cost YOU money to get free software on your computer instead of Windows. Another problem is that Dell has been put under a lot of pressure from, you guessed it, MS, to keep the copies of 7 rolling out. Remember when Dell told it’s customers that Linux is “more secure” than Windows? Ya, that comment went missing very quickly from their webpage. To be fair to them, this page still puts Ubuntu in a very favorable light, without directly comparing it to Windows. As mentioned above, they offer so few PCs with Ubuntu installed that it is hardly worth it, plus they hide them so well on their website it would be almost impossible for someone who didn’t already know that Dell offed this service that Linux was even an option. In conclusion, I think that Dell’s actions and medium success will force other manufacturers to offer something similar. This in turn will further develop desktop Linux as people realize it’s potential. We will just have to wait and see what the future holds.

Koffice
Crazy2be
So i discovered koffice. It’s awesome, because it has a sidebar. I was going to write an online-base word processor like that, and discovered koffice which was basically exactly what i was envisioning. Awesome. Bye.

Well, thats it for this year. Hopefully next year is just as good to GuysOnFOSS as this year was. Thank you all for reading over the past 365 days, feel free to leave us a message in the comment section ;)

Time does indeed aeronautically transverse...

My god, nearly a year? I would have never guessed when I started this blog that it would get anywhere near this lifespan. A month, maybe. I'll post something more heartfelt on the day.

Due to having quite a bit more time this year, I can probably post a bit more and hopefully be at least a little interesting.

See you on the day.

Time flies like an arrow... Fruit flies like a banana

Great Scott! How can it be the beginning of August already? It dawns on me that during the school year we blame studying for the lack of posts and then when all the work is finished for the year, we still manage to go a month without a post. 

Anyways, as the one year anniversary approaches, the entire staff is getting excited. In fact, if you are to lazy to look, the first post was made on August 14 2009. In order to count down to the date, I have added a counter to the website. It is written in JavaScript by Robert Vahid Hashemian, who maintains a website that includes many free web tools including the countdown timer that you see on the page.

 So what is coming up in year 2 of GuysOnFOSS, honestly we have no clue. So if you have an idea for this blog then let us know and we will most likely jump on it. I know that Inerg has a contest he will be kicking off soon, which should be fun. Hopefully we'll have something put together for the big anniversary. BTW, did you notice the new colours and layout? We thought that it was time for a change from the generic blogger template now that we are 1 year old.

Thanks for the support!

Time for a update

Well its been a month since there has been any post and a long time before I posted so I have returned. First I'm going to start with talking about Alien swarm. Then I'll talk about our contest for a free Starcraft 2 trial key. Lastly ill post a question which you can answer in the comments section.


Alien swarm
Alien swarm is a free game released by Valve that originally was a UT2004 mod. When Valve hired 3 of the developers from the Black Cat studio they started to port Alien swarm to the source engine in there free time. Now Valve has released this and the entire source code so its extremely moddable. But lots of people questioned why they would release this game for free until someone posted in the steam forums why he thought they released it for free. The major reason Valve released this for free is that its more of a demo for the full game. The full game will be something you purchase with a lot more content instead of the campaign you get. Now there are some limitations for this game. These are you have to have a Steam account, Its limited to windows unless you use Wine or other windows emulation software and it seems to not work well with some hardware even causing some hardware to over heat. Now even with these issues I must say that this game is very fun to play even with just the one campaign.

The game play is a over head view of your characters. You play with 1-3 other players against what is called the swarm which are a alien race of bugs. From what I was able to figure out is that this race is attacking outlining colony's. You play the role of a military squad that is sent to recover and save all the civilians and kill the swarm. Any ways back to game play, The overhead view that you are placed in is a bit strange but is fairly easy to get used to and once you do you will probably be able to complete the normal campaign with out to much difficulty. While normal is a good level to start at you probably will want to go to hard fairly soon. One warning I will give is that often people who are new will just join hard/insane right away and ruin the game by dieing right away my suggestion would be to vote them out or play with friends. Any ways I found the game play quite fun especially with the unlock system were you get a new item or weapon every level.

The graphics I have to say look very nice. They did a great job of making the aliens look like they are running on the ground not just floating. The levels are set out amazingly and you will come across stressful points that are difficult but shouldnt be to hard if you figure them out. The actual look of the game is amazing I don't think they could have done a better job using the Source engine. One thing that surprised me is that they actually use the standard poly count in there weapons and models that they would use for a fps which is around the 6000 range. But this does show in the detail in the game.

Over all this game definitely worth the 2Gb download. I would suggest you try this game and when you get bored of it leave it installed as lots of good mods seem to be in the works. Also for those that complain I'm late about this I'm aware of that.


Contest
Ok so I purchased Starcraft 2 on a midnight release and got a trial key that I figured would be good for contest here on Guys on FOSS. While blizzard doesn't make there games open source they do at least release there games for multiple platforms even if they don't support Linux. I haven't figured out how to do the contest yet. But in my next post which will be some time during this week or next week will explain how to join.


Question
Should Guys on FOSS get a dedicated web server instead of a Garrys mod server to host a forum and our pod cast's.

That is all for now hopefully this post is long enough to make up for the month of us missing. Oh and our pod cast's will most likely continue after summer break. Although ill see if I can get some of us together to make one for at least next month.

jQuery color animation plugin

I've made a simple jQuery animation plugin based off of the github version that will animate colors with alpha, allowing simple cool effects. However, there is no animation at all on browsers that don't support rgba (heeeeeeello IE), so be aware of that. Maybe one of you will fix that without some hack that just checks for IE and does something different for it (it should actually check for rgba compatibility, so it works properly for all non-rgba browsers).

Enjoy!

Rosegarden

Rosegarden – A MIDI sequencer

Music composition software is quite rare, if you try to find it in the FOSS community. While Linux does not have much software suited for music, there is one that stands out. Rosegarden, one of those few. This remarkable software has almost all the functions that anyone needs. It allows for composers to use four different methods for creating music. The notation method allows for composing the traditional way, drawing the notes on the staffs themselves. As well there are the matrix, percussion and event editor methods.

The massive download of files has not allowed me the time to test some of the other more advanced functions but I did get a feel for the program. If you want to try it, go ahead and visit www.rosegardenmusic.com

That would be a good ending for this post if it was that simple. One of the events that people will abandon Rosegarden for is the initial setup phase. First off - if you are running Ubuntu or Mint – is to download the software thru the software center. Then, you must get another program that will receive the signals that rosegarden puts out, and re-route them to the speakers. The JACK system included in the RG install is quite confusing to setup, so many will use something else. I would recommend the use of either qSynth or TiMidity. The qSynth setup is quite straightforward, and a good tutorial can be found here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linuxquestions-org-member-success-stories-23/setting-up-rosegarden-for-midi-music-in-linux-ubuntu-8-04-a-697198/

I have found that it took quite a bit of system resources while running. So I did a bit of experimenting with the TiMidity software. I installed the package labeled TiMidi ++ Midi Sequencer. I have yet to figure out how the entire thing works, but it seems to automatically start when you login. RG will auto-configure to the proper TiMidity ports as well.

Well, I hope this is a good introduction to Rosegarden, bringing this post to the end.

An Introduction

Hello there!
I thought I'd better introduce our newest writer so here it is:

On Wednesdays he goes to the dog wash, with his cat.
On Thursdays he skydives, armed with only a teacup and a reclining chair.
On Friday, he goes to mac conventions - with his Ubuntu machine.
On Saturday he has a tuna sandwich and then goes swimming with sharks.
On Sunday he goes for a jog - through a mine field.
On Monday he swallows flaming swords while doing jumping jacks.
On Tuesdays he plays cards, on the wing of a Boeing 747.
On Wednesday he sleeps in until 11:00 and spends the rest of the day in his pajamas.

He doesn't often drink beer, but when he does he prefers Dos Equis.

Ladies and Gents please welcome: Systemtwo

We look forward to your opinions!


-The Thoth-

MuseScore Con't

GOOD MORNING INTERNET LAND!!!

If you recall, my last post was mostly historical, but this one will contain more about the software. Since writing the last post, 2 significant things have happened.

The first is that I have changed my work laptop from Ubuntu to Linux Mint (yes I know, it is a variation of Ubuntu). Why? I'm not a fan of the way Ubuntu is going with their desktop environment, but I still like the general way it functions. So I switched to Mint since I wanted to stay connected to the Ubuntu repositories, as there is a lot of great software there and I require something reliable for this computer, since it is for work. My other pc has remained my test computer for running the more fun stuff ;)

The other significant thing is that I have finished that instrumental music assignment I had mentioned in part 1 and have been assigned another one. This one is a composition assignment as opposed to the previous assignment which was just arranging. Once again I used MuseScore 0.9.5.

Having never used the alternatives, it is hard to really compare this WYSIWYG music notation software to anything else but I will try to pass on my experience.  Installation on Mint was a breeze, as it is included in Ubuntu's repositories. If you are not using a Debian derivative, MuseScore has also provided a RPM and the source code.

My first impression was good, I was impressed with how professional and clean the interface was. it is obviously designed for ease of use, which is good when doing long compositions. Navigation is accomplished by grabbing and dragging or scrolling using a scroll wheel. Being a true  WYSIWYG editor, the composition looks just like it will print when you're done. Adding instruments was easy as well, and MuseScore contains more than anyone will ever probably use, including a massive amount of voices. It is worth getting acquainted with the many keyboard shortcuts, as they will save you a lot of time. Entering notes is rather intuitive: the number keys change the length of the note, and the note itself is entered by using the corresponding letter on the keyboard. MuseScore also is capable of working with a MIDI piano keyboard. Transposition headaches are a thing of the past, as all of your transposing is as easy as hitting the "Concert Pitch" button which (surprise, surprise) toggles concert pitch on or off.

Probably the best feature (Apart from the price) is it's ability to playback your compositions. This allows the composer the opportunity to hear what they've written before a band actually plays it. This feature is in no means unique to MuseScore, but it is worth mentioning because it is such a huge help.

I did have a few little glitches with the software. For one, it crashes occasionally. Probably once every 3-4 hours of work, so keep saving if you don't feel like composing the same thing twice. Another thing was sometimes when I switched to concert pitch mode and back some notes were given flats, and sometimes double flats. This was fixed by going Notes -> Pitch Spell, so it wasn't too much of an inconvenience but a glitch none the less. Also, once and a while it would stop recognizing my keyboard, this was fixed by restarting the program. Since I haven't had the time to test this on any other machines, I don't know if these are isolated incidents or not.

Overall, I'd recommend this software to anyone looking for notation software. I believe it can defiantly compete with other free software, and may even be able to compete with some paid software. Plus it is opensource and cross platform, what more can you ask for?

Here are the links to the project that appears in all the screenshots:

• MuseScore project file 
• PDF
• WAV

Coincidently it is also my project for my instrumental music class. I'd like to include a disclaimer. I am not a professional composer, listen at your own risk ;)

That brings us to the end of the post, don't worry, I'll be Bach.

-The Thoth-

MuseScore

Before I begin, I'd like to welcome Crazy2be to the small groups of writers. Sure, he has officially been on the staff almost since the beginning, but only just recently made his first post. Crazy2be, we look forward to reading your thoughts!

Down to business. I recently received an assignment in my instrumental music course to arrange a piece of music for a band. My options:

1. Do it by hand. 19 different instruments? I think not.
2. PAY for some software, and have to run it on my Windows pc
3. Opensource alternative

Any guesses? 

If you chose 2, you're wrong but if you chose 3, you are correct! It is true, even music notation software has an opensource alternative, and that is MuseScore. I will be giving my impressions on MuseScore in my next blog post but right now I will provide you with a little background on this piece of software.

MuseScore began it's life as MuseE, a MIDI/Audio sequencer which is still in existence. As MuseE grew, a decision was made to strip it of it's notation capabilities and create a designated scorewriter. This happened in 2002. in only 6 years MuseScore had achieved a yearly average of 180000 downloads! In 2008 their website, MuseScore.org, was launched. This new online presence on the web contributed to the feeding frenzy. The newest stable version (0.9.5) was released in 2009. The Beta (0.9.6), is already ready for download, and is included in the Lucid Ubuntu repositories under mscore.

Stay tuned for my impressions of MuseScore in the next blogpost.

-The Thoth-

Blender 2.5: Awesome

The other day i stumbled upon Blender 2.5, an update to blender that's been in the works since 2007, according to the release logs. I was so impressed by the much improved UI that i downloaded and read the entire pdf on it's design (granted, it's only a few pages). I can honestly say it is the most polished looking 3D program i have seen to date, with a wonderful workflow.
However, along with all the wondrous improvements, there are a few things that could still be improved. First of all, a library would be extremely useful for those of us who don't want to make every single model ourselves. There should be enough CC licensed work from the various blender movies to make at least a sizable library, and ideally you would allow people to submit their own creations quickly and easily... one of the best implementations of this i have seen is in sketchup, where you can browse and search a huge online repository. Materials should also have a repository, along with a moderated repository for scripts that do certain types of things (e.g. a script that generates a grass field, complete with flowers, based on supplied parameters).
One more thing it could use is a "quick start guide" or similar, although it needs it significantly less in 2.5.
Well, it's pretty darn awesome, but not quite perfect yet. Also crashes quite a bit on windows still, but that's not a problem for me most of the time ;).

Indie games

Well I just learned that the humble indie pack hit the 1 million dollar donation challenge. What this means is that the majority of the games in this pack are releasing there source code. Currently only Lugaru is available for download even if its rough. With in the next week Aquaria, Gish and Penumbra Overture will also release there source code. The most exciting thing about this is that the 1 million dollar challenge was reached 55 minutes before the deal ended. Lastly another thing I found cool was the fact that the average purchasing price for Linux was the highest and it held a third of the amount of purchases. While its not a conclusive study it does show that there is a market for selling games based in multiple OS's. If you want to check out the indie pack site for links to the source code of the games click here. I'll also be doing a review on each of the games and how they run in Ubuntu and Arch (Once I get it setup). I'll also try to do them as videos with game play giving me a chance to try out VLMC.

Oops.

Sorry guys, we dropped the ball again. In our defense school has been piling up, but of course there really is no excuse for the lack of post. We are sorry.

Anyways...

We would like to inform you of some possible upcoming features and hopefully distract you with a bunch of links:

• New WICMG from Mekapaedia or Inerg or The Thoth
• Fedora/Ubuntu/Slackware piece from the indecisive The Thoth
• VLMC review by Inerg

Again these are all just things that have been rattling around in our minds, perhaps all these will be published, perhaps none of them will, but at least it is something. If you have something you'd like to see on the blog please shoot us an email and we'll get right on it.

Thank you

-The Thoth-

Free Google Wave Invites

Not sure if there is anyone out there who still needs an invite but if you do, today is your lucky day. We recently got a new load of invites, and who better to give them to than our readers? Be within the first 20 to email us at guysonfoss@gmail.com and you will receive a wave invite.

-The Thoth-

Haiku - Part 4

Hujambo! Habari gani?

Oops, sorry about that... Lately I've been getting my English mixed up with my Swahili - they are so similar. Anyways, this is the 4th installment in the Haiku series and it may be the last... but maybe not. If you haven't read the other parts yet and you want to you can read them here: Part1 Part2 Part3....

Alright, so in this part of the series I said that I would take a look at what makes Haiku different from other OS's, specifically Linux. I also said I'd walk you through some of the 'competitors' of Haiku. If you see an error in this post, just shut up about it... Just joking, it is entirely possible that there is an error in the following post, because:

a) I am not a total expert in these matters

b) I am watching The Office right now.

Lets jump right in: What makes Haiku different? Well for this answer we turn to the official Haiku website which states: 'Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS.' Just as BSD has a focus on security, Haiku is focused on a fast, lean, user friendly system. These values have been carried from its predecessor BeOS (if you don't know what this is, read the other posts). For this very reason Haiku is focused on being completely unified. Unlike Linux which has stacks of things running on top of each other (Kernel, X windows system, etc.) Haiku has chosen to be contained in one unit which makes up the entire operating system. The idea is that when the OS is not unified it makes solutions very complicated and compatibility difficult. Haiku also strives to keep their focus on the desktop computer user, which means that they have gone with bash in the terminal and have kept the gui very clean, these decisions make Haiku easier for the average user. Keeping with the theme of ease, development is done with object orientated programming languages.

Lets get into 'competitors' for a moment. Some observant readers may have noticed that I put quotes around the word 'competitors', and that is because... THERE ARE NONE. If I had been posting this a few years ago, the preceding line would have read 'THERE ARE FIVE'. Yes indeed folks, there were four recreations of BeOS and one continuation of BeOS. The recreations were: Blue Eyed OS, Cosmoe, E/OS, and BeOS Workstation. Some of these, including Blue Eyed OS were built on top of the linux kernel, which set them far enough apart from Haiku to not pose too much of a threat. There also was one continuation attempt called Zeta, but this disappeared after Palmsource began questioning the legality of Zeta using BeOS code. So thats is it, Haiku is triumphant, and it looks like it will stay that way with lots of Blue Eyed OS going over to the Haiku camp.

Once again, if you happen to find an error (quite possible), don't hesitate to correct me. We all love getting feedback here at the GuysOnFOSS head offices so feel free to shoot us an email, or check out the forums.

Shukrani kwa ajili ya kusoma!

-The Thoth-

Haiku - Part 3

If you haven't read previous posts in this series you may click here for part 1 and here for part 2.

Hello class! Now, who can remember what we learned last time. Oh yes... When we last left our friend Jean-Louis he was in a mess. His company Be inc had just been sold for about 11 million dollars to Palm inc. This was significantly lower than the original offer from Apple of 125 million. So BeOS fades into oblivion, never to be heard of again...

Not quite. Although the story ends here for Jean-Louis, the spirit of BeOS lived on through it's small, but loyal, fan base which was made up of BeOS developers and users. They kept on developing software, and it was not long before there was a group developing an open source continuation of the fallen operating system. The project was called OpenBeOS, and it had the lofty goal of recreating BeOS out of open source components. The idea was for OpenBeOS to be an continuation of BeOS with backwards compatibility at the heart of the project.

Development began and soon the first version, a patch for BeOS R5, was available. The name was changed to Haiku, which represents the simplicity of the OS and is also in reference to the unique error messages in BeOS, which were often in haiku form. The project flourised throughout the next years, with the first stand-alone version being developed. Soon Haiku was able to render windows. It was still years away from being a usable desktop operating system, but Haiku was gaining steam.

From that point on Haiku only picked up speed, developing much faster than ever before. In 2006 a tentative date for the alpha 1 release was set for 2008. Leaps and bounds were made in this period and soon Haiku was self hosting. By the time the Alpha was released in September of 2009, Haiku boasted a native gcc4 port, allowing existing programs to be built for Haiku. Developers continued to work to bring things like Java to Haiku, and at this point Haiku borrows NONE of its code from BeOS.

That is where we are today! I know I missed some things, but you can check out the official project history. Alpha 1 is out right now so go on and give it a try. The next part in this series will deal with competitors and the main differences in Haiku as opposed to other OS's. As always, if you see a mistake or want to comment on this post or series you can do so through the forums, email, wave, or simply by commenting on this post.

I'll leave you with this screen capture of Haiku running in VirtualBox

-The Thoth-