David Brake's blog
Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forOctober 19th, 2004 | back to home

19 October 2004
A generic end user manual for Linux
Filed under:Copyright,Online media,Open source,Useful web resources at10:15 pm

At last someone has produced a free-to-download User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop (there may be others but this is the first general purpose one I’ve heard about). You might also check out “the O’Reilly site”:http://linux.oreilly.com/ for a few free chapters from some of their many Linux books or take a look at “Learning Debian/GNU Linux “:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/book/index.html which is completely free – one of O’Reilly’s “Open Books”:http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/.

Thanks to “Slashdot”:http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/08/22/1955204.shtml for the link

I just learned about a new Linux flavour with a twist
Filed under:Digital divide (developing countries),Open source at9:11 am

Ubuntu Linux, sponsored by South African entrepreneur “Mark Shuttleworth”:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bio.html is not just available free – the organization behind it will “send free CDs”:http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/ to wherever in the world people want to get their hands on it. (Note: if you have broadband and can download it rather than getting the CDs please do so and save money that could be used to send discs to developing world organizations that do need it). If you want a review of the current version with all the geeky details read “Kuroshin”:http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/9/28/211242/712. To summarise, it includes the main applications you would need (the Firefox web browser and OpenOffice) but at present if you don’t want it to take over your whole hard disk you have to partition it manually, which doesn’t say much for its user-friendliness. It’s early days though.

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