http://blog.christophersmart.com Fortiter Et Recte Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:57:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm not an expert on this subject matter, nor a Debian developer, but I do love Debian. I couldn't help but be disheartened by the results of the vote on firmware in Lenny. Assume blobs comply with the GPL unless proven otherwise. BAH! Seriously, what the hell are you guys thinking? If ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2009/01/06/lets-be-firmware-about-this/ Been playing with the latest openSUSE release, 11.1, and as I'm on holidays thought I'd try and get CIV4 working. It appears to work fine, except for sound which errors complaining about an alsa pcm-pulse library issue. This is installed on the openSUSE system, but Wine needs the 32bit library. Installing ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/12/25/getting-wines-pulse/ Sun has released version 1.2 of their ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office. It allows users stuck with that office suite to import and export data in open document format and is free for both individual and commercial use. http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/12/22/odf-for-that-other-office-suite/ Well this week I created my very first DistroWatch Weekly as the new editor of the popular newsletter. While some readers complained that Ubuntu is getting too much coverage, I think that overall most enjoyed the newsletter. I'm looking forward to compiling the DWW for next week's release! -c http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/12/17/letter-to-the-editor/ Looks like domains hosted under my account with Dreamhost are really, really slow (more so than usual). Apologies for that, I'll try and look into a new hosting plan somewhere when I get back from overseas. -c http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/11/25/slow/ I don't have much call to view flash content, but thought I'd test out this new fancy (alpha) 64 bit flash plugin from Adobe. The tarball contains only one file, libflashplayer.so. Extract this to ~/.mozilla/plugins and restart firefox. NOTE: You must remove any previous versions of flash before doing this. I didn't ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/11/19/flash-ah-ah-king-of-the-impossible/ Today is Remembrance Day and the 90th Anniversary of The Armistice, which symbolically marked the end of World War I. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we will remember them. http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/11/11/lest-we-forget/ First we needed a phone line to dial the Internet, but we couldn't use the phone. Then we got ADSL which let us log on and use the phone, now we have VOIP so we don't even need the phone! Problem is, it has always been too expensive. Every now and ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/10/29/finally-its-worth-getting-naked/ Wine's pretty good these days. On its own it can install and run programs like Microsoft Office under Linux. This is thanks, in part, to contributions made to the Wine project from the Codeweavers gang. Their flagship product, Crossover, is a commercial product based on Wine which lets you install many ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/10/29/crossover-for-free/ Ever had a PDF that you needed to change a few items on? There's an extension for OpenOffice.org 3.0 which enables the importing of a PDF document into Draw and Impress (some of the OOo applications), where you can then perform basic editing. OOo's built-in export function means that you can ... http://blog.christophersmart.com/2008/10/25/ooo-to-edit-a-pdf/