Club Linux Coffs Harbour

My studious partner wants to listen to a Latin podcast on her audio player. She has a bit of catch up to do, there are hundred probably thousands of mp3 files to download. Now I know there are all kinds of graphical download plugins and managers I could use but I prefer something a bit quicker and more simple.

Corrections are now available to address security problems to the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). Also offered are a few adjustment to serious problems in the Debian project's third update. However, the update does not translate into a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 instead users can expect updates from some of the packages.

Could some kind soul explain the steps in changing from Evolution mail to Thunderbird, Please, and without losing emails.

Thank you in advance 

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

I never get blasé about stuff like this. It always gives me the warm fuzzies.

Day one: I find what I think is a bug in a Drupal module I'm using on a web site, and find someone else reported the issue they day before.

Day two: I investigate the issue further and find it's a trivial problem and well within my capacity to fix.

Day three: The fix is accepted by the module maintainer, and integrated into the code in the Drupal version control system.

Day Four : My Drupal site tells me that an updated version of the module is available, containing the bug fix. Not just me, but everybody else in the world who is using the same module gets the benefit of the few minutes work I put into fixing the problem for my site.

Contrast this with proprietary software: You know there's probably a bug somewhere, but it's illegal and probably technically impossible to investigate further. You report the bug, hoping that the company that owns the copyright on the product (or the company from whom they have licensed the component containing the bug) feels that paying someone to fix it will be in the interests of their shareholders. You cross your fingers and patiently wait for the next Service Pack, or Patch Tuesday. In all likelihood the problem isn't fixed, but for your troubles the update includes a bunch of antifeatures that you never asked for, making the software even less useful.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

Hi All,

Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.

I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:

http://www.diva-project.org/

I expect there are a fair few of you who have bought one of those cheap MP3 players from The Good Guys or WOW. I know I have one which cost me about 30 bucks and plays half an hour of audio which gets me to work and back on my bicycle.

I've been looking around the new features in Gutsy, and was interested in what's new with the "restricted drivers manager", the gadget that looks after any non-free software required to make unfriendly hardware work. Tried to launch it and was told:

Could these be the eight sweetest words in the English language?