It’s more than just taste too. Portions are epic. They have the “Big Ben” burger, which cut in half would produce two Big Macs from McDonald’s. Then there’s the “Double Ben”, with two patties and the “Triple Ben” with three patties. Add on the amount of fries, and the size of the shake, and you could easily feed a family of four with one order of the Triple Ben.

Lastly, the service is amazing. Every time I’ve visited, I’ve gotten outstanding service from the employees, and the turn around time on preparing my meal is fast. Maybe not as fast as a “fast food” joint, but certainly not as long as your standard dine-in restaurant either. As a result, I recommend Burger Bar in Roy, Utah to anyone and everyone. If you’re a burger, fries and milkshake lover like I am, you’ll love this burger stand.

However, despite the amazing food, epic portions and fantastic service, Burger Bar operates on trade secrets. The recipes for their burger sauces, dipping sauces and shakes are all proprietary. Further, they aren’t free. I pay ~10-12 dollars for lunch whenever I want to pay them a visit. If I bring a party of 6 or 8, I don’t get a bulk discount either. So, aside from the food and the service, everything about the experience is proprietary and vendor-controlled.

I’m okay with that. So why is it that some people aren’t? Well, not with burgers, but with SaaS, or “software as a service”. Of course, I’m referring to Facebook, Google+, Gmail, Bit.ly, and other software vendors that provide an online service to their userbase.

It seems to be the latest “fad” (call it what you will) to oppose proprietary SaaS solutions, or sites with proprietary JavaScript licenses. Companies, such as Facebook, operate on trade secrets. Their server-side code certainly isn’t open to the public, and their JavaScript is obfuscated as much as possible to prevent prying eyes from making any sense out of it (as well as minimize bandwidth). Now, I no longer have a Facebook account, but I left Facebook for other reasons. Mostly, if Facebook was a burger joint, I’m confident that they are trying to poison me, without me catching on. But that’s beside the point. Facebook offers a service, entirely proprietary, much the same way Burger Bar offers a service, entirely proprietary.

Yet, it’s okay to eat the burger, but not okay to use Facebook. It’s okay to ignore the trade secrets of a restaurant, but not okay to ignore the trade secrets of a software vendor. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not advocating, endorsing or condoning trade secrets, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc., where the intent is to defend your intellectual property at all costs. All I’m saying is, when it comes to software, I view SaaS a bit differently than installed software.

Continuing the food analogy, when I prepare food in my home, I want to know what’s in it. The FDA in the United States feels the same, and as a result, ingredient lists are required to be printed on every packaged food source. So, when making my own burger, I have the right to know exactly how to prepare it, down to making my own “secret sauce”. I have the source code to my burger, so to speak, and I can make all sorts of fantastic burgers with that “source”. Yet, when I visit a restaurant, I don’t need to know the “source code”, so long as I feel confident the restaurant isn’t trying to poison me or make me sick.

I treat my computer much the same way. My laptop is my home, where I can make my own recipes to create my own software. I have full control over my data, and by having access to the source, make sure the software is respecting my data too (among other things). Google is my restaurant, where I can order software, perhaps pay a premium, and enjoy a good experience, with someone else’s trade secrets. I decide what data to give them, and what not to. I still have full control over my data. So, although I don’t have access to the source, I don’t have to give them my Social Security Number either. On my laptop, having access to the source code is key, and the foundation for a lot of my Free Software principles. On a web site, regardless of the site, I’m not interested in the source code so much, as I am having a positive experience that allows me to interact in a safe and productive manner.

I share this post, because I just finished reading http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/11/24/google-plus.html. Bradley Kuhn argues that you won’t find him on these services, such as Twitter or Facebook, because of the trade secrets. I applaud him for sticking to his principles, and not compromising. However, does he eat at burger joints where trade secrets have been critical to their success? I’m curious where the line is drawn. Why is it okay to eat and physically digest trade secrets, but it’s not okay to execute them in your browser? As a result, I believe Bradley may be distancing himself from those that love him, and just want to interact with him online. In fact, I would say he’s distancing himself from the very people he wants to advocate to. How can more people use Free Software, if you are only hanging out with the people who already do, and you are not hanging out with the people who don’t?

Just my thoughts. I’m not interested in trolling, so don’t take this article as such. Only as discussing an angle to SaaS that I don’t think many have thought about. If you’re interested in arguing in the comments, please be civil. Thanks.

Question: Are you one that pirates music? Movies? Software? Any other digital media that is otherwise copyrighted in a manner that would consider your actions piracy? If so, then I have a second question for you: Do you believe in the principles of freedom and liberty? Then this post is for you.

I’m going to shoot straight- piracy is a slap in the face for those of us fighting for copyright restrictions to be lifted, for Digital Restrictions Management wiped from the face of the Earth, and the DCMA over turned. The fact of the matter is, we hate the RIAA, MPAA, blood sucking lawyers, and everything else wrong with copyright just as much as pirates. However, we recognize there are more mature ways to reaching our goals, and we further recognize that piracy is just hurting our cause, not helping it.

Think about it for a second. If you pirate music, books, movies, software, or any other copyright material, what are you saying? At first thought, you’re sticking it to the man, right? You’re also harming material that is open, in the public domain, or otherwise copyrighted in a manner that let’s you share to your hearts content (commonly referred to as “copyleft”). Look at all the artists who have chosen independent labels, if any label at all, that encourages sharing of their music. Instead, you’re sharing Tori Amos, Metallica or some other artist. What you’re saying, is their music is better, but I doubt you’ve given the other music a try, haven’t you? What about proprietary software? You’re saying that you don’t want to pay these outrageous prices on software. You’re also saying that this application is superior to Free Software. The same can be said for images, books, videos, and other digital works. Piracy isn’t liberating anything, it’s just making it so you don’t have to pay, and it’s making more laws on copyright further complicating the system. It’s not the solution to the problem.

Now, I understand the want, or even need, to get these materials. Maybe school requires Microsoft Office. Can you use OpenOffice.org, or some other Open Source office suite? If so, why pirate Microsoft Office? If you absolutely need that specific office suite, surely the school has student discounts. What about Metallica? I was just as pissed as the next guy when they went against Napster, but pirating their music only says you still like the band, and you still like their tunes. Why not boycott them? Why not find another artist in metal that allows sharing and free distribution? If you just like their tunes so much, why not listen to them on a radio service, like Last.fm? Using a service like this, not only will you get Metallica tunes, you’ll also get similar artists that you may not have known about. Discovering new artists is a great way to support music in the Free Culture. If you must have their stuff, is it really that hard to pay a dollar on Amazon or iTunes? If you don’t want the money reaching Metallica, why not get their albums from a gray market shop?

Piracy just doesn’t equate to honesty as well, no matter how you look at it. You’re not being honest in your dealings with your fellowman, and if you’re engaging in piracy, how can others trust you in different aspects of your life? Sure, you can admit that you’re a pirate, but you’re still not honest with the law. You’re not honest with the artists or developers. As much as it sucks sometimes, we should believe in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law. I’m not saying follow the law blindly, and there are always times when we should lobby changes to the law. This seems more the right path than ignoring the law and engaging in piracy, don’t you think? Now, we’re not perfect law abiding citizens. I for one have a hard time sticking to posted speed limits on the road and coming to a complete stop at stop signs, so I’m certainly not one get all high and mighty, but is that an excuse for me to break other laws? Further, what if I place something in your care that requires your trust? Can I trust you won’t put it on bittorrent, or otherwise break my trust?

Piracy especially is troubling for those of us who believe in the Free Software ideals. Here, we’re fighting the good fight for software freedom, then in the dark corners of the basement, we’re pirating proprietary software. Isn’t this hypocritical? You either believe in the ideals or you don’t. Playing both sides doesn’t work. Further, as already mentioned, pirating the software only pisses off the software execs and their lawyers, making the whole copyright process more complicated- it’s doing nothing to liberate the software at all. Boycotting the software, and using competitive open source applications are a couple ways of getting the point out that software should be liberated. If no one is using their software, how can they continue with their business models?

Finally, I admit to being a pirate many years ago. I had a collection of gigabytes of music, videos and software. I was on the peer-to-peer networks night and day. However, when I thought about it, I realized that my actions could not be justified. How could I promote and advocate “copyleft” licenses and continue doing what I was doing? No man can serve two masters, and I had to make a choice. I deleted my entire repository of music, videos, books, software and anything else that was pirated, and started anew. This was nearly five years ago, and guess what? I don’t miss any of it. I have all the music I want to listen to through Last.fm. I have all the software I want to install through my distribution’s software repositories. When I need movies or music, I hit up the gray market shops, getting them for cheap and in excellent condition.

Give yourself a soul-searching moment. Think about your beliefs and then your actions. I think you’ll find that piracy just isn’t the right way to go about removing all the restrictions we currently face. Piracy only makes more ridiculous laws and prevents the Free Culture from furthering it’s cause.

GNote can bring Tomboy to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as Red Hat will not ship mono with its flagship product.

Whatever Red Hat’s reasons are for not shipping mono with RHEL, GNote is a major win for the open source community. Different people and different operating systems have different needs, and providing yet another application to fill a need is what Free Software is all about. This gives Red Hat the opportunity, if it desires, to bring Tomboy to RHEL through GNote.

Lastly, let’s not forget the Free Software Definition, which it seems GNote is taking advantage of:

• Run the program, for any purpose
• Study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
• Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
• Improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

Well, since then, Debian and Ubuntu have been my Linux operating systems of choice. Superior package management, great hardware recognition, immense software selection and ease-of-use make them the distro of choice for me. I’ve run other distros, such as Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, Slackware and even attempted Gentoo, but I always came back to the Debian way of things. It’s the shoe that best fits for me. However, I’ve been troubled by package management lately, and the fact that it’s not easy to downgrade packages once installed. When I first installed Debian on my laptop, I wanted a stable environment, but the latest packages as well. So, I chose Debian testing as the basis for the install. Eventually, I needed a package that wasn’t in testing, but in unstable, so I upgraded. Unfortunately, after an X.org update came down the pipe, and broke X on my laptop for a few days, I was regretting the decision running unstable. Downgrading back to testing isn’t possible, or at least not easy, and as such, it was either live with unstable, or reinstall testing. I chose the former. Then I heard about the Conary package manager, and it’s ability to control package versions, making it easy to roll back to a previous software version if you don’t like your upgrade, or if something broke. If only Debian had this solution when I wanted to go back from unstable to testing.

Foresight Linux is the first operating system in this list that I’m keeping my eye on, and will be putting in a virtual machine as soon as I can get KVM working properly. Foresight is the first distribution to introduce the superior Conary package manager. First off, it’s a rolling release, which I like. They “freeze” every-so-often to create an ISO image for you to download, but once installed, you’re constantly updating and upgrading your system as new software versions come down the pipe. However, what happens when a new version of X.org comes down, that hoses X on your box? Simple- roll back the X.org version to what you were running previously until the new version works everything out. In other words, package management handling dependencies with version control built in. Think aptitude with svn. From what I’ve heard, Foresight has superior hardware recognition as well, recognizing wireless cards, video cards, sound cards, printers, monitors, etc. with great ease. Further, because it is a GNOME-based distro, ease-of-use comes standard. This may be the next progression in Linux distributions for me. Time will tell.

Next in the list of operating systems that I’m keeping an eye on is OpenSolaris. My first introduction to Unix was the Solaris variant via a Solaris computer lab at my local university. I took an introduction to Unix course as well as programming in Unix which kept me in the lab. It was great! Spending hour upon hour in that computer lab was exciting and thrilling. So, eventually, I wanted to run Solaris on my computer at home, and wondered if it was possible. It was, as Solaris supported i386 architecture. Unfortunately, getting Solaris up and running on my hardware proved to be a big challenge- a challenge that I didn’t have the appropriate experience for. Eventually, Solaris fell by the way-side, and Linux stepped in it’s place. However, because Solaris was my first Unix love, I’ve never forgotten about it.

Forward several years later when Sun announces that they will be opening their flagship OS under the community built OpenSolaris. Just imagine the Solaris kernel with the GNU/BSD utilities running on my hardware. GNOME, vim, Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenSSH, and more, all available. Needless to say, this is exciting for me. There are several ways to try OpenSolaris at their downloads page, with the OpenSolaris Developer Preview and the Solaris Express Community Edition looking to be my first choices. Nexenta, which is just Ubuntu coupled with the OpenSolaris kernel, seems to be another great choice.

Finally, the third operating system that intrigues me is Haiku-os. Haiku aims to be an operating system that is BeOS compatible. Remember that operating system? I was introduced to BeOS while watching the Screen Savers actually (they need a good web developer), and Leo Laporte had one of the developers of BeOS on his show. At this point, I was already running Linux, but it was mentioned that you could go to their site and download it for free (I think this was about a year prior to them finally closing their doors, selling to Palm). I did so, put BeOS in a VM and ran it for a while. What I was absolutely amazed with, was it’s speedy boot, and it’s snappy feel. Everything felt so lean, yet loaded with features. Applications ran fast, media was well supported and all-in-all, it was a great system. However, I eventually lost focus, and kept moving forward with Linux.

Then, one day, I’m surfing the web, finding out what had happened to BeOS, and I stumble upon the Haiku-os web page. After reading the site’s docs and FAQs, I learn the Haiku-os is an Open Source attempt to recreate BeOS. keeping the APIs compatible. The kernel is being designed from scratch, rather than using the Linux kernel, and the licensing chosen is an MIT-style license (BSD, without the advertising clause). So, this definitely meets my needs for running software. Development has been slow as the team is small, but it has been steady. There currently is not an ISO image to download and test, but there is an image for VMWare if you have that installed, which would actually be the best way to test-run the operating system.

So there you have it. Three operating systems that I think are worth keeping an eye on, and at least giving a test-run, all for various reasons: Foresight Linux, OpenSolaris and Haiku-os. Will any of them replace my current Debian / Ubuntu setup? Maybe, maybe not. They definitely have caught my interest, however.

In a nutshell, the BSD license is a very open license, allowing you do do practically anything with the software. It’s less restrictive than the GPL, but more restrictive than the Public Domain. There are only a couple precepts that must be adhered to, when using this license:

• You are free to redistribute the software, in binary or source form, as long as the copyright, conditions and disclaimer are present.
• You cannot use the name of the originating organization, or contributers, to promote derivatives of the software, without written consent.

If adhered to, you are free to modify, copy and redistribute BSD-licensed software in either source or binary form as you see fit. You are not required to return code or patches to the upstream BSD-licensed software. You are free to change the license, or charge for derivatives, of the software, be it commercial or proprietary.

BSD-licensed software is particularly attractive to organizations providing a service, such as GMail, or embedded applications, such as your mobile phone or stereo. The company/developer can use BSD-licensed software to produce binary applications or services, without releasing the source code.

First off, I am excited to see Movable Type get back on its feet with respect to the community. It’s history of proprietary enterprise solutions and restricting licenses have kept it from becoming the preferred blogging platform for many. As such, a less powerful, but nonetheless Free Software solution, WordPress has taken the scene as the big daddy of blogging CMS. I use WordPress as my blog platform, and fully support it. Now that Movable Type is going GPL, however, I’m wondering if it’s too late for Movable Type to enter the market as a Free Software CMS. It does solve some of the issues that plagues WordPress installs and I wonder how WordPress is going to respond.

For example, I would much rather be running WordPress on top PostgreSQL than MySQL, due to the reputation of data integrity and scalability of PostgreSQL. However, WordPress just supports MySQL. Also, I would like to see some way to update my WordPress installation without running a separate script to handle the upgrade. From what I understand, Movable Type supports this natively with CGI scripts that perform all the necessary functions. Movable Type seems to support a number of other features such as LDAP and Oracle DBs, which could be important to others.

In the long run, I may consider making the switch from WordPress to Movable Type when 4.0 is stable. In the meantime, I’m interested in reasons why I should stay with WordPress or why I should move to Movable Type. For starters, as mentioned previously, I would prefer to have PostgreSQL powering my database rather than MySQL. Any thoughts? Vote in the poll after the jump.

This is a poll utilizing AJAX. It will not work properly in your feed reader. You will need to visit this site’s post if you would like to vote in the poll. Thanks.

Download here.

I blogged about this last year as well, and since then, I have only been using Jabber. I haven’t looked back. I had some family and friends on MSN and a few on ICQ, Yahoo! and AIM, so making the change wasn’t easy. In fact, it took a great deal of discussion with my wife and family members. When it came down to it, I had to do what was important for me, and being a Free Software advocate, I needed to drop proprietary protocols, and use only Jabber. It’s been one of the best decisions that I have made in my life.

So, for those reading, I encourage you to do the same. Ditch MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and others, and go completely Free with a Jabber account. You’ll be glad you did, and if your family and friends want to IM you, they can just register a Jabber account, or use their Gmail, to get in touch with you. If you are a Free Software advocate, then I submit that using those legacy proprietary protocols is a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?

Not only should you switch to Jabber as your IM, but Ogg Vorbis for your music, Ogg Theora for your video, OpenDocument Format for your documents, Jingle for VOIP, etc. The underlying goal is to use open formats and protocols to the inferior proprietary alternatives.

Take a stop by the Open Discussion Day wiki as well. May serve to be useful and informative.

P.S.- I changed my personal Jabber server from Wildfire to ejabberd recently, and as such, lost a lot of my contacts. Fortunately, I had a backup of my roster. Unfortunately, the majority are Gmail users. Due to the way Gmail handles it’s invite system, I cannot re-request an authorization to add you to my roster. You need to delete me from your roster, and re-add me. It sucks, but don’t blame me, blame Gmail. So, either get a better Jabber account, or, if you want to IM me, and you’re using Gmail, you’ll need to remove my contact from your list, and re-add it.

UPDATE: Justin wrote up a good review of the conference on his blog. You can find his post here.

I had the opportunity today, along with John, Kyle, Justin and Mike (some local LUG members), to meet with Bruce Perens during the Novell Brainshare Conference. Although, this meeting was not part of Brainshare, and was strictly a press conference. However, the insights that were shed on the Novell / Microsoft deal were priceless.

The press conference was good. It was held at the Shilo Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. My friends and I arrived about an hour early to help get a few details coordinated before the meeting started at 12 noon. When 12 hit, there were only a couple press present, so we were worried that a good turnout would not show. But, apparently, Novell had them held up in a Q&A session that went a few minutes over. It wasn’t long before the room was filled, seating about 20 or so. The meeting lasted an hour, which went by too quickly, and was loaded with really good information.

Pete Ashdown, Democratic Candidate for the U.S. Senate last year and CEO of XMission, was present and introduced Bruce to the press. I would like to thank Pete for allowing us to use XMission to host the images and media of the event. I would also like to thank my employer introPLAY, for sharing their account on the XMission servers.

You can find all the images and audio from the event here.

A few highlights from the meeting:

• Microsoft is spreading FUD with this deal with Novell to the Open Source community.
• The Novell / Microsoft deal poses a real threat to Open Source due to software patents.
• Novell and Microsoft both hope to sue end users if the Open Source Software is not purchased from them.
• Version 3 of the GNU General Public License is written to thwart those lawsuits.
• Every piece of software, Free and non-Free infringes on a software patent one way or another.
• Software patents are the ability for corporations to protect themselves first and innovate later.
• Software patents stifle Open Source Software development.

The conclusion of the meeting? Nothing good is coming from this deal between Microsoft and Novell. If it were just a technical partnership, everything would be okay, but it’s not. Bruce kept saying “is this really a Novell exit strategy?” I can’t help but wonder if it is. The worst nightmares of every Open Source developer is becoming a realization. The GPLv3 is our savior from a potential litigation nightmare on Open Source that will come about because of this.

At any rate, I would highly encourage you to listen to the audio provided on the XMission page. Very insightful stuff.

Texas and Minnesota are debating making the move to ODF following the example of Massachusetts, for all of the official government documents. This is good news for ODF supporters and fans. Not so good news for Microsoft and Office Open XML supporters and fans. In fact, Microsoft is facing a new hill to climb. Their approval or rejection application was just delayed another 3 months, and it may be conceded all together.

But, can you blame any of the states wanting to make the move to ODF? Lets compare the two, shall we (updated a bit)?

It should be plain that ODF is the obvious winner. I’m glad to see states like Massachusetts, Texas and Minnesota considering ODF for their government documents. Countries should follow suit. Regardless of office software, ODF should be the default file format for any text-based application.

Because you have to register on that site to comment on that article (registering on sites, just to comment is ridiculous), I am opening up comments here. I am curious what the community thinks about IBM using ODF to secure Lotus Notes in the market. Frankly, I find it mere speculation without proof.

Discuss.

Anyway, I’m not putting the post up to step up on a soap box, but rather, bring to your attention some Open Formats that deserve attention. So, I’m going to start with Xiph.org. From their website:

The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation dedicated to protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets.

By visiting their site, you will notice “the xiph open source community” bar located on the top of your screen. Across the bar are the following links:

• Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.
• Theora. Theora is an open video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project (It is a project that aims to integrate On2′s VP3 video codec, Ogg Vorbis audio codec and Ogg multimedia container formats into a multimedia solution that can compete with MPEG-4 format).
• Icecast. Icecast, the project, is a collection of programs and libraries for streaming audio over the Internet. This includes: icecast, a program that streams audio data to listeners, libshout, a library for communicating with Icecast servers & IceS, a program that sends audio data to Icecast servers
• Speex. Speex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech.
• FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.
• XSPF. XSPF is the XML format for sharing playlists. It is open- No proprietary lock-in. It is portable- You should be able to send a playlist to your friend and have it work. It is well-engineered- Most playlist formats get the easy things wrong.

Now that you are familiar with these codecs, how often are you going to continue using MP3, WMA, MPG, MOV and other proprietary formats? For me, it’s all about fighting the good fight, and refusing to use those codecs, even if it means making a sacrifice on my part.

This may not be for everyone, but you should definitely give it a try. I think you’ll be surprised.

First off, screen is a wonderful tool that allows you to run a program in a terminal inside a special “session window”. You can “detach” the window, exit your terminal, go to work, open up a terminal, and “reattach” the “session window”, and your terminal status will be in the exact same state as when you left. This is handy for running programs, such as irssi, where you can pick up right where you left off without missing a beat.

To run screen, obviously, you need it installed. Once installed, pull up a terminal, and type:

screen

A message may come up about screen, where to download it and how to file bugs. Then it will take you to your default prompt. It may just take you there anyway without the “about” message. At any event, you are now running a “session window” inside your terminal, and you should be at your normal prompt.

You can have multiple “session windows” running side-by-side, basically acting like “tabs” in gnome-terminal. You can also have nested screen sessions. The complexity of how differing screen sessions can be run won’t be covered here, but may be covered later one-by-one. For the time being, we’ll just cover single screen sessions.

You can now “see” your screen session by typing ‘screen -list’ at the prompt. A brief output about the PID and whether or not it is “attached” is printed to your terminal. You could see something similar to the following output:

aaron@hercules:~$ screen -list
There is a screen on:
        23454.pts-1.hercules    (Attached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-aaron.

Once inside screen, there are a number of keystrokes that control the movement inside of screen. Such as detaching and reattaching your session, moving forward and backward from one session to the other, logging out, clearing the window, and many more. Usually, the keystrokes are in the form Ctrl-a, letter. For example, while in screen, as you currently should be, type “Ctrl-a, d” to detach out of your session, and back to the normal terminal. That is, type and press “Ctrl-a”, release, type d, release. Your session is now “detached”. To “reattach”, type ‘screen -dr’ at the prompt.

When detaching and reattaching multiple screens, it may be difficult to know exactly what is being “attached” and “detached”. To save any confusion, never forget ‘screen -list’ (or ‘screen -ls’) to show you what you have running. When “reattaching” a session, it is safest to type ‘screen -dr’, which says “run screen, but first detach my running session (-d), then reattach it here (-r). This works if you have only one screen session running. If multiple, you will need to provide the PID also. See ‘man screen’ for further detail.

Ok. Let’s see this in working action. As I mentioned, I use irssi as my default, and only IRC client. However, I don’t want to disconnect and reconnect to IRC every time I change my location. So, rather, I run irssi inside of screen. So, first I pull up my terminal, and I am greeted with my friendly terminal prompt. I’ll call this prompt “Prompt A”. From Prompt A, I run ‘screen’. I am now met with a new terminal prompt which I’ll call “Prompt B”. Prompt B is a running session “inside” Prompt A. From here, I run ‘irssi’ at Prompt B. I connect to my various IRC servers and chat away.

Now, it’s time to go to work. I have two options at this point. I can either: 1) close my terminal directly, or 2) detach my screen session, and exit nicely. If I choose to close my terminal directly, I can rest assured that my IRC connections won’t change. Irssi is being protected by my screen session, so closing the terminal will have no effect on it. However, I like to exit everything cleanly, so I issue the keystroke ‘Ctrl-a, d’ to “detach” my screen session. I am now back to Prompt A. From here, I ‘exit’ to close the terminal, and go to work.

When I arrive at work, I SSH into my box running my screen session. Once SSH’d in, I am met with Prompt A. I want to start chatting in the IRC session that I started at home. So, at the prompt, I type ‘screen -dr’ to “detach” the screen session (if I just closed the terminal directly) and “reattach” the session to my current location. My irssi application returns to the screen just as I left it when I was home. I can now start chatting away as if I never disconnected from any of the IRC servers.

Take a second for that to sink in. That rocks! I never missed a beat, and to the others in the channels, it’s like I’ve never left. As far as they know, I’m still at home. It just doesn’t get much better than that.

That’s just using a single screen session. As I mentioned, you can use multiple screen sessions running side-by-side, or nested screen sessions, depending on your current situation and needs. With multiple screen sessions running in concurrence, you don’t need a terminal that has all the bloat with tabs, profiles, etc., such as gnome-terminal. You can use RXVT, and have the same effect of tabs just using screen.

Finally, you should learn how to kill a screen session. When the need for a screen session has expired, rather than letting the process run in the background taking precious RAM, you will need to expire the session. To do this, you need to get the PID from your box. Just ‘screen -list’ to get that PID. The PID will look something like 23454.pts-1.hercules. Now that you have the id, just type at the terminal (you need to be at a prompt):

screen -X -S ID kill

This will kill the session and the process, as well as any application(s) that were running inside it.

When I stumbled upon this, I was ecstatic! A complete suite of Open Source Software tools for Windows users. Even better- they run right off of your portable USB drive!

While the list of tools in the suite is young, and not extensive, it’s enough to get a serious Windows user freed from the bounds of proprietary software. In the suite, you have:

• ClamWin
• Firefox
• Gaim
• OpenOffice.org**
• Sudoku
• Sunbird
• Thunderbird
• AbiWord**

That’s pretty impressive. Office software, Internet apps, both browser and email, a game, anti-virus software and productivity all in one package that can run comfortably and easily on 512MB of storage space. ** Use AbiWord instead of OpenOffice.org and fit the suite on 256MB!

Get PortableApps Suite for Windows here, or check out other PortableApps here.

Next on the list, The OpenCD

Coming from Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, this is a GREAT collection of software. Differing slightly from PortableApps, it features a great list of Free and Open Source Software for Windows users.

This list is a little more extensive. Covering productivity, design, multimedia, Internet/networking, utilities and a couple of games. It features most of the apps from PortableApps, but adds a few:

• MoinMoin
• PDFCreator
• Blender
• Audacity
• Celestia
• 7-Zip
• Notepad2
• Sokoban
• The Battle for Wesnoth

All bundled software is found on a single CD, and needs to be installed onto your system. You can download the CD either directly, or through Bittorrent, the preferred method.

And last, but definitely not least, Software For Starving Students

What list would be complete without recognizing local talent? Software for Starving Students (SSS) comes straight out of Utah with the talent of the students from BYU. SSS aims at not only freeing the Windows bound, but the Macintosh bound as well. The latest release is 2006.01 with 2007.01 just weeks away.

SSS has even a more extensive list than The OpenCD or PortableApps. Such extra software includes, but not limited to (but in alphabetical order):

• Ant Renamer
• Azureus
• BZFlag
• DeepBurner Free
• Dia
• Eraser
• FileZilla
• GNU Chess
• Inkscape
• Paint.NET
• PuTTY
• Tux Paint
• Tux Racer
• Wink
• WinSCP

Of course, there is much more software available, both for Windows and for Macintosh. Here is a full list of 2006.01 applications. All of which fit on a single CD.

You can find the download here, both for Windows and Mac, Bittorrent and direct.

It’s important to mention that these projects are the results of volunteers. I am sure your donation to the project would be appreciated. Even more so, I am sure that they are eager for volunteers willing to make each project the best it can be.