Paul Sutton

software

University of costumed heroes

Software freedom is important as it gives users the power to be in control of the software they use and the hardware it is installed on.

GNU.org defines free software as :

What is Free Software?

Free software means the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

More precisely, free software means users of a program have the four essential freedoms:

* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

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The latest Free Software Foundation video hopefully helps illustrate what can happen when you put trust in closed source systems that cannot be subject to scrutiny through access to the source code.

Examples of common free software

You can follow the fsf on the federated social media networks such as Mastodon

Initiatives such as Tech Pledge are also a good idea for getting people to think about how they behave on line and starting to build better, more friendly, respectful communities.

#fsf,#freesoftware,#video,#promotion,#software,#freedom

JabRef Update

Not quite following on from my previous post The JabRef bibliography software has been updated.

JabRef is a bibliography manager, to help make .bib files easier to create and manage. It should be possible to upload the output .bib file to Overleaf too.

  • Screenshots from Jabref 3.8.2

jabref1

jabref2

References

There is a #latex channel on the Freenode IRC network.

#LaTeX, #bibliography, #manager, #software, #windows, #linux, #apple, #overleaf, #ctan,#tex-live,#overleaf, #jabref,#references,

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If you would like to try out different desktop environments on a GNU / Linux based OS then Debian offers a tool called tasksel. This will make it easier to choose a different desktop environment for example.

You need to run this as root.

#tasksel

which presents you with the following.

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The tasksel tool runs as part of the text based installation routine but post install you may want to change something without having to resort to using synaptic or other graphical package manager or even using apt from the linux terminal or console.

You can also opt to install a webserver or ssh server.

#Linux, #debian, #console, #software, #choice, #install

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Blender Open Movie Project

The Blender Open Movie project archive, now has 10 movies to watch and enjoy. These can be found on the project website.

These are very high quality pieces of work, they also demonstrate how powerful Blender is. This is really good promotion as to what can be achieved with free software.

#blender, #movies, #free, #software, #videos, #animation

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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#KSTARS – ASTRONOMY PACKAGE

KSTARS is a Linux based astronomy package. For a free software package it has a lot of features and downloadable catalogues of stellar objects.

When you first load up the package you may want to view the constellation lines. I worked out how to do this, but am including some info below to help users change the line colour from the default light grey as it may be easier for people to see the lines.

If you click on Settings (menu) —> configure —> guides

You should get the following

constellation lines

I have checked the boxes to constellation:-

  • lines
  • boundaries.
  • names

If you then click on the colours tab at the side

constellation colours

I have set the colour to yellow. This does stand out, probably a little too much. However you can set it to the colour of your choosing or leave as the default grey.

colour picker

The end result of this is (download):

Hope this helps

#software, #astronomy, #science, #kde, #linux, #freesoftware, #setup, #configuration, #constellation, #linecolor, #boundaries, #names.

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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