Showing headlines posted by mfioretti

Conky is a graphical system monitoring tool for Linux, that can also be used for automatic maintenance and event notification on local or remote computers.

How I helped out a group of older users by introducing them to computer games that particularly appeal to them — and to the idea of FOSS, even if they don’t realize it.

Here is some information, useful for whoever is doing or considering homeschool, straight from parents who actually did or are still homeschooling with, and just thanks to, Free Software

I got some great feedback on my post about Linux configuration anarchy -- so here are some thanks and a few rebuttals on the topic.

Here is why I like Openbox pipe menus, which make the Linux desktop much more efficient for those who do without Gnome or KDE, and four of my favourite ones.

One of the perennially pesky issues of the Linux desktop is multiple configuration files for very similar programs. Please let me know what you think of my proposal to solve configuration anarchy.

These two questions came out on a mailing list recently. Since the answers are relevant for everybody interested in Free Software development, especially, but not only, in educational/non-profit contexts, I put them online in one page. Feedback is very welcome!

8 months ago Nichi Vendola, governor of the Italian Region of Puglia, signed in the same week a proposal for a Free Software regional law and... a partnership with Microsoft, worrying local FOSS activists to the point that they sent Stallman to Puglia to explain what Free SW is. This morning, Vendola declared that the law was recently approved by the Puglia Regional Council, with a press release that, after defining Free Software as "Using computers without licensing costs",leaves unanswered all the questions about FOSS in local schools and businesses asked last year.

After a bit of studying and testing, I have found a very simple and useful way to download RSS feeds from the command line. It works very well, except (in some cases) with encoding. Please try the script, and thank you in advance for any help with the encoding problem!

“after struggling for over 1 year, sadly Sergio had to stop using Open Office Impress and go back to Microsoft Power Point”. After asking Sergio, I reformatted and put his list of complaints online to gather more feedback on whether OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) always present such problems when compared to PowerPoint:

Here are some code snippets to streamline the search and removal of duplicate files on your Linux computer.

The Free Technology Academy (FTA), an advanced virtual campus which seeks to educate and promote the adoption of Free Software and other Free Technologies, just partnered with the Association of Greek Users and Friends of Free/Open Source Software.

WordPress is quick and easy to install and update, but the quicker you can make these operations the better, right? If you have shell access to the server where your WordPress copy is installed, it is possible to make some operations much quicker and safer with this shell script.

the Dbmail system stores email into a relational database: how and why Harald and his company use Dbmail is really interesting. Here’s the story:

I have found a way to migrate one existing, bilingual WordPress install to two independent copies of WordPress with the same top URL, and without changing the URLs of any page. Please let me know if I missed something.

Gnu Free Call is a Free Software, server-less alternative to Skype. Here is an introduction to Gnu Free Call written specifically to help non-geeks to understand why such a project is important for everybody, both in normal life and when disasters strike. Includes explanations from Haakon Eriksen, the project coordinator.

Every now and then, a question like this pops up on some email server management forum:"I’d like to be able to reject connections from remote IP addresses if they’re from certain countries." I have reformatted some tips on how to do this on this page. Feedback is very welcome.

There are a few repetitions here and there, but that’s a minor issue. With one exception, everything that readers starting as email administrators with “Linux E-Mail” will need is in this book...

Wordpress is a great publishing system, but managing it manually can be a very time consuming process. This is especially true when you want to upload lots of posts, or if you would like to write content in your preferred, full-blown text editor and then have it “magically” appear online. Eventually, I wrote this script around the WordPress-CLI utility and have already used it successfully to upload hundreds of posts to several of my WordPress websites.

What is the role, purpose and point of software? Most people might assume that question to have an obvious answer: as the Berkman Center for Internet & Society puts it, software is “the programs or other ‘instructions’ that a computer needs to perform specific tasks. Examples of software include word processors, e-mail clients, web browsers, video games, spread sheets, accounting tools and operating systems.” What this description omits of course is human agency, which ultimately determines what software does, how it does it, the degree to which it supports or undermines the rules and laws of society, and how it encourages or discourages ordinary citizens to participate in the process of defining those rules and laws.