hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0434.txt

Episode: 434
Title: HPR0434: HPR Roundtable 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0434/hpr0434.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 20:30:45

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This is Patrick from the Radio, the official roundtable episode number four.
My name is Clot 2 and on the very exciting panel with me this episode, I have a veteran
of every roundtable so far. Deep Geek. Hello. What are your podcasts now, Deep Geek?
Or do you only have one officially? I'm actually on tobacco HPR so I can pop in whatever
I need to but I'm also at talkgeek.me.us for my podcast. I also have Charles Olsen from the Mint
Cast. Hello. Charles what's your show about, I wonder?
Well, officially we say it's the podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux.
It's kind of aimed at people who are getting started. I know when I got started in Linux, I actually
made things more difficult for myself than I needed to be. I have since found Linux is mostly
easier than Windows if you know what you're doing and that's what we try to aim at is to help others
know what they're doing sooner so they don't have to experience the pain that I went through.
Well, you had like a little spiel written down on a note card or something didn't you?
Actually just the first sentence after that I was winging it but I should have said yes I was totally
prepared for that. Let's see we have Russ Winner from the Techie Geek and formerly a
distro watch. Do you do any more distro watch episodes Russ?
I still post the episodes for the guest host and I handle the RSS feed for a distro watch.
That's just so I can keep my distro watch.com email address.
Very nice.
And the Techie Geek podcast is a podcast that covers Windows and Linux servers and PCs
and just about anything else that appeals to your energy.
Think of it as the Linux podcast for Windows users.
Wow, very nice. That's used to nag the good tagline.
I'll bet a lot of other kind of jealous there but good.
Then we have some guy named Feel who doesn't even claim to be a part of any show at all.
He's just a wanderer.
That's me. Hi guys.
Hey, Feel. So you've done one episode for HPR correct?
Yeah, I did one on interface which yes I'm voting and I did a few twat tech episodes as well.
Ah, very nice. And then last but not least Russ from Linux.
Pam Shack not to be confused with Russ from the Techie Geek. How you doing Russ?
Did we lose Russ?
Am I the only one not hearing Russ?
No, I don't hear me there. I don't hear me there.
We will see if he makes it back on.
Okay, and then like I said, I'm quite too.
So, okay, so this round table is going to be about what free software applications we all use to make our life easier
or maybe that we've given to other people to make their lives easier.
Maybe give us an outline of I guess your day-to-day tasks that you actually,
you know those apps that you actually live in and use all the time and just,
it defines your computing experience.
Let's start with DeepGeek.
Hey, well I did a day-to-day app.
I'm going to have to start with Ice Weasel, also known as Fire Fox and some Circles.
Or maybe that's by Somersa.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I just, you know, can't get away from it for web browsing because the plugins I can find fit me like a glove.
You know.
But the other things I do, if mainly, you know, looking into what work and push Linux to go for the next level.
And so I end up reading a lot of manual pages.
And when it comes to reading manuals, I just love Cockrore from ManPages and KPDF for PDF documents.
Huh.
Not ocular?
I haven't tried it yet, I've heard about it.
It's really good actually.
Yeah, I'm looking to try that.
Audio encoding, encoding I want to talk about.
ABCBE, which stands for a better CD encoder.
And this thing is a command line driven thing that you put a music disk in your computer.
And you just give it a couple of command line switches for what formats you want out.
It does the rest.
Nice, okay.
Walk away, it's done.
MPlayer, both for my video addiction, as well as converting audio file types.
So you use mincoder for your audio stuff?
Yes, yes, yes.
And it's great, the best thing about that, that's course platform.
The great thing about that is that, you know, if you have the code of the system, it doesn't pick up.
It just changes things, does things right.
It's lovely.
Yeah, there's a lot of other podcasters on here.
What does everyone else use for audio encoding, especially?
I'm kind of partial to that kind of topic.
Oh, that's a yum.
Oh, that's a must for the editing.
I hate to encode an audacity.
Yeah, me too.
I was going to say, what about the actual encoding?
I mean, I typically export out of audacity in one thing.
And then I take it to Sox or ffintech to get it out to some other format.
I have a script that calls og encode lame and flack.
And it calls lame with the variable bit rate flags.
Right.
So everyone else is pretty much just using audacity to encode, really?
Yes, I do.
Yes.
Well, that's it in Sox.
Yeah.
Yeah, it meant that the whole thing is audacity.
We record, edit, export everything in audacity.
Yeah, I mean, you know audacity.
What's that?
I also use level later.
Yeah, level later, the Python app.
Does that not break on you, typically, or not, really?
Not really.
I use windows, so.
You should check out Normalize if you ever get a chance.
Normalize was one of my top picks, I guess.
In terms of, I mean, again, being a podcaster, the media stuff.
Normalize is just a fantastic little application that does exactly what level later does.
But it's GPO, it's command line.
And it doesn't have the periodic breakage that level later does.
On Debian, I think it might be called Normalize-Audio.
Yeah, this was called.
I've been fooling around with it.
Okay.
So I want to mention a couple of things I use.
I've given them, because I think they're good.
First of all, with Windows, I'm from Believer
and replacing Internet Explorer for better security.
Yeah.
Sure.
So I give them Opera.
Oh, okay.
And maybe some people don't know this, or maybe they do.
Opera works on Linux, too.
Yep.
I have it on Linux.
Yeah, so.
On the main one, but I haven't.
You know, it's nice if my in-law is calling me over a web page and I can pull up Opera,
which I normally don't use for browsing and kind of know it's rendering the same way as they're looking at.
Nice for a little over-the-phone troubleshoot in there.
And they also gave them earfan view.
Have you guys heard of this?
I've heard of it.
One of our listeners mentioned it.
Forget what it does.
It's an image viewer.
But it also scans front and back.
It's an image viewer.
But it also scans props and recises.
How can I do it like the batches of images?
Yes, it has a batch mode.
But it's just, it's like a really minimalist thing so like no one gets confused over a billion menu items.
It just, you can look at anything in windows.
You can use the scanner in windows.
It can change sizes and flip people around.
And that's kind of it.
So it doesn't have any sharp edges as they say.
What I really like about it is that at work I have to deal with 200 megabyte tiff images.
And earfan view is one of the only programs I can really open that without dying.
What other things did earfan view beat out for that?
All of Microsoft stuff.
Like the one they have bundled with their office.
The Gimp would die.
The Gimp would die on that one?
Do you have your, you probably don't have enough swap space then.
I've opened up some pretty large images in Gimp.
Yeah, I'd have to look into that to be honest.
Although I mean I've never done it on windows.
So because you're talking about doing that on windows, right?
Yeah, but swap space or what's the windows equivalent called on the C partition?
But I mean that's sad.
What's the name of the one that you guys are talking about?
Whatever it is, it's going to have left of a footprint.
Your fan view?
Yeah, it's IRFAN.
It's spelled IRFAN.
It's actually the first name of a college guy.
And he was like not American, so it's not American name.
Yeah.
So I call IRFAN view for the longest time until I met a Muslim gentleman who corrected me.
Oh, I see.
Got you.
Okay, that's funny.
Let's move to Charles and get his kind of his typical apps, I guess.
I just want to get an overview of how we all compute and then we can start tossing in all the other good stuff.
Yeah, and there are actually a couple of unique ones.
Use open office.
Yeah.
Now at work I have to use Microsoft Office and Word.
I fight with Word all day.
And I only use open office Firefox.
Those are my main ones.
When I'm not podcasting or working, I like to do writing, I like writing fiction, and a couple of unique ones.
One is for writing screenplays, an open source program called Celtics.
Yeah, I love that one.
Yeah.
Although it's got a annoying little bug in the Linux version right now as far as character names,
but it's so completely usable, it's just a little annoying.
But it's great for writing screenplays, you can put it out as PDF.
And then the other one I use, and y'all may laugh at this one, but I use EMAX with an add-on called Oregon Mode,
which lets you organize pretty much anything.
I use it for organizing stories, and I've used it for organizing the podcast.
I know a guy at the Linux workshop here in Houston who runs his entire life and his business using EMAX and Oregon Mode.
It's a very powerful program once you learn how to use it.
That's very cool.
For us, RentWinner, what do you have on your computer on a day-to-day basis?
Well, on Linux, the application or extension for BASH that I love to evangelize is FISH, FISH.
If you've never used FISH, it's so simple to install.
It's just AppGet install or Yom install FISH.
And what it does is it adds, besides a lot of other neat things, it adds tab completion for command.
Use the using tab completion for file names and whatnot.
You'll just love the fact that you can tab complete commands.
In addition to that, like if you can't remember the complete name of a command,
just type like LS and hit tab, and you will get a one-line description of what each command is.
So it's like so cool for a learning command.
I just love FISH.
So I love to tell everybody, especially newbies through Linux and newbies to the command line, is such a great help.
I also really like H top.
I use top for years, but H top gives you so much more.
It has some menu options for searching for a command.
So if you're used to dropping out and doing a PS,
BASH EF to look for commands that are running,
you can just press F3 while you're in H top and search for that app that's running.
It just is great.
So there are the two Linux apps I have all the time.
Over on Windows, for years I used the BASH cell for Windows called SIGWIN,
but about a year ago appeared on the scene Portable Ubuntu for Linux.
This is awesome.
I love to tell people about Portable Ubuntu.
It's officially known as Portable Ubuntu Remix now.
And what's great about it is that Ubuntu is running on your Windows machine as an application.
You're not running inside a virtual machine.
This is not a dual boot.
You're actually running a full version of Ubuntu Linux.
One top of your Windows desktop.
You can talk directly to your NTFS partition.
And using Terminator or just the normal built-in terminal in Ubuntu has completely replaced SIGWIN for me.
It's great.
It has a very small footprint.
I run it in the default 256 megabytes, but you change that.
So even if your machine only has 768 or a gig of RAM, that's plenty to run Portable Ubuntu Remix.
And this last week, I'm also a big fan of Portable Apps that you can run on USB sticks.
Yeah, those I used to use too on the OS X a lot.
Do I use all the time or putty?
If you use Windows, you're probably familiar with putty, which is a terminal emulator you can use to SSH into your Linux machines.
But the Portable version is great because I oftentimes sit down at people's machines that don't have, so I just pop in my USB stick.
The other that I use, surprisingly amount, is 7ZIP, the Portable version of 7ZIP.
The one cross-platform app that I cannot live without is Dropbox.
Don't have a free Dropbox account you've got to get one.
See you if I watch my year computer. What would I see?
Well, I do development, but I work mainly on a Windows box.
So I use Geven and NodePad++ as text editor. For compiling, I use MiniW.
And that's for command line stuff.
I've also been playing with QT a lot, which I really like.
That's the GUI framework from Trollex now taken over by Nokia.
It's fantastic, and when they say that you can take your code and have it run both for Windows and Linux with just a recompile, they mean it.
Wow, that's really cool.
Yeah, you know what it is. I wasn't expecting it. Like I thought there might be niggas, but nope.
Now, I interface with the central Xbox a lot, and so to communicate with that box to SSHN from my Windows machine, I use Tuddy.
To transfer files over SSTP, I use FileZilla, which I like a lot, because that's how I get to my FTP server as well.
And for X11 forwarding, I use X-Ning, which resides on my Windows box.
I can't. Now I was hearing, was it rusty or talking about portable Ubuntu? It sounds really cool.
I'm using right now SIGWIN, so I'll have to check that out. And because the command line sucks for Windows, I use console 2 instead.
That's what I use, really at work.
That's very cool stuff. I didn't know you could X forward to Windows.
I guess. That's very cool.
Yeah, it's seamless. You can even export your whole desktop, your GNOME session, or whatever.
Yeah.
The problem.
Okay, and the other rest, what's on your computer all the time?
Well, I come at this from a system administrator point of view, because that's what I do.
And we do everything in a pretty much open source environment.
And my client tends to be the same whenever possible.
So I use a lot of the system insight tools, OpenOffice.org, of course, for Office Suite.
We use DocuWiki for technical support information, which is pretty good Wiki as they go.
But, of course, for getting into machines and stuff, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing.
VNC as well, even in the Windows machines, where RDP is sometimes problematic.
VNC is a good way to go.
We use Bacula as a backup manager, which is a really good one.
I would consider an enterprise class for backup, for open source.
And the real ones out there tend to be pretty expensive.
So Bacula is a great solution for that.
From podcasting angle, you know, where it links in the handshack.
I don't do a lot of stuff outside of Audacity.
We use Audacity for pretty much everything.
We use socks whenever I have to encode something outside of the Audacity Framework.
I use the Gimp a lot for photo editing.
That's been a great thing.
I used to have to find an old copy of paint shop.
I think it was as I was using before the camp, but ever since that came along, I've been sort of sold on it.
I'm not sure I should mention this, but I really like handbrake.
It's a good one-shop solution for what it does.
What does that last one for those of us not familiar with it?
The DVD Ripper.
Oh, okay.
But it's basically telling what format you want to rip the DVD into.
Whether you want to be like YouTube Flash or HT64 or whatever.
You put the DVD in, click the button, then walk away.
And when you come back, you know, you have a video.
So that's pretty cool.
I also like Open Swan, which is a VPN client and server architecture.
Which is nice.
Oh, it's good to have a free and open source one of those.
And I think that's all I have on my list.
That's a pretty good list.
So the Open Swan one is Windows and Linux as well?
I'm not sure.
I only use it on Linux.
I don't know if it has a Windows version or not.
Oh, okay.
I'm hearing a couple of different categories here.
Let's talk first about the very exciting world of text editing.
Because a lot of people have actually mentioned something for it.
Whether it's Open Office or something like GVM.
The text editors that are available for both platforms, for instance.
Do you find that they pretty much, I mean, it's pretty much just the same application on both environments, right?
So you can go from Linux to Windows and use, for instance, GVM or Open Office.
And there's no learning curve if you are used to using it on.
Or rather, do it on Linux.
And then, you know, if you're doing it on Windows, they're both the same, right?
Are there exceptions?
Almost completely.
The one thing that I saw different in Open Office is file locations.
But as far as the, I mean, I've taken files, but my Windows files and put them on Linux in Open Office.
And I think all the commands are exactly the same.
It's just, like, I use templates a lot, so I put them somewhere and knowing more to do that.
It wasn't at all difficult, but it was different.
Someone, I forget who it was, that someone was talking about how they had to use Microsoft Office at work.
Yes, that one, right?
Okay, that's what I thought.
I'm wondering how possible, like, in previous jobs that I've worked, you know, they'll come to me and say,
you have to use, you know, such and such an application for this job.
And I'll say, yeah, okay, no problem.
And then, as soon as they're out of the room, I'll launch up Open Office or something like that and just use what I want to anyway.
Is it possible to do that in, like, your environment or in other environments?
Or are there literally things so specialized to, for instance, Microsoft Office that you just can't get around it?
In our case, it is not that it's so specialized, but they have it locked down where you can't install anything.
I used to be help desk supervisor, so I had more power.
And I actually did use what I wanted then, but about three years ago I was offered a much less stressful job there as a trainer.
So I'm not a supervisor anymore, but I also don't have my help desk powers.
And I have to live with their software specifically, and actually would probably get a lot of trouble if I was caught with anything else on there.
Even if it would, even if it would perfectly function and get the job done, you just don't write anything to your C drive period and you don't install and that's the way it is there.
Yes, okay.
I work for a very large company that's, like, $2 billion a year.
And the reason they won't allow us to run open office because we've had this discussion is that it goes towards, they have, like, official products that the company supports.
And we can't, we're not allowed to deviate from that.
And in order to even, which, anything else, you first have to go through X number levels of management.
So in our case, it's really, I have admit access on my computer, so I've installed it, but on an official perspective, it's not allowed at our company.
And is that how you're swinging GVM, for instance?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I kind of ignore all the rules.
I mean, yeah, they didn't sanction me doing what I did either, but they didn't have my computer locked down, so I got to do what I wanted to.
Exactly, but from, I wouldn't be able to, like, our office, officially, if would not be allowed to switch to open office.
Right, okay. And what about the VPN thing? I'm kind of curious about that.
We opened, we mentioned Open Swan. Someone else had something else for VPN, I think.
I mean, the only one I've ever used is OpenVPN, I think is what it's called, on Linux.
Is that pretty comfortable? That's just the client.
Well, I think OpenVPN is actually PBTP, is it not?
You got me.
I have to look at it to find out, but Open Swan is just an IPsec VPN, as opposed to IPP.
Nice, okay. So Open Swan, I'm going to have to remember that one.
Yeah, it's pretty nice. It started out as free Swan.
Sealed a whole cute thing, the whole QT cross-compilot between Windows and Linux, and it just kind of, I guess, working out of the box.
So you found out which development in with QT have you done so far?
I've done, they've asked me to port all these command lines programs over to GUI.
So I've done maybe about a month and a half worth of time.
Wow. Yeah. No, it's a fantastic thing.
It doesn't, they support a lot of compilers, because what they do is QT generates C++ code.
Like, the program in C++, they've got some things that are part of standard C++, and they generate that.
They turn it into real code, so then when a compiler takes it in, it just, it works.
I've used it with MingW, which is the Windows port of GCC, and I've used it with Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler.
And in both cases, the programs are identical, and Linux works evidently with GCC.
They also support Intel's compiler ICC.
So yeah, it's pretty cool.
It looks native to each platform, so every, I mean, the looks that you see, you know, no more on Windows, looks like any other application you'd expected to.
And yeah, it's just, they provide a lot of high-level classes, which just make someone's life really, really easy.
And the documentation includes great.
So yeah, I have nothing but good things to say at this point.
Maybe once I get further in, then I'll see you.
I'll have more experience to talk about the negatives.
Yeah, yeah. I would be interested in hearing more about that from someone who knows what they're doing.
I mean, I read all the propaganda that I have no idea, you know, whether they're just, I mean, I use KDE every day.
So obviously, I'm very interested in the cute toolkit that I am interested in hearing it from someone who's doing it for, you know, non-KDE work.
I think that's always interesting.
Yeah, well, in Linux, actually, I use the null environment, and no problems, right?
Like, it works just fine, and it doesn't have to be KDE.
Wow, cool. Yeah, I mean, I think Skype, I think that is written in the cute, with the cute toolkit.
I had another, oh yeah, how many of you guys have come from, like, okay, you've got all these free applications that you're using all the time.
How many of those did you bring over from Windows or your previous OS with you?
Are there other applications that you actually started out with on a non-Linux platform?
Yeah, in my case, I actually was using, of course, Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and GEM, and Celtics.
I was using all of those in Windows before I moved over to Linux.
Yeah, that's pretty close to my list for what I was using on OS10.
For me, it was the web browser's Mozilla, which is via Fox later on, and Opera.
You didn't use anything else, though, those were the only two.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, once I became a Linux user, I grew a habit of keeping a few encurses kind of web browsers on my system case.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love that stuff, because believe it or not, they've bailed me out of a couple of situations sometimes.
Yeah, I learned early the value of being ready for X server, not to want to start for whatever reason.
Right, yeah.
So, there's just a few things that I never used, and one is links, too.
I actually worked on both graphical. The other is Word Grinder, which is a full-word processor.
I've never really used it, but it's nice to notice a full-word processor for encurses.
What's wrong with them?
Well, it's really just a text editor. I mean, for a text editor, I'm a nano guy myself.
And I keep MC, Midnight Commander, back there.
Right, right.
Yeah, just in case, which corresponds really to how I use Beeshoff Commander graphically, especially for FTP Protocol stuff.
So, I mean, but that's kind of the same thing. You get the two paintings, even in the Beeshoff Commander.
Whereas for Rocks Filer, you have to, if you want to transfer from one to another, you have to open up two Rocks windows and then drag and drop.
Right.
So, depends on, you know, I guess, how you want to get to it.
Yeah, I'm more accustomed to just opening up the two windows and dragging and dropping, but I know a lot of people, I guess, kind of were used to the...
So, it was originally called Beeshoff Commander, is that what it was called?
Well, Beeshoff Commander, as I said, is the graphic version of the two-pane file management program.
Okay.
So, you can FTP with that, or you can just have two directories on your local system.
Yeah.
So, for a while, I used Filezilla when I was using FTP transfers.
That was interesting. That's supposed to be course platform.
I don't know if anyone else has any real experience with that.
I think I used it, I don't know, it's 10, that's one point.
Yeah, I used Filezilla in Windows and Linux all the time.
I'm not sure which one I used in first.
Posers and other applications I used in Windows first.
I guess NVU is still around.
Yeah.
So, there's a less buggy implementation of NVU, I guess, and VLC.
Yeah, of course.
You've played the fault audio player.
Yeah, that's a great one.
Do you actually use it to ever transcode or anything?
Yeah, when you were asking, do we ever use anything but audacity?
VLC is one that I have used.
The main reason, well, there's two reasons I record my piecats in Windows.
One is, my main machine is Linux.
While I'm recording, I like the machine that's doing recording to be doing nothing but recording.
I have a Windows laptop that's actually for my engineering consulting.
It's pretty much a dedicated laptop, but I do run audacity on it.
So, I'm recording there.
And when you transcode on, at least in the Windows version of audacity, it does weird things.
One of the things that's weird, I don't know if you ever noticed this.
It gets the timestamp all messed up.
It'll say like 35-minute long podcast when it's really an hour and 10 minutes long.
What about email clients?
I mean, obviously, we all use some email client. What are we using out there?
Boz.
Really?
Yeah, I like to close a lot.
Now, that's a GUI one, right?
Yeah, that's a GUI one.
If I need to do command line, which is like, like I said, I have a little backup command line up.
I use Mail Handler, MH.
Oh, okay. And MH, I hadn't heard of that one, actually.
I'm surprised because you read Unix Floss, if you didn't show.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was mentioning that there was a case study.
Oh, is that the one they said was horrible?
No, that's the one they said was the case study they used for.
How you can have a different front end for the same functions, command line functions.
Oh, okay.
So they were comparing that to just the regular mail.
Yeah.
So I do remember that.
So the cool thing about Sophie Clause, the Clause, is that it also does the MH format.
So I said for the MH format.
And I can look at the files from both things via the command line or the GUI.
And Clause has, you know, you can just drop in add-on for whatever you want.
Like I use Clause as my RSS reader too.
Sure, fantastic.
Okay, cool.
I'll have to try that one out maybe sometime.
Because I mean, I've heard of it.
I just never, never understood what the big deal that was.
Yeah, that and its theme ability.
It's beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing on the GUI.
I'm Clause Handler, multiple accounts.
Multiple accounts.
Check into Mail 4, yes.
Okay.
Once it has its home folder for mail, it kind of, it doesn't like to move that.
I've had to do some things with soft links to move things around after I've configured Clause.
But that's, you know, probably just my weirdness, you know.
Because I fool around with different petitions and stuff like that.
Most people would never have to do that.
If I'm primarily using Thunderbird, well, actually I'm primarily using the web mail.
I want it, when I'm sitting at my desk at home, I would like to do it in an email client.
I'm using Thunderbird, but I just don't feel completely satisfied with it.
And I'm not really sure why and I'm trying out everything else.
Evolution seemed too bulky and slow.
Clause is one of different solve, but I haven't set up yet.
Well, this is nice because it's fast.
I still had using K-mail, and it just took too long to start.
That drove me bonkers.
It just, I mean, okay, this is Linux.
You know, I click on the menu, okay, install already, okay?
I hate to say, I'm writing, let me deepread this here.
Okay.
But Clause, you know, it kicks off.
It uses just the plugins to specify.
I think you'll love it.
But yeah, the most full account is one thing.
Because I have my account and I have the MintCast account.
And I have a couple others that I use for sort of spam catcher, but I need to watch them.
It'll do that.
I mean, I have it doing my local mail.
As well as checking, I have my regular accounts on my regular ISP,
which, you know, I wish I didn't have, but I think this gives you that so they can communicate with you.
Then I have the ones on my own domain, and it just handles it fine.
And the filtering is great.
I actually have a thing where I have some filtering commands running on the web server.
And there's a secret account, so it knows certain from addresses.
It pulls them over to a second account automatically.
And that one, I can pull down that too as a separate thing.
And what I do with that is I like to have my little email icon on my menu, on my taskbar,
link it to that one, and I get spam free from my 50 best friends on the web.
You know, it's just them.
They can only set that off.
It's nice.
For me, I find the bird as well, mostly.
And I've used it so much now.
I'm just really adapted, getting through it, and dealing with it to you with secrecy.
So I like that a lot.
But from the command line, I'm a pretty big fan of one that's freezing beer,
but not GPL, which is pine.
Are you using a pine or alpine?
Just pine.
Which, if you're familiar with nano, is really easy to use, really easy to get around in.
And I think it was Charles mentioned WebMail.
We provide WebMail at work, and we use SquirrelMail, which is a GPL WebMail client,
or WebMail server, which is really nice, and really, really easy to configure too.
If somebody wanted to select SquirrelMail on a home Linux server,
get it up so that they have WebMail access to their own email, which is really easy to do that.
How pine is still under development?
I believe pine is no longer developed.
I could be wrong on that.
And the version three is coming too.
I'm looking forward to seeing that one.
You know, I tried that on a test machine, and just for kicks.
I didn't really see the big differences, to be honest.
I mean, there were some nice touches, like, if someone sent you an address,
it would pop up and offer you to, or rather, if you rolled over that address,
it would pop up and kind of help you get that into your address.
It would look the easiest and quickest way that you could, or things like that.
But I didn't see the big improvements, like, but I would have wanted to see,
like, integration with OpenPGP, or GNUGPG, stuff like that.
I didn't see a big difference.
Okay.
Plus has that, PGP, and OpenUGPGPG plugin.
But you said it was very modular, so I kind of figured it did.
Oh, okay.
I mean, I guess Thunderbird.
Thunderbird, you can add it in as well.
But actually, this leads into a question that I did have.
I'm not that huge of a big fan of Thunderbird, yet at the same time,
I'm always putting out people's machines.
You know, when I'm setting up for a friend, you know, they need email client on OS10,
you know, I'll dump the mail app and give them Thunderbird.
Partly because I trust Thunderbird more than Apple's mail,
and partly because I'm more familiar with Thunderbird than Apple's mail.
So how many of you, or what are we all doing, I guess,
when we're setting up machines, you know, for the in-laws or for the friends or whatever?
I mean, are we giving them some of the apps that we're talking about,
or how are we managing this?
And how important is it that we do?
I mean, for support and stuff.
You know, you can't always give them the full-fledged geek software.
Right.
You know, geek software can be so prosaic.
Yeah.
But, you know, on the other hand, I was also, for quite a while, a pack rat,
and you know, when I set up a computer in my in-laws,
they're still using an old free version of colipso.
You know, just they know it.
Who's going to write a virus for it?
I stick it on there.
What can I say?
I'm lazy.
I want them to be happy in that complaint.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I guess that's the primary concern.
Is that the person you are administering the computer for, you know, you leave them happy.
You know, they're satisfied with what they've gotten.
Anything Thunderbird probably is a good choice for email client for people like that.
It is simple.
It's pretty solid, easy to use.
So I think that is a good choice for not-
It's got the brand recognition.
You know, you say, oh, it's by the same people who do Firefox,
and that's put their mind at ease.
You know, they're like, oh, okay, cool.
I'm comfortable with that.
Although, it's not, you know, it's fresh.
It looks similar enough that people aren't intimidated by it.
I always install Firefox,
mostly because it's self-updates,
and I don't have to worry about vulnerability as much as Internet Explorer 6 Thunderbird
and VLC.
Because one of the, just the fact that you don't have to worry about codec,
because often kids, the question is, I can't open this video.
And in 95% of the cases, it's because they didn't have a codec, right?
They didn't have Exped or whatnot.
So that's just a worry right out.
That's about it.
I don't have anything else I would impose on people.
What about open office?
I mean, don't people ever ask you for a copy of Microsoft Office?
Yeah, I wouldn't install that if they asked for it,
but if they have office already, I'm not going to worry about it.
Oh, sure, sure.
You can't install open office if they have office already.
I don't see the point.
Well, again, it goes back to what's your primary goal?
I was like, then, it checks something.
Okay.
You know, I didn't want to step on it, but I've also been listening to tonight-wise's nightcast,
and he makes a very good point where you got to make sure that you don't accidentally help somebody do something pirated.
So if you're installing a Windows box,
and they're asking you to install something that has to be bought, purchased, licensed, registered,
and they don't give you the key.
Yeah.
We fuse it because when something goes wrong and they have to point a finger,
they're going to point at you.
Exactly.
Well, I absolutely agree with that.
Yeah, I will not do that because, I mean, just because, yeah, I don't feel comfortable putting on a pirated version of something.
Not knowing what's going to go wrong, what they're going to need to go do,
and then they're going to call you if it breaks anyway, you know?
Yeah, and then you have to support something you don't use.
Yeah, you know, so, yeah, if they ask me for office, I say, well, here's open office.
And I don't go into the whole spiel about Richard Stallman's dialogue,
and I just say, look, this one's free, and it does exactly the same thing.
And then I open up one of their documents in it, they see that it all looks the same,
and to them it is the same, and that's the end of the conversation, really.
I have a question for you guys.
I've never been blamed that because you installed an open source program on their computer,
now it's doing something bad that they did not like.
It doesn't have to be open source, you just have to have touched it.
Yeah, but back in the old days, that's what happened to me, but I've learned.
I mean, I just don't do anything unless they specifically specifically ask for it,
because generally the times I would get into trouble is when I would say, well, I'll just throw this on there for them,
and then it all comes back to like, what's that weird icon that got there?
Is that the problem? That kind of thing.
But otherwise, I don't think I've run into that too much anymore.
I think they were giving about these days.
I think it's just to get news to the computer situation that they're just knowing.
I think people have a tendency if they see something they don't open anymore,
whereas we used to click everything we saw, and maybe the virus training has gotten us
not to be too exploratory on but strange icons that people may have installed now at desktops.
And I don't find that to be true.
People will click on anything on their computer, at least the people I'm supporting.
I mean, they will call me up with problems.
I'm just like, how did you ever find your way to that little obscure utility that you're not supposed to ever touch?
And of course, you know, you went in and found it and locked yourself out of your computer or something.
I want to know if it's a funny story.
My mom got a fishing email.
This was about a year ago.
She got a fishing email for Bank of America, which we don't have in Canada.
She proceeded to create an account with this fake Bank of America and give them all her information,
which I personally, she called me up for support because she wasn't sure about what she was supposed to put in.
I've heard the situation, but I have to agree with the fact that for some people, yeah, that has not settled at all and will never.
What you said about the users clicking everything, but people I've supported actually are the opposite of that.
They will click only the one thing that you show them they need to click and they may not even know what it is.
When I was help desk, I had people call and say they're having a problem. I say, well, what are you clicking?
And I say, well, I'm clicking the third one.
And I can finally finally get it out of them. It was a third icon down.
They don't know what it was and something happened and moved it.
So there was a different thing now that was a third icon down.
And so they couldn't launch a software anymore.
We figured that out and put that one back as the third one.
There's still an intimidation factor with computers, I think.
And people, the average user comes in two groups.
One is they all click anything and see if it works.
And then there's the one who, if something doesn't look exactly the way you show them or wrote it down on a piece of paper that they come paralyzed.
Exactly.
So do the free apps tend to help us help these users in general?
Or is it just a question of what we are most familiar with?
I think it helps.
In the case, like I was mentioning earlier with BLC, it really takes the headache out.
With what you guys were saying about not installing pirated software and saying,
hey, we have open office having that avenue even possible, I think it's a big positive.
Yeah. I find that people who are non-gakes seem to respect authority a lot more than people who are gakes
because when I'm supporting my in-laws, anything their school tells them to install, they will install.
Period.
You know, it's like some kind of weird kind of cool stuff I have to be running.
Adobe player, mine, whatever.
It's just no stop, no going against, you know.
An elementary school teacher knows more about computers than me, yes, I know.
Okay, it's a fun demeaning myself, but you know, you just know fighting it, I guess.
What do you guys use to listen to music with?
Prudacious and Oguon 2-3.
Totem, Banshee, Blind.
Whatever the default is and Linux, man, I don't listen to that much music and I'm not even sure what it is.
I'm a player, I guess.
Well, I would like a rhythm box.
What I would like to know about is radio stations that also netcast,
especially if they use some kind of weird Microsoft thing, what do you got to do to get that from Linux on?
Any ideas for me?
What do you mean by weird Microsoft thing?
Like some kind of real audio, I mean that's not Microsoft, but is that what you mean?
Like a real audio format, for instance.
Yeah, some kind of format that like,
and player won't suck down.
That's a good question.
I don't really listen to that much.
I mean, and player usually solves the problem for me.
I found something interesting with one station that's maybe a hundred miles away.
They play 90's rocks, so I want them, right?
So they have, they recommend some thing called moonshine or something from Microsoft.
I'm like, no.
You know, but I find that using modsplugger and Firefox,
that it will kick off and play in the background and be able to suck down the feed.
But if I try to give and player that feed URL myself, I can't make it go.
Weird.
What about VLC, if you try to do it in VLC?
Yeah, but it seems to want to install all of GNOME and I'm a KDE person.
What? VLC wants to install GNOME?
Maybe it's in Debian.
I see a whole bunch of GNOME settings, managers and stuff,
about to go in and stuff, my fear.
Back out, yeah.
Just get it, get the source or something from the site.
Yeah.
Is it GNOME or like the GTK stuff?
I think it's the GTK stuff I'm referring to.
It's my effect, you know, let me just bring up the next terminal real fast.
That makes a lot of sense.
It's probably going to have to install some of the GTK stuff to get it to work.
I'm pretty sure there's a command line only,
a method that I don't know if you can only install the command line.
That's getting installed VLC requires the following.
Gconf, Gconf2, a bunch of different libraries which are fine.
You know, are there the GNOME notification demon?
Oh well.
I've never noticed that.
I mean, I always install it blindly, but yeah.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I have very little GNOME stuff installed on my system,
so I kind of stay away, but VLC.
Sometimes I actually see VLC recommended by radio stations website.
Just download the dev and deep package I in and see if it breaks.
I have to try that.
Yeah, maybe just downloading it straight from their site might do it better than doing my repository thing you're saying, right?
Well, you can just download the dev and install the dev by itself, do a force, you know, install it,
and you may have to run it from the command line to get it to run, but it may run.
Of course, there's some libraries in there you're obviously going to need.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
So that gets around getting all that GNOME configuration stuff.
Yeah.
You know, you're probably going to break because some of those dependencies you do need,
while some of them I'm sure you don't.
Yeah.
And if it does break, you can call you then for support.
I'll just back out.
Don't worry about me.
I guess we could throw out one.
For those of us in Linux who, if there is some program, Windows program, we can't live without.
Wine is good.
I had one in Windows called InfoSelect.
It was an awesome note-taking program.
I've never seen anything else anywhere near as good.
And I'm not putting anything else in it, but I have 20 years of notes in InfoSelect, so I can't give it up yet.
And it runs almost flawlessly in wine.
I've done some other things in wine, some works, some don't.
But when it works, it's a nice program for that one Windows thing you can't give up.
At least text notes that could be replaced by something like Tom Boy?
Yes.
Tom Boy is what I'm using now for new notes.
I just have thousands of them in InfoSelect that I haven't tried to move over yet.
And I'm not certain Tom Boy can handle that many.
I don't know if there's a limit to it or a practical limit or...
I've just been nervous to try to move it over.
I do keep a virtual machine of Windows 2000 lying around just for like some old games.
I use QE MU.
It's not too hard to set up.
QE MU.
I know you and I both use it.
That is a really great emulator.
Do I use it for all my emulation experiments?
I'd like to know about an Linux.
What can you use for calendaring?
Because I used to use the calendar that came with K-Mail.
And now I want something that stands alone without sucking in all of the K-Mail things.
Because it's K calendar, so I'm in the recommendation.
Well, there is that lightning plug-in for Thunderbird.
But that's assuming you want to install Thunderbird.
Well, if there might be anything that's sort of...
It's a standalone app or something.
Yeah.
That's what it might be something that's sort of alone.
This man doesn't help you.
So I have a TVG1 phone using Google and Google Calendar is pretty nice too.
And if you're okay with putting all your information on Google server, right?
Oh, you know me class too.
I think I really need a like a Pearl script that'll just spit out a bunch of HTML pages that look like calendars.
Yeah, really?
Yeah.
And then you could just like, you know, take that file wherever it was, you know, your HTML.
I know kind of the Mozilla has Sungbird.
Oh, that was the Sungbird.
Yeah, I remember that.
The hearing about that.
Yeah, just like the calendaring part is there, you know, the Mozilla suite separated out.
Yeah, I had forgotten about that.
I did try that at one point, I think.
But I'm just not into calendaring, so I just couldn't get into it.
But if I recall correctly, it was kind of nifty.
The only thing I see in the Debian repository is open sync plug-in Sungbird.
Open sync Mozilla calendar.
Ice owl plug-in?
Yeah, it's probably it.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, that's probably the Debian version because of the license thing thing,
or you can just get it from Mozilla.
Ice owl.
Oh.
Standalone calendar.
Ice owl.
Standalone calendar application.
Ice owl is a Mozilla based calendar application.
The goal is to produce a cross-platform calendar using the XUL.
That's what Ice Ries was built on.
Ice owl leaves a somewhat small memory footprint than the Mozilla suite.
Ah, that might be a good one.
I'll just give that a shot.
Thanks, guys.
You can't have found it yourself, but I did say Sungbird.
I'll take credit.
Thanks.
Okay.
To a demo podcast, what do you guys use?
I use juice, which I like.
A little slow, but it does the job.
I use going to the site and clicking on the link.
It's a horribly inefficient way.
I really need to get something better.
I had started to use G-Potter, but I got the...
When I got the G1 phone, there's an application called Dog Catcher that downloads plays them
and everything, so I haven't bothered doing it on the main computer anymore.
I used PodGet for a while, which was written in Batch.
It's kind of like a devian version of BatchPotter.
But I'm actually thinking I was looking at BatchPotter the other day,
and I'm actually thinking of modifying it because I'd really love to use it with Area 2,
which is a concurrent command line downloading program,
because I hate when it's just downloading from one podcast after another that just sucks.
That sounds like a great idea.
It shouldn't be too hard either.
BatchPotter, I was looking at the script and I was like,
wow, it is such a short script.
Yeah, I need to start using it for myself.
I use RhythmBox, and just the pod catch,
and who's ever seen it with a might fancy clip.
I use proprietary evils, so I'll show you up a bit.
Don't tell me you use iTunes.
That will do, actually.
Yes, the worst application ever.
Switch to songbird.
Do me that favor.
Or can you, because the media player doesn't.
Well, I'm looking at various other options.
I'm kind of stuck with iTunes right now.
I think I've noticed about the way Apple programs,
it seems like when they write something for Windows,
they deliberately make it horrible, so you need that effect.
No, no, it's horrible anyway.
It's horrible on their own OS.
That is the worst application ever.
I remember when my niece had that,
and they would ask me for help,
and I was just lost.
I know.
I mean, I can't believe they call it
a music management program at all.
I mean, it's just so...
Is it me, or I still think
folders on a disk drive
is the best thing for managing music files?
Absolutely.
It's just the most logical way of doing it.
I used to use...
What was the audacious replacement for?
But they went over to that.
They went over to that thing where it's like you have to have a playlist.
You have to program playlists.
Yeah, I hate that.
Why?
As much as you drop into a directory and it goes.
Yeah.
XMMS.
That was it.
XMMS2, you had to take a client,
and then you had to write a playlist,
and picking the client was hard enough.
And then they asked you to write a playlist,
and then I gave up.
I don't know.
It's like, no, I want to do this.
I want it to be simple, you know?
Well, it could be simple.
How's that for a soundby clap field?
I want it to be simple.
I was interested to know what people use for remote support,
whether it's the DNC, log me in.
What's everybody use?
Are you going to try to pitch us a go-to meeting now, Russ?
No.
Okay, just making sure this wasn't like a trick, you know, a trick question.
Very, very perceptive.
Why 30-day free trial ran out?
No, okay.
I haven't actually used it, but one of our listeners wrote in,
and mentioned a website called Ugoo,
a spelled Y-U-U-G-U-U,
and the way she described it sounded pretty cool
and pretty easy for doing support, remote support.
That's cool.
How do you spell it again?
Y-U-U-G-U-U.
Cool, okay.
If the person I'm doing remote support with
doesn't already have an log me in account
that I can get in Team Viewer,
C-E-A-M, Viewer, Grade in Windows,
the person you're helping does not need to install anything
on their computer to TeamViewer.com.
Click on Get Team Viewer.
If they're using Internet Explorer,
it might SM-Do run an active event,
and it gives them a user number
and a password number to read.
The person that's going to give them remote support,
you put that in,
and then they're asked this person wants to
take control of your machine,
they have to grant you control,
and then for that one session,
you can control their machine.
It works great,
and then when you disconnect,
that session goes away.
Yeah, that's nice.
I use, when I'm supporting other people on Linux,
I just use K-R-D-C in K-D-E,
and that's how it does it as well.
You get the password or whatever,
and they give it to you
and you enter it in or however it works.
So that one's pretty cool.
I did use the Mac OS thing that they've got now,
and that's kind of a problem
because what it does is it pipes,
I think you have to have their little paid service anyway
in order to use it,
but it does start piping like audio
without the person's knowledge,
and so you're sitting there supporting them,
and they're like swearing at you under their breath, you know?
Not realizing that you can hear them,
and you're kind of like too embarrassed to tell them,
I can hear everything going on,
so yeah, that was really awkward.
You could hear worse things
while you'd split and fill in the computer, for sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, everyone, I guess that probably wraps up the call,
and these are good applications
to know about things for the discussion,
and next roundtable will be sometime next month.
I'll be sending an email out.
If you want to get on the email list,
so that you can get invited to a roundtable,
just let me know.
You can email me at clap2ithackerpublicradio.org.
Anyone's welcome to join, and love to have you on.
So thanks for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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so head on over to C-A-R-O.N-E-C for all of those meetings.
Thank you very much.