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First here. We finished a Slackware review. I personally like the distro for its austere approach and stability. I couldn't, however, really recommend it for new Linux users because of the foreknowledge of some Linux tools necessary to the install. Some disagreed, but I stand by my thoughts.

We also took a few days to tweak out the latest Mozilla-based browser, Phoenix. It's a lightweight and fast little browser that can be as full or empty of plugins and extensions as you'd like. Truth is, it's become my browser of choice lately.

Jill Ratkevic encouraged us to participate in a Windows refund day on January 23. Inspired by the legal mind of Walt Pennington, the action makes what I think is a worthwhile statement: consumers should have a say in the operating system on their new computers.

We also jumped in the way back machine to look at Star Wars as it might have appeared on your computer in the mid-70s, when the series began. Through the technological wonder that is ASCII animation, I shared with you the death of Jar Jar.

We pushed and popped, chased a clutch of KDE tweaks, dropped spam into a BlackHole, lost a blog, found another cool script, and discovered a way to fund aspiring open source programmers.

Not a bad week, all in all.

Elsewhere, the ever forward-thinking Doc furthered an interesting and rather heady discussion on DigID. It's got quite a few in the tech blog circles talking. And isn't that really what it's all about?

SGI got the Linux world buzzing this week with a 64-bit, 64 Itanium processor machine. The system will run well over a million dollars US in some configurations. I might even be able to balance my checkbook with that much processing power.

CES kicked off this week, too. I know this is a tough question, but who do you think will be a growing player in the small devices demonstrated at CES? Hmmm, could it be ... maybe Tux? Certainly. Linux is finding quite a comfortable niche in the embedded devices space, and CES should be a good showcase for the strengths.

And finally, DesktopLinux featured an article from "Joe User" on his experience as a Linux newbie. He expresses a few frustrations we've all experienced. More importantly, he makes a compelling case that Linux is the OS of the future for anyone interesting in computing and not just playing.

It's been a good week. I hope your weekend treats you just as well.

                 
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

GnomeTWEAK

Scheduling Meetings

Evolution is quickly becoming the email client of choice for many Linux users. It's a robust productivity tool that includes email, calendaring, to do lists, and contacts. For those who've relied heavily on the basic functions of Outlook or Outlook Express, it will break down one of the biggest barriers to moving to Linux.

In my heaviest Outlook days, I worked in a corporate legal office. We had more that fifteen employees in my department alone, and more than fifteen hundred campus-side. With that staffing level, meetings are a constant and critical part of each week. Outlook was very convenient in that regard. Anyone in the department could schedule a meeting, copying all the participants and collecting RSVPs.

Evolution has a similar function in its calendaring application. To schedule a meeting, select New Appointment, then Actions and Schedule a Meeting from the toolbar. This will bring up a 5-tabbed window. To the far right is the meeting tab. In this section of the window, you can select the participants, dashing off an email invitation by entering the appropriate email addresses. You can also select each individual's role in the meeting and whether or not they're required to respond or attend. Finally, you can schedule locations, as well.

If you're in a big work environment with lots of employees, Evolution's calendaring application will quickly become one of your most useful inner-office communication tools.

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Get your favorite Linux flavor on CD: Pick your favorite Linux flavor and get it on CD for as low as $1.95. Find Linux gear, books, and software for Linux at Linux Central . Check out the selection today!

I've talked about ispell in previous issues. It's a built-in spell checker for all your Linux-composed documents. While ispell is a great tool, I've recently moved to another spell checker, designed as a replacement for ispell.

aspell is "an interactive spell checker that is designed to eventually replace ispell. It does a much better job of coming up with possible suggestions than ispell (and in some cases even Microsoft Word 97's spell checker). It also has run time support for other non English languages. aspell can learn from users misspellings." I'll tell you - I've found those claims to be true.

The aspell convention is:

ispell [options [document]

The options include:

• check: checks the document
• pipe: ispell compatible mode
• --ignore-case: ignores case
• --dont-ignore-case: considers case
• -b: creates a backup of the file with .bak extension
• --home-dir=dir: directory containing personal configuration files

aspell, like its predecessor, learns as you go. The suggestions for corrections are much better and organized in a much more logical fashion than those in ispell. Common corrections are moved to the top of the suggestions list, as are additions to the built in dictionary. aspell is the way to go for spell checking in Linux.

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GnoTime

http://gttr.sourceforge.net/

"The Gnome Time Tracker is a desktop utility for tracking the amount of time spent on projects, and generating configurable reports and invoices based on that time. It also makes for a good to-to list tracker and idea organizer, allowing to-do list items to be sorted even while providing ample notes-taking area associated with each item."

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Beonix Believer
Scribbled by Jerald L. Vinikoff

"I see that you're discussing Phoenix, which I have tried on a W2K machine and liked, although it lacks some features. Beonex, also from Mozilla, is a more full-featured browser. I have used it on both W2K and Linux and been pleased with it. Not to knock Phoenix, but people might get a lot more out of Beonex, without some of Mozilla's annoyances, e.g., personal security manager--I'll spare you the rant.

"Although you're not going to become a lawyer, you're ok in my book. I enjoy and learn from Penguin Shell."

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FirstMonday

http://www.firstmonday.org/

"First Monday is one of the first peer-reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 418 papers in 79 issues; these papers were written by 498 different authors. First Monday is indexed in INSPEC, LISA, PAIS and other services. In the year 2001, users from 536,046 distinct hosts around the world downloaded 3,117,547 contributions published in First Monday."

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