A new month has just begun, it’s again time for a few suggestions of free software projects to flattr. This is Flattr FOSS in action.
Enough said, let’s start with my suggestions:
- The battle for Wesnoth is a great turn-based tactical strategy game (I spent countless hours on it a few years ago). It’s been a long time I have not played on my computer, but opensource games should be encouraged. Lack of good games is one of the few recurring complaints that come back from people trying out Linux for the first time. And The battle for Wesnoth is a very active project, so there’s no reason to not support them.
- Shutter is the next-generation tool to take screenshots, it’s quite popular at least in Ubuntu and it can easily replace the default gnome-screenshot application. You can apply various effects on the fly, and upload the resulting pictures directly on image hosting sites (Flickr, Picasa, etc.).
- Awesome is a highly configurable window-manager for X. I use it as a tiling window manager (windows are arranged to always fill the entire screen). Its configuration file consists of LUA code so it’s for power-users mainly… Julien Danjou started Awesome but he has also written many other small nifty tools, discover them in his Flattr profile.
- Sparkleshare is a new collaboration tool that will transparently synchronize a folder between several computers/persons and inform you in real-time of changes. Under the hood, it uses public Git hosting sites (like Github or Gitorious) to store and exchange the data. In some aspects, it’s like Dropbox’s shared folders. You can also read Linux Weekly News’ review of it.
- My last suggestion is to support Harald Welte and his projects. Click here to see his Flattr profile. He is someone in the free software world. First of all he’s a famous kernel hacker, he wrote much of the firewalling code (known as netfilter). He also initiated gpl-violations.org and ensured that the GNU General Public License was respected when he found out companies that failed to meet the terms of the license. Lately he has been reverse-engineering the whole GSM stack — pointing out security problems as he discovers them — with the goal to provide a free implementation of everything (first results are in projects OsmocomBB and OpenBSC). Isn’t that impressive?
That’s it for this month. By the way, did you tell your friends how easy it is to support free software with Flattr? Share this article with them and let them join Flattr FOSS too.
I honestly don’t get all this love for AwesomeWM. It’s a mess in my opinion. They change the syntax with every version, Lua is easy but just plain tedious. The whole thing just gives the impression that it’s trying too hard. It’s also not as fast as its fanboys claim, or at least no faster than other tiling WMs like DWM or Xmonad and is nowhere near as modular as something like wmii or Musca.
I’m more of a *box wm type user than a a tiler, but I’d say anything from Suckless is way more usable than the mess that is AwesomeWM (am I the only one that thinks the name reeks of naffness?)