Neil's Magical Meme

Woop, a meme! Thought up by Neil: How Open Source are you?

So. How Free am I?

To save typing time, everything in this list is free unless otherwise stated.

Operating System: Knoppix Debian GNU/Linux

It's lovely. But I shall be installing Sarge when it becomes stable.

IM Client: irssi

It's not annoying like Gaim with its font sizes that don't change or the inability to block the width or itacism of some idiot's font. But Unicode doesn't work too well with it being in a screen in an xterm. But then us-ascii is the only character set that can be trusted to work on all platforms. So maybe it's a blessing in disguise.

Editor: vim

I use it all the time. It's a great editor. And the pretty colours are nice when you spend hours on end hacking.

MySQL Front-end: mysqlcc (MySQL Control Centre)

It's pretty damn useful. MySQL Administrator doesn't let you stick data into tables, etc. and MySQL Navigator is a little crappy. What a great explanation of mysqlcc.

X Browser: Mozilla Firefox

In its current guise it doesn't meet the DFSG's definition of Free. But it's in main so it's free enough for me. It's going to have to be repackaged to exclude the non-Free parts and the name will have to change due to the Mozilla Foundation insiting that non-Mozilla packages will have to be under another name.

It's a good browser though. One day I'll build it from source and include SVG support.

X Mail Client: Mozilla Thunderbird

Same as above.

Document Production: LaTeX

It's an excellent language. When my new blog is complete it will use LaTeX-like markup, such as `` for a double back quote.

Media Players: mpd, vlc

mpd is fantastic. It's a daemon that plays music! Much better that that XMMS crap! It fits in with the Unix philosophy of ``do one thing well''. All it does is sit in the background and play music. It has a bit of playlist ability but that's it. For a front-end I generally use mpc, which allows commands like mpc play, mpc next and mpc stop. When I'm in a more music-changing mood I generally use GMPC, which is a nice GUI.

vlc is nice and it plays allsorts of shit with the codecs from mplayer.

Summary

Hehe, it's like a colophon. Sort of. I love it!