Saturday, December 24, 2005

Windows Open Source for the Holidays Well, it's Christmas Eve here in North America, among other places. Tomorrow is the first day of Hanukkah, and we're a few days out from the Winter Solstice. Whatever you celebrate, may you have fun and find a good time. They say it's the season for giving around here, and I'm trying to remember that. A friend and co-worker of mine came by my cube the other day and said he was ready to try OpenOffice at home. I was excited, and told him what he has to look forward to. Then he asked how big of a download it was; I said something along the lines of "Oh, no big deal. It's about 100 megs." Slightly crestfallen, he said "Over my dial-up?" Oops! I've gotta remember that not everyone is set up for broadband yet!! Anyway, I finally got around to thinking about delivering a burned CD with OpenOffice on it, but then there was all that extra space on it. Here's an opportunity to introduce a bunch of different open source programs all at once. Some folks from the Milwaukee Linux Users Group had done something like this at UW-Milwaukee a year or so ago; that is, put together a CDs worth of programs that run on Windows to give people a taste of the open source life. Today, it finally occurred to me that I'd seen actual projects like this at Sourceforge too, but I couldn't remember what the project's name was. A little bit of Googling (and some navigational voodoo) got me to this article by Mike Hillyer (hey Mike, trying to use the Open Source subject archive to find this article generates this WordPress error message: Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /home/www/openwin/html/mike/wordpress/wp-includes/classes.php on line 629). So my friend will get a late present this year, TheOpenCD. It seems really cool, and should solve my friend's problem. If you know someone like him, I recommend it. 5:35:51 PM    comment []