Where do we go?

I've been very busy for the past three months, 
continuing to try to get it all together, so the blog has taken the 
back seat.

So, what is the objective? Actually, to get to a status in which I can do what I want to do and still make enough money to make doing what I want to do possible.

So, rather than posting profound thoughts and insights on how to solve world hunger, I think my time here is best spent just passing on the simple little things I learn from life on a daily basis, probably mostly related to Linux and software and computers and technology.

So, despite my earlier ambitions of using this for my philosophical exercises (although that may occur from time to time), I now think it will just be pure geek stuff. So those of you who may have bookmarked it for the former purpose may wish to nuke your bookmarks, as the rest will be boring techie stuff.

For example:

=========== Scribus Installation ===========

Today I was encouraged to finally dabble a toe in the pool of Desktop Publishing (DTP). A colleague had sent me a document in .pub format, the proprietary Microsoft publisher format.

Being defiant of things proprietary I found

     www.scribus.net

Scribus is a Free Software Desktop Publishing program for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Scribus does not support importing Microsoft Publisher documents. There are no current plans to add support for it. The reasons are here:

     http://www.scribus.net/index.php?name=FAQ&id_cat=3#q19

I first tried installing with YaST on SuSE 10.2, but it failed with a missing module:

     scribus: symbol lookup error: scribus: undefined symbol: art_free

I googled the error and found

     http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2007-03/msg05712.php

which says:

     Fixed the problem by updating libart_lgpl2

I then went to YaST software updater and entered

      libart

and updated all the installed modules. I then ran scribus and it runs a charm. No problem.

Meanwhile, I had also installed it on Windows on VMWare on Linux, again no problem.

I'll play with it over the next few days, but in the meantime it seems like a very robust alternative to proprietary DTP.

Sweet.