Category: Technology

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Live from Linux

It took me a while – a learning curve, you know – but I am making this entry while dialed-up from within the Linux Mandrake 9.1 division on my home computer.

Some people make a religion out of Linux, but I’m just cheap and want to keep fresh without spending (too much) money. This machine has to last for a while, and I want to squeeze as much out of it as I can. I also like learning just enough of my computer “under the hood” to not be a passive end-user. Or perhaps a better analogy is to learn to drive a manual transmission car after years of being dragged around with an automatic transmission one.

But it begs a question, what does it mean to enjoy the fruits of a open source/GNU general licence community, and realize that the various worlds of worship in which I dwell have neither the conceptual or institutional parallel.

Put another way, what can Christians learn from the open-sourcers, at least as it applies to worship?

More on this later.

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A goodie for poor churches and broke seminarians

I rarely talk up commercial products, but a piece of open source software doesn’t count, does it?

I’m talking about the new release of OpenOffice.org — both the address of the webpage and the name of the software — which I use at home and which we use at the church to produce the newsletter and order of worship. There are five things I like about it:

(1) It is free; (2) it is easy to use; (3) in its 1.1 release, you can export to PDF, thus saving you a minimum of $65 in other software costs; (4) it makes folded-leaf booklets (including an order of worship) with all the pages in order; and (5) did I mention it was free.

I first learned about it — back when it was StarOffice, which is going commercial — from Labarum, a British military chaplaincy site that has ready-to-print service booklets.

But going from the 1.0 release to 1.1, it has ballooned in size, so unless you have a very fast connection, do as I do and find a DC-ROM distributor, and get the software mailed to you for a nominal fee. (I paid $5.95 from a vendor on Ebay, and was quite pleased. And you can share the CD-ROM.)