Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

CASE president Darrell Burkey has travelled north to attend Linux Conf Australia 2011, a large and very popular IT event.

“linux.conf.au (lca) is a conference about Open Source Software, including Linux. It brings together the world’s community of Linux and open source enthusiasts who make considerable contributions to open source software.”

Flying to the recently flooded city of Brisbane for the full event we have no doubt we’ll come away with a treasure trove of information, new contacts and new ideas we can apply to ICT in community-service sector. We use a wide range of Open Source solutions in our day-to-day operations and strive to stay abreast with developments in this fast moving and very exciting industry. Friends of CASE have also been in attendance at the conference, Pia Waugh has been tweeting comprehensively as usual and Andrew Tridgell has given a presentation on coffee and Linux. Mark Pesce, who we heard from and were impressed by at Connecting Up 2009, also a keynote speaker at lca2011, has been keeping up quality coverage via his Twitter feed here.

For more information about the event please check out the official page. We’ll provide further coverage here as we put the material together!

Chris Smart, Australian Linux guru, has started writing for Linux Magazine. This week he’s looking at the Linux graphical user interface “KDE”.

“KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and was first released in 1998 by Matthias Ettrich, who was a student at the time. Ettrich saw a need for the Unix world to have a unified desktop environment which had a consistent look and feel, rather than just multiple applications looking and behaving however they wanted to…Now in its 11th year, KDE has come a long way in a short amount of time and recently celebrated the release of version 4.0, marking a turning point in the development of the project…”

If you’ve been thinking about giving Linux a shot, maybe the new KDE will give you the confidence to go ahead with it. Chris also runs Make The Move, kind of like an Apple version of “Make the Switch”, only Chris’s solution is thousands of dollars cheaper!
Read his article “KDE 4: The Komplete Desktop?” here.