increased use of FOSS software

Recently some of the projects I have been responsible for have required the use of some specialist packages. I am proud to say that I have taken the FOSS path for many of these.

The School Magazine

Back in 2003 I was responsible for the school magazine, I completed it without the use of a dedicated Desktop Publishing Package (DTP) accepting content from people in most formats and publishing to PDF for export to the publisher. It was a challenging process and I remember swearing I would never do it again.

Bring on 2007 and guess what? - I have chosen to do the magazine again. This time I feel I am a little more prepared.

This time I will be making use of Scribus. I believe I have researched this well and feel it will meet our needs. My only concern is document size, but the main page of Scribus website is promoting the fact a book was published using it so I feel relatively confident.

I have read reviews, gone through the introductory tutorial (easy – no sweat!) and considered the features I will require and read up on them. Since then I have produced a document, made some page masters and applied it across the document with success. I believe that it is a mature package that will meet my needs. It will even support PSD (Photoshop Documents), which for me is a good thing as I have not been confident enough to make the switch to the GIMP.

Local Show IT Competition

My Local show introduced an IT Competition for people to show off their skills in Information Technology. It is called “OnWithTheShowThisIsIT”. Peter Ruwoldt was one of the key instigators of this competition.

This year I was placed in charge of the website and chose to overhaul the layout of the site (content remained unchanged). As a part of this process I decided to make use of NVU for making the pages, notepad++ for tidying up the code and Filezilla for uploading the site.

NVU was okay, although I wasn’t overly happy with the code it produced. It tended to be messy and had a weird way of dealing with tables. Originally I also made use of its upload feature, however to ensure I got the site structure that I wanted I ended up uploading manually with Filezilla. I would suggest that NVU still has a way to go before it is a fully functional package, it tended to crash occasionally also. Now that I have all my templates made up, it is a relatively easy tool to use.

Year 8 Course

Year 8 is the first year of High School in our State. This year I will be teaching it for the first time in my school. Previously it has been handled by other teachers. I have decided to overhaul the course and only use FOSS.

At this stage I can not see why it wouldn’t be possible. The concepts required are fairly generic and it shouldn’t be difficult to apply the skills in a different application.

At this stage the plan is to make use of Open Office, Paint.NET(I am a big fan of this project), Scribus and Firefox.

Many concepts do not require an application so these should be the only applications that I require. For example teaching the students about Internet safety will not require the students to use any software other than a word processor.

My other plan is to convince the new Art teacher to make use ok Inkscape…. I might be pushing it a bit on that…. But I can only try ;-)