This is a website by M. Fioretti, freelance author specialized in Free as in Freedom software and digital rights issues, co-author of the Open Government book and board member of the Free Knowledge Institute. I regularly write about digital rights and other, more or less related topics at the Stop!, which you are all invited to visit, of course.

What you will find here

This other website (which you can support as explained here) is a place where I plan to slowly collect in a readable, easily usable format a lot of tips and tricks that I have discovered myself or read on some mailing lists over the years about configuration, automation and performance optimization of Linux, OpenOffice and other Free Software.

All these programs are very powerful and getting the most out of them is much easier and much less intimidating (even when it involves the command line! Really!) than most newbies may think. You only have to find the right information in the right format, and this is exactly what I hope to provide here.

Initially, most of the material will be about tricks to make more efficient, through Free Software, activities like email filtering and archival, backups, automatic generation of office documents or OpenOffice usage. I will often talk about using scripts and the command line because this remains the most powerful and versatile way to get certain things done with a computer, but will do my best to explain it in the clearest possible way, so don’t be scared.

However, if there is something you would like to do with Free Software on your computer but don’t know how, just let me know and I will try to write about it.

Unless otherwise stated, all the software source code on this website is licensed under the GPL version 2 and all the content is available under a GNU FDL license. Please add at least a link to the original source when you reuse this material.

Contact information

I always welcome feedback and requests for specific tricks. Just send me an email at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

Enjoy!

Marco