Summersault, LLC is a small website development firm based in Richmond, Indiana, and we provide web hosting and co-location services for our clients. We seek to hire a qualified UNIX system administrator and technical support representative to manage and secure our hosting infrastructure, resolve technical support requests from clients, while incorporating a passion for Summersault’s particular mission and vision.

I know what most of you are thinking What is Mono? Well...

"Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications." - http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

What this allows you to do is run programs written in the various languages that are part of the .Net package and run them in a non-Windows environment. I have the link to download the package and I also went step by step on how to install it on any Linux distribution on my website threethirty.us. If anyone would like me to repost that here I have no problem doing so.

Tagging update: Ho Hum.

As a a power user of Thunderbird 1.5, I evaluated the first beta release of Thunderbird 2.0 today. I was most looking forward to better tagging. More than five tags are now allowed, but the use the implementation is not compelling. First, you can't easily add multiple tags at the same time, like you can with del.icio.us. This makes the use of tagging slower than it needs to be. Second, there is no visible keyboard shortcut to add a tag to a message, beyond the first 10 defined. Finally, tagging simply doesn't scale well this way. As you can see in the screenshot, Thunderbird just keeps adding new tags to a linear list, which will eventually start to scroll of the screen. Unwieldy.

I was disappointed that Realplayer 10 wouldn't play this RealAudio stream I made several years ago, using official Real-branded tools as I recall. Instead, the message returned is:

The content you are trying to play uses an audio codec that is obsolete and no longer supported. Please contact the content provider about using a supported codec.

It appears Real quit supporting their own format. However, the open source totem player had no problem with it.

Thanks to Ray Ontko and Ubuntu, we now have dozens of CDs with open source software to give away.

These CDs not only contain great software for free, but they are multi-functional. You can:

• Install open source software for Windows, including OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird.
  
• Boot directly into a memory test program, to confirm if you have any bad memory.
  
• Easily boot directly off the cd into a completely functional Ubuntu Linux desktop. This is an easy and risk-free way to evaluate Linux-- your hard drive will not be touched.
  
• Finally, you can use the CD to install Linux to your hard drive if you like it, possibly alongside or replacing Windows.

If you'd like one of these CDs and live around Wayne County, Indiana, contact Mark Stosberg to get one.

If you live elsewhere, you can contact Ubuntu directly, and they'll mail CDs to you.

I recently gave a presentation about the culture and values of open source at the Richmond Church of the Brethren.

I roughly covered the following bullet points, and have presented them here with some links to provide some context about what I might have been talking about.

The people behind Lindows, and now known as Linspire, have come out with a free community project they have called Freespire. Freespire Beta 1 Build 0.0.69 as they call it the first operating system with the freedom of choice. It is targeted at beginning computer users. It is almost a clone of Linspire, and even bundles its CNR (Click n Run) software in there, as well as bundling proprietary codecs and drivers.

You can see the install here: http://osvids.com/vids/0006/vid_0006.html

As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half.

Over at the Summersault blog, I've posted five tips to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.

Google has released Picasa for Linux. Picasa is a free photo management and light editing tool comparable to iPhoto or Digikam. Previously it was only supported on Windows.

The release of Picasa for Linux is significant for a number reasons. First, the lack of Picasa for Linux had been a reason to hold back on a Linux switch. Multiple people had cited cited the ease of use and the ability to make non-destructive edits. With that feature, Picasa allowed you recover the original version of a photo if you were unhappy with your changes for any reason.