Equitas IT Solutions

resources

We've gathered a wealth of experience through the years and have collated some of it here in a series of guides, help documents and How-tos. There's also some downloadable resources in the shape of regular presentations given at various free software events over the years.

Note that unless noted otherwise, these are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence.

The beginners section is mostly introduction guides and articles. There is also material written with beginners in mind in the how-to section.

Downloads

The following are documents and other resources that you may find helpful in choosing or using free software.

Unless noted otherwise all these are released under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence. Where possible documents are available as both ODP (OpenOffice.org) and PDF files

Presentations

foss in use

This presentation was given by Ryan at the FOSSbox free software day on 28 Nov 2008 in London. It talks about using free software in the real world at a National UK charity Contact a Family whom I was working for at the time. It also referenced a case study which also available here.

• Target audience: non-techie VCS users and managers
• Presentation: ODP (117KB), PDF (304KB)
• Case Study : PDF (276KB)
  • Note that the case study is Copyright (c) Contact a Family and is used with permission here. It is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence.

setting up a linux server

This presentation was given by Ryan at the SocialSource free software day, Nov 2005 in London. It describes the process and discussion required when considering deploying a server based upon GNU/Linux.

• Target audience: "accidental-techie" VCS users and those who support the IT in their organisation but it is not their primary function.

• Presentation : ODP (34KB), PDF (33KB)

Software additions

Ktuberling playgrounds

Ktuberling, also known as the increasingly inappropriate "Potato Guy" is a popular piece of free software aimed at children. Less of a structured game and more of a fun pastime it presents the user with a background (or playground) with various objects they can place on it to make a picture. Originally it came with a single background of a potato guy (hence the name) with eyes, mouths, hats etc. to place on him.

Recent version increased the range and scope of the playgrounds so that Ktuberling itself was more akin to the "Fuzzy felt" range of children's games than "Mr Potato Head".

Following prompting (read "nagging") from my own children I recently designed two new playgrounds for it. I've submitted them to the KDE project but they won't make it into the very next version (4.4) due to bad timing on my part.

In the meantime, I'm making them available here if you want to try them out. These playgrounds are released under the same licence as Ktuberling itself, the GNU General Public Licence v2.0

To install them, unpack these archives into the same directory your distro stores the other playgrounds. On my Debian-based systems this is /usr/share/kde4/apps/ktuberling/pics

• Robot workshop: Build your own robot from the various parts. Download archive (.tgz 40kb)

  

• Butterflies: Make a butterfly from the colourful bodies, wings and shapes available. Download archive (.tgz 18kb)