Today I thought I might suggest a little bit of summer reading, now the good weather has finally arrived in the UK! Some are a little off the beaten track, with less explicit links to free software; all of them, in my opinion, will be of interest to anybody visiting this website. So, read the list, pay a visit to Amazon and grab the nearest bottle of sun cream!
If you’re a GNOME user I expect you’re more than familiar with the panels that come as standard with your desktop; if you use openSUSE you’re probably also familiar with the slab menu that Novell have developed. There are, however, several other applications out there that can extend and beautify your Gnome panels.
JR: Hey Matthew, to start if you could introduce yourself and tell us a bit about OpenedHand.
MA: Hi. I’m a 32 year old father, husband, free software hacker and boss man of OpenedHand. I live in London, UK. Beyond making Linux better on devices my other interests include modern design, comics (a big fan of the likes of Ed Brubaker, Alan Moore, etc.) and table tennis (current office champion—first rule of OpenedHand: let the boss win at ping-pong). I’m the author of various pieces of free software, including Matchbox, Xephyr and most recently Clutter.
Jon: Hey Havoc, to start if you could introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a bit about your past work?
Havoc I got into free software after reading the GNU Manifesto, which I found inside Emacs on the school servers in college. I worked on Debian documentation for a while (my computer at the time was too underpowered to compile software).
As I learned to program I wrote a variety of useless and not-really-working applications, and contributed some of the more misguided bits of the original GNOME 1.0 libraries. After a couple years of messing around I had some kind of clue and Red Hat hired me to work on GNOME.
