Jim Hall

5850 points

Minnesota

Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award People's Choice Award 2018 Author Linux Contributor Club

Authored Content

Make websites more readable with a shell script

Calculate the contrast ratio between your website's text and background to make sure your site is easy to read.

What Return of the Jedi taught me about open leadership

What would you advise someone preparing to rule the galaxy?

Why it matters that Microsoft released old versions of MS-DOS as open source

Microsoft's release of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 on GitHub adopts an open source license that's compatible with GNU GPL.

6 open source tools for writing a book

These versatile, free tools are all you need to write, edit, and produce your own books.

A new presciption for open source health care

A gawk script to convert smart quotes

Plus, get our awk cheat sheet.

Extracting and displaying data with awk

Get our awk cheat sheet.

Authored Comments

Jim Hall

4 Oct 2019

What's in an open source name?

I'll add another one:

FreeDOS is so named because it is a free version of the DOS operating system. It was first named PD-DOS because it originally was made up of a lot of Public Domain utilities. Also, PD-DOS was a play on other DOS names, like Microsoft's MS-DOS and Digital Research's DR-DOS and IBM's PC-DOS.

The name DOS means Disk Operating System. As in floppy disks, originally of the 5 1/4" 360 kilobytes variety.

Jim Hall

10 Sep 2019

Get your business up and running with these open source tools

Good to know! I'm very new to Scribus - but it's very easy to pick up.