Linux | Steve Woods

Croatia: President supports open source

24/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Croatian President Ivo Josipović. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
What Croatian President Ivo Josipović has done would be akin to Elizabeth II supporting the work of the UK LUGs, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site.

Ivo Josipović is providing support to a conference organised by Croatia’s 2 free and open source advocacy groups, the Croatian Linux User Group (Hrvatska Udruga Linux Korisnika, HULK) and the Croatian Association for Open Systems (HrOpen) and has accepted the groups’ invitation to become honorary patron of the the event – the 2013 Croatian Linux Users’ Convention (CLUC) to be held in Zagreb from 15th to 17th May.

HULK and HrOpen met the president in Zagreb on 21 January. “We briefed President Josipović on the benefits of using open standards and the use of free and open source software”, explains Ivan Gustin, HULK’s chairman. “He appreciates our activities and efforts, especially in getting this type of software accepted by Croatia’s public sector.”

HULK is an association promoting the use of open standards and open source solutions. It represents both professional and amateur users and developers of free and open source software. HrOpen, whose members include several of Croatia’s universities, promotes and encourages the development of open IT systems and an open internet in Croatia.
rms coming to Bath

19/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics

Richard Stallman – the conscience of the free software movement
Richard Stallman, also known as rms, the Founder and President of the Free Software Foundation and often described as the conscience of the free software movement, will be giving at talk entitled “Copyright vs Community” at 6.00 pm on Thursday 21st March at the University of Bath as part of the 2013 Bath Digital Festival.

Admission is free, but booking is essential. More details are available on the Bath Digital Festival site, which, for those unfamiliar with his decades of work in the field of software and freedoms of various kinds, also has potted biography of rms.
Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview due next week

17/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

There’ll be a further foretaste of the Ubuntu OS for smartphones with effect from 21st February according to a report on German IT news website Heise since Ubuntu developer Canonical wants to publish its Touch Developer Preview of the mobile operating system then. It is aimed at developers so they can test their applocations with it, as well as users who like to experiment. Besides images for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and LG Nexus 4 smartphones, Canonical also wants to publish the sources with which the operating system can be ported to other smartphones.

An Ubuntu for smartphones wiki page is already online, but will only be filled with additional content on 21st February. Anyone visiting the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona from 25th February can also see the Ubuntu OS on smartphones at the Canonical stand (81D30) in Hall 8.1.

Ubuntu: coming to a smartphone near you soon

Using Ubuntu for smartphones is heavily based on swipe gestures and dispenses with the usual Android home, back and menu buttons. The final version is provisionally scheduled to ship in the autumn, as was recently announced by Canonical’s founder Mark Shuttleworth.
Control Impress presentations from an Android phone

04/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones.

Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth, according to a presentation given by LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels over the last weekend.
The long tail of LibreOffice

10/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.

You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.

The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE, RedHat and Canonical, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.

The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).
Microsoft burgled; nothing of value stolen

09/01/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

It’s long been known that Microsoft keeps an eye on its competitors, such as open source. As far back as 2006, its open source laboratory at Redmond housed more than 300 servers collectively running more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions. That facility was in those days run a team of senior-level programmers and system administrators, some of whom were architects of popular Linux distributions or authors of well-regarded books. Doubtless very little has changed.

It also keeps tabs on Apple and develops applications for Apple’s products at its research and development centre in Mountain View.

Courtesy of The Guardian, I was made aware of a recent burglary at Microsoft’s research and development centre.

Palo Alto Daily Post report of the incident

As can be seen, nothing of value was taken. 🙂 By far the most interesting part is that no MS products at all were purloined (was the thief a cool thief? Ed.).

IT news site The Register suggests that the thief might have hold of some unreleased Microsoft apps with his or her Apple devices.

El Reg’s piece concludes:

The office also houses Microsoft Exchange hosting servers, a less tempting target for a light-fingered thief.

Well, most servers do weigh a tad more than your average fondleslab. 🙂

Finally, this comment on The Guardian’s report raised a smile and a laugh:

According to some reports, they stole 50 Microsoft Surfaces at the same time, but they broke back in the next day to return them.
Seasonal good GNUs

28/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Politics, Tech

Once again, there’s been a bit of seasonal silliness going on courtesy of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but in a good cause, as the FSF’s news pages report that, in the run-up to Christmas, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store in Boston, Massachusetts during its “Tech for Tots” session to wish shoppers a Merry Christmas with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software’s buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from shoppers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this.

Spreading the good GNUs about free software

On its Windows 8 campaign site, the FSF criticises Windows 8 for restricting computer users’ freedom to modify and share the software on their computers. This action follows a similar one at a Windows 8 launch event in October, when the FSF made international news announcing its campaign to ask computer users to skip Windows 8 in favour of free software (posts passim).

FSF executive director John Sullivan said, “Tablets and laptops are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. These restrictions end up locking people into one company’s products, and complicating things that should be simple like moving programs from an old laptop to a new one. We invite people to join us by going to http://fsf.org/windows8 and signing the pledge to switch to a free operating system. If you already use one, help a friend or family member switch.”

Hat tip: Roy Schestowitz
E17 – there’s no rushing a good thing

23/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Slashdot reports that E17 – the latest version of the Enlightenment desktop environment – has just been released. The previous release of Enlightenment took place in 2000 – 12 years ago!

The release announcement is very sparse (apart from a list of the E17 developers):

E17 has been in development for a long time, and there have been a lot of people involved over the years. At this time, the first and final official release of E17, I think it’s important to name names and thank everyone who has been involved over the years.

(The names follow here)

That’s it! Here endeth the release announcement.

Screenshot of the new E17 release

I’ve occasionally used Enlightenment and found it to be a very lightweight, nifty desktop environment/window manager. It comes as the default desktop environment in Bodhi Linux, a distribution especially made for running on older hardware.

E17 is also known as Enlightenment 0.17 and the new release has also been codenamed the “Lucky Rubber Ducky” by its developers.
GNOME starts privacy fundraising campaign

22/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Tech
GNOME provides one of the major desktop environments for Linux and has just announced a new Friends of GNOME campaign aimed at making GNOME one of the most secure computing environments available.

To quote the GNOME Foundation:
GNOME was founded with the goal of promoting software freedom. We remain committed to the empowerment of our users and are always looking for ways to improve our software. We want people to be safe, in control, and enriched by the software they use. The GNOME community was inspired by the keynote delivered by Jacob Appelbaum on the topic of privacy at this years’ GUADEC* and was reminded of our mission. To this end, GNOME is working on a new campaign focused on privacy. Through this campaign, we aim to enhance GNOME 3 so that it offers one of the most secure computing environments available.

Proceeds from the privacy fundraising campaign will be used to fund development efforts such as:
- application containment
- enhanced disk encryption support
- Tor integration
- user control over diagnostic reporting features
- robust VPN routing
- application integration with system-wide privacy settings
- controls for how GNOME devices are identified on local networks
- anti-phishing features for Web, GNOME’s web browser
This campaign hopes to raise some $20,000.

* = GNOME Users And Developers European Conference
Linux drops support for i386 chips

15/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Tux, the Linux kernel mascot
One of the great things about Linux is that it will run on really old hardware.

However, there are some limits to this and The H Online reports that Linus Torvalds, the keeper of the Linux kernel, has integrated various changes developed by Intel employee H. Peter Anvin into the main development branch of Linux to remove support for the 386 series of processors from the Linux kernel. As a consequence, the Nx586 from Nexgen, a company that was later taken over by AMD, will also no longer be supported; design ideas for this processor were later incorporated into AMD’s K6, which continues to be supported.

These changes will stop Linux from running on the system for which Torvalds first began to develop Linux. Linus’ response to this was: “I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

Intel i836 processors, otherwise known as 80386 processors, were first introduced back in 1985 and worked at a then dazzling top speed of 33 mHZ.

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