Open Source | Steve Woods

LibreOffice 4.2 international bug hunting session announced

05/12/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, announced earlier today that the LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session will start on 6th December and end on 8th December. During the three days, volunteers from all over the world will test the beta of LibreOffice 4.2 to find bugs and regressions.

LibreOffice 4.2 will be released at the end of January 2014 with a large number of new features and loads of fixed bugs. See the release notes for more details. The community is working to make this major release the finest in the history of the free office suite.

In order to join the bug hunting session, volunteers should download LibreOffice 4.2 Beta 2 from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

Mentors will be available at least from 08:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC and will be reachable through IRC (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa) and the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@freedesktop.org).

Other information on the LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session can be found on the Document Foundation wiki.
Supercomputer app store being developed

02/12/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Today’s Le Monde Informatique asks how the world of high-powered computing (HPC) can be reconciled with the needs of companies as regards simulation and modelling. An American research centre is working of the creation of an app store to provide dedicated applications.

The major problem for supercomputers is that companies are not benefiting from this technology. The modelling and simulation tools based on supercomputer processing could enable companies to create and test prototypes in virtual environments. However, the licence fees required for simulating wind tunnels, furnaces, welding and other processes are expensive. Furthermore, these solutions require multi-core systems and qualified engineers to use them. The solution is to take a HPC treatment and convert it into an application.

Blue Mountain supercomputer. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is working on this via a programme called AweSim. An investment of US $ 6.5 mn. has been made by the US government and private companies such as Procter & Gamble to create an App Store. This should open at the end of the first quarter of 2014 with one application and several web-based tools. The AweSim programme has the ultimate aim of becoming a business and bringing together thousands of applications.

Reducing costs and resorting to open source tools

Tom Lange, Procter & Gamble’s Director of Modelling and Simulation states that these solutions will serve as the group’s logistics. He explains that traditionally, “the software industry is based on the sale of licences which can cost $50,000 dollars per year for an HPC application. This price is beyond the reach of small businesses which are not interested in temporary use”.

AweSim will use open source HPC tools in its applications and is working on partnerships with major HPC software suppliers to make some of their solutions available in the form of applications. OCS is also working on a development kit so that other centres with supercomputers can supply applications. Programme Director Alan Chalker explains how this may work. A vehicle manufacturer wants to produce a solution to reduce the wind resistance of an 18 wheel truck. He will be able to download a CAD file, refine some parameter, click to launch it and use 128 cores out of the OCS supercomputer’s 8,500. The final cost will be US $200-500 for one hour of processing by over 6,000 CPUs. It will take 48 hours to simulate the process and report the results. A test in an actual wind tunnel can cost up to US $100,000.
Greens/EFA urge greater FOSS use in European Parliament

02/12/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s open source public sector news website, reports today that the European Parliament’s Greens/EFA Group is urging the European Parliament to make an earnest attempt to using free and open source software. In a letter to EP President Martin Schulz (PDF), which was released last week Friday, the group links free software and open standards to the Parliament’s transparency obligations.

The text of the letter is reproduced below.

Sir,

Thank you very much for your reply to our letter of 10 July 2013 regarding Free Software and Open Standards in the European Parliament, further to the Decision on discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget of the European Union for the financial years 2010 and 2011.

We are very happy to have received the first, and ground-breaking, report on the matter, but we kindly remind you to ensure that the study is completed as well, as requested in the European Parliament resolutions of 10 May 2012 and 17 April 2013, on Parliament’s obligations, in particular under Rule 103 of its Rules of Procedure, with regard to Free Software and Open Standards.

We have commissioned a second opinion on the report to better understand how we can contribute to the Parliament’s efforts in this field. Please find it attached. The opinion concludes that a study on Parliament’s transparency obligations under Rule 103 vis-à-vis its ICT-policies would “result in recommendations to what extent the use of FOSS and open standards is critical to adhere to these principles as a whole”.

We believe that if, as the opinion suggests, these recommendations were to follow from the Rules of Procedure, it would serve the Parliament well to develop them.

Thank you for taking immediate action to remedy the situation.

Yours faithfully,

(signed)
Rebecca Harms

(signed)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Co-Presidents
Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament

No political organisation seems to be complete without a modicum of hypocrisy. In this instance, despite the Greens/EFA’s avowed espousal of free and open source software and open standards, readers may be interested to know that the PDF version of the letter was produced using the proprietary Nitro Pro PDF production software, which runs exclusively on the Windows operating system. 😉
Polish school finds Ubuntu PCs “faster and cheaper”

27/11/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that the Zolnierzy Sybiru high school in the Polish city of Lubawka has converted 11 of its PCs to run Ubuntu Linux.

The 11 machines are shared by 55 pupils and the conversion took place at the instigation of one of the school’s teachers.

The switch has made the PCs run faster and there have been savings on Windows and other proprietary software licences too, according to FWiOO, the Polish foundation for Free and Open Source Software.

The 11 PCs in question were bought in 2005 with funds from the Ministry of Education and previously ran Windows XP. In September the PCs were converted Ubuntu Linux.

In September a brief report (Polish) summarising the high school’s switch to Ubuntu Linux was published.

The pupils store their data in a free cloud solution offered by Canonical, the firm behind Ubuntu Linux.

“By using Ubuntu, these computers run faster and more reliably”, FWiOO notes.
Linux: suitable for business and personal use

11/11/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

The Netherlands’ Nationaal Cyber Security Centrum (NCSC), part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, has recently published a fact sheet (PDF) about Microsoft’s impending withdrawal of support for its ancient Windows XP operating system.

The fact sheet urges users to switch to more modern operating systems as alternatives, but also says some interesting things about Linux, for example:

Newer versions of Windows, such as Windows 7 are 8, are still well supported. The same is true of Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu and Red Hat.

When it comes to operating system updates and suitable uses for operating systems, the NCSC remarks as follows:

In addition to the newer versions of Windows, there are other operating systems which are also regularly provided with updates. There are various Linux distributions which are suitable for personal and business use. Ubuntu and Red Hat are two popular examples of these. It is also possible to replace the computer itself, or you could also choose a computer with a Mac OS X operating system. These are supplied and supported by Apple. Even older versions of Mac OS X or Linux-based systems reach the “end of life” status from time to time. It is therefore also important for users of these operating systems to use a current version.

The NCSC’s main target groups for this working paper are the Netherlands’ ministries, national government councils and service organisations, Joinup reports.
LibreOffice 4.1.3 released

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) blog announced earlier today that LibreOffice 4.1.3 has been released for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features for proprietary and legacy file formats.

According to TDF, the new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. Nevertheless, for enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests the use of LibreOffice 4.0.6, which is supported by certified professionals.

The release of LibreOffice 4.1.3 is taking place just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany, where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced LibreOffice developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 is available for immediate download. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.3.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.3.2).
Jamaica adopts GNU Health

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.

This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.

After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.

GNU Health provides the following functionality:
- Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
- Hospital Information System;
- Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, GNU Health has won the Best Project of Social Benefit award from the Free Software Foundation, amongst other international awards.
Take care when updating Ubuntu

24/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

According to German technology news website Heise, news is emerging on discussion and support forums of graphics problems when updating from Ubuntu 13.04 to the latest version – Ubuntu 13.10. Users are reporting graphics problems in the form of a black screen. The problem most affects systems with AMD graphics cards if the proprietary AMD driver (fglrx) is used. However, additional package sources can also cause problems.

Anyone wishing to update their current Ubuntu 13.04 installation to the latest 13.10 version, should first check whether they are using proprietary graphics drivers and uninstall them if necessary. This can be done in the System/Software & Updates settings under the “Additional Drivers” tab. Uncheck the Nvidia or AMD driver respectively there and pick the X.Org-X-Server driver instead and then reboot.

Some reports of problems also indicate that there can be problems with the update if individual components of the graphics stack don’t originate from the standard Ubuntu repositories. If you have included PPAs such as Xorg-edgers with the latest X.org code or Ubuntu Unity with the current developer version of the Unity desktop, you should remove these repositories with the ppa-purge tool, which can be installed from the software centre. A reboot before the upgrade is also recommended here to check that everything is working.
Calibre 1.7 released

22/10/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Media, Open Source, Tech
Version 1.7 of Calibre, the cross-platform e-book reader and management software, was released on 18th October, Softpedia reports.

Calibre’s features include:
- Library management;
- E-book conversion;
- Syncing to e-book reader devices;
- Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form;
- Comprehensive e-book viewer;
- Content server for online access to your book collection.
Calibre running on the KDE desktop under Linux

A complete list of changes since the last version release can be found in Calibre’s release announcement.

The new version is available for download for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.
Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region to save €2 mn. with OpenOffice

15/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

The administration of the Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region will switch to the open source OpenOffice productivity suite, Joinup reports. It thus hopes to save some €2 mn. euro on the licences that it would have spent for updating the ubiquitous MS Office suite. To prepare the migration, a three-month pilot involving 300 workstations has started at the region’s Directorate-General for Agriculture; all other regional departments will switch over to OpenOffice by the end of 2014. The region employs some 3,545 office staff.

The region is currently using a ten year-old version of MS Office. Instead of spending €2 mn. to upgrade 3,200 proprietary licences that are due to expire next year, the province decided to switch to OpenOffice which “offers basically the same functionality”.

The region has set aside a budget of €220,000 for the switch to OpenOffice; this budget includes a staff training element.

Reducing costs and resorting to open source tools

Posts navigation