Open Source | Steve Woods

Under 3 weeks to LibreOffice Conference

09/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic Cà Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.

The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.

The conference tracks will cover the following:
- Open Document Format (ODF);
- LibreOffice Development;
- Community Development;
- Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
- Building a Business with LibreOffice.
For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.
Linux for Munich

08/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Munich City Council has announced that a total of 2,000 Linux CDs featuring the Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distribution will be given away from next Monday in Munich’s public libraries according to the German technology news site Heise. The city’s Administration and Personnel Commission decided to take this step on 19th June 2013 because Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014 and will not be providing any more security patches for the operating system from that date onwards.

Bavaria’s capital city thus wants to make sure first and foremost that computers which have been using Windows XP do not end up as electronic waste. Furthermore, Munich wants to be regarded as an “innovative expert in the open source sector”.

Nevertheless, the council points out that it cannot provide any support at all for the chosen Linux distribution and that users should refer to for this to suppliers in the database of the local Chamber of Commerce & Industry (IHK) and ubuntuusers.de.
Canonical and Dell launching Ubuntu computers in 1,000+ shops in China

07/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The Canonical blog reports that Dell and Canonical will be launching Dell machines running Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system in more than 1,000 outlets in China in the next few weeks.

Dell and Canonical will be jointly extending a range of Dell hardware pre-loaded with the Chinese language version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS across a swathe of major Chinese cities. Sales in the original stores have proven so successful that the companies have agreed to expand to beyond 1,000 outlets.

Ubuntu’s Chinese store promotional materials

This is the latest of a series of developing partnerships in China for Ubuntu. In March 2013 it was announced that the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology had selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems (posts passim).
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release schedule announced

02/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The release schedule for Ubuntu 14.04 – the next long term support (LTS) release of this popular Linux distribution – has been published on the Ubuntu wiki.

According to the schedule, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS should be released in mid-April 2014.
LibreOffice 4.1.1 released

29/08/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.1, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the first minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.

According to the developers, the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. However, for enterprise adoptions and production environments, The Document Foundation recommends LibreOffice 4.0.5.

LibreOffice menu screen

LibreOffice 4.1.1 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC1 (for bugs fixed in 4.1.1.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC2 (for bug fixes in 4.1.1.2).
Ebook manager Calibre reaches version 1.0

25/08/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech
Ebook management software Calibre has now reached version 1.0, seven years after it was first released and a year since the last major release. Lots of new features have been added to calibre in the last year — a grid view of book covers, a new, faster database backend, the ability to convert Microsoft Word files, tools to make changes to ebooks without needing to do a full conversion, full support for font embedding and sub-setting, and many more, which are listed below. However, it should be pointed out that many of the features listed below were actually introduced during the lifetime of Calibre’s 0.9.x series.
- A grid view of book covers
- A new, faster database backend
- Virtual Libraries
- Conversion of Microsoft Word documents (.docx files)
- New metadata download sources
- Full support for font embedding
- An easy to use tool to edit the Table of Contents in ebooks
- Rewritten PDF output engine
- New “Polish books” tool that allows users to carry out various automated clean-up actions on ebooks
The developers of Calibre also believe now is an appropriate time to express their thanks to all the developers who have contributed many of the major new features listed above. An incomplete list of contributors is available here.

Calibre 1.0 is now available for download for Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Valencia completes move to LibreOffice

24/08/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that government of Spain’s autonomous region of Valencia has completed its migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite.

Under this initiative, LibreOffice has been installed on a total of 120,000 public sector workstations.

The initiative forms part of the costs savings and reduction programme undertaken by the autonomous government to reduce current ICT costs, and those of procuring proprietary software in particular. According to the government’s head of ICT, Sofia Bellés, “This action has already enabled us to save €1.3 mn. since the start of the project and will generate annual savings of €1.5 mn. in proprietary software licences starting from next year”.

Besides the financial benefits, the investment in LibreOffice entails other benefits, such as the availability of applications in Valencian and Spanish, vendor independence and the freedom to modify and adapt the software to the users’ needs.
Happy 20th birthday, Debian

16/08/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Today, 16th August 2013, marks the 20th birthday of Debian GNU/Linux, one of the Linux world’s most venerable and respected distributions.

Ian Murdock founded the Debian Project back in 1993 and since then it has turned out to be a truly free community project aiming to build a free Linux operating system – something that would have been impossible without Debian’s strong community of users and developers.

In the intervening 20 years, Debian has grown to be one of the most influential and largest open source projects, used as a base in many popular Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu.

A cake with the Debian ‘swoosh’ logo

Dubbed the “universal operating system” Debian is available in over 70 languages and supports an enormous range of computer types, with over 20,000 software packages for more than 10 different computer architectures.

I use the latest version of Debian – codenamed ‘wheezy’ – on my laptop, whilst my main desktop machine runs Mepis, a Debian derivative featuring the KDE desktop. Over the years, I’ve found Debian (and derivatives) very stable, reliable and secure.

Why not treat yourself on Debian’s birthday? Go and grab a disk image and install it! 🙂
Linux banking trojan spotted in the wild

10/08/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Until now, Linux users could sit back and relax when the talk turned to viruses, trojans and other malware: they weren’t a problem. As a result of the small numbers of Linux desktop users and the positive flipside of the the lack of Photoshop, iTunes et al., malicious software in the Linux world has been limited to two classes: demonstrations for exploits that have never been seen “in the wild” and targeted attacks on server software vulnerabilities.

This golden age for Linux users could now be drawing to a close. Security specialist Limor Kessem from RSA has written on her blog about the “Hand of Thief” banking trojan, which only attacks Linux machines and is currently being offered for sale in underground forums for U.S. $ 2,000 with free updates. It has been developed by a cybercrime team based in Russia.

The trojan’s developer claims it has been tested on 15 different Linux desktop distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian. It includes a form grabber for both HTTP and HTTPS sessions; supported browsers include Firefox, Google Chrome and several other Linux-only browsers, such as Chromium, Aurora and Iceweasel. As for desktops, the malware supports 8 different environments, including Gnome and KDE.

The malicious code also incorporates virtual machine detection designed to make it more difficult for security researchers to unpick its secrets, as well as routines to block access to security updates or access to the websites of anti-virus vendors..

“Hand of Thief” exploits no special Linux security holes; the user has to install him/herself it by e.g. by opening an email attachment without checking it first or installing it from sources other than the recommended repositories of his/her Linux distribution.
FSFE objects to claims of free software’s ‘predatory pricing’

29/07/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

In a recent anti-trust submission to the European Commission, a coalition led by Microsoft falsely claimed that the distribution of free software free of charge hurts competition. FSFE has written a letter to the European Commission’s competition authorities to refute this claim and point out that free software is critical for an open, competitive IT market.

In its letter, FSFE urges the Commission to consider the facts properly before accepting these allegations at face value. “Free software is a boon for humankind. The only thing that it is dangerous to is Microsoft’s hopelessly outdated, restrictive business model,” says FSFE president Karsten Gerloff.

In essence,the so-called “FairSearch” coalition is asking the European Commission to favour a restrictive business model over a liberal one – exactly the opposite of what competition regulators should do to achieve a fair and open market.

“Free software is not about price, it’s about liberty, a guarantee of competition and vendor independence. Asking to cripple free software in order to allow proprietary vendors to sell their locked-down systems is just absurd” says Carlo Piana, FSFE’s General Counsel. “The most substantial threat to competition in the mobile space today are software patents, and we have repeatedly urged anti-trust authorities to address this problem,” he adds.

FSFE is asking the European Commission to dismiss the “FairSearch” coalition’s unfounded claims on predatory pricing and not make them part of whatever steps it decides to take in response to the group’s filing.

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