Open Source | Steve Woods

Debian 7.0 due for release in early May

19/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Yesterday Neil McGovern posted an email to the Debian Development announce list giving the timetable for the next release of the stable version of Debian GNU/Linux, codenamed Wheezy.

We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 – “Wheezy”.

The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata [sic], or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire). Every other RC fix that does not make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you would like included in the point release!

Status
======

From the usertags page you can see a total of:
Blockers for Wheezy bugs (2 bugs)
Planned for removal bugs (4 bugs)
Ignored for Wheezy bugs (58 bugs)

These have all been actioned/fixed. However, there are also about 17 bugs that have not yet been tagged and are not hinted. These will be actioned shortly.

Awesomeness of Wheezy
=====================

We really need some more work on http://wiki.debian.org/NewInWheezy, please help contribute! Let’s tell everyone why Wheezy will be the best release ever.

As well as this, release notes, installation guides and documentation in general, especially translations can always do with some work. Please see previous mails on these, and help if you can.

I’ve been using Wheezy on my laptop for the last couple of weeks and it’s a very stable, reliable operating system. See instructions for getting Debian if you want to use or try it too.
Open source career taster days for women

17/04/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

In conjunction with both Fossbox and Flossie, BCSWomen, the British Computer Society’s specialist women’s group, is organising 3 open source career taster days for women in London next month.

The days involved are 13th, 20th and 28th May and the sessions will run from 10.00 am to 5.00pm.

All the taster days will be held at BCS, 1st Floor, The Davidson Buidling, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA (map).

The cost will be £10.00 plus VAT (i.e. £12.00 in total) per day, but this will include lunch and refreshments.

The organisers are promoting these days as a series of three one-day workshops for women returners aimed at raising awareness of Open Source development as a dual skillset or second career.

The course will aim at building awareness and confidence and help women take some first steps either towards learning to code or to update existing skills and to learn how they might contribute to open source projects. It will also aim to raise awareness of self-training opportunities and of open source career paths and entry points.

Day 1 will include and introduction to FLOSS culture and licensing models, plus programming for Android mobile devices using MIT App Inventor.

Day 2 will comprise an introduction to open source projects and resources, as well as an introduction to Git.

Day 3 will give participants an introduction to programming with Python.

Online bookings only will be accepted and those interested are advised that places are limited.

Full details here.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
How many LibreOffice users are there?

15/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

It’s always difficult trying to work out how many users of particular software packages there are out there. Be that as it may, The Document Foundation, the body behind the open source LibreOffice suite, has made an attempt at estimating the suite’s users.

According to a report today in Le Monde Informatique, estime that the suite has 20 to 30 million users on Linux (many Linux distributions, e.g. Ubuntu and Debian, include LibreOffice as the standard office suite in their disk images. Ed.) and another 30 to 40 million users on Windows. Up to last autumn, LibreOffice had been downloaded 20 million times.
LibreOffice 3.6.6 released today

11/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The blog of The Document Foundation, the German foundation behind LibreOffice, announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6, the free and open source office suite for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is described by the Foundation as a maintenance release for the 3.6 series

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

This release is aimed at businesses and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features (those who want more advanced features can sample LibreOffice 4. Ed.). This new release is suited to the increasing number of organisations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are also available from the Extensions Centre.
WordPress Social Media widget hiding spam

11/04/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Two days ago, the Sicuri Blog reported a serious security problem with the Social Media widget for WordPress, one of the world’s most popular open source blogging platforms.

To quote:

If you are using the Social Media Widget plugin (social-media-widget), make sure to remove it immediately from your website. We discovered it is being used to inject spam into websites and it has also been removed from the WordPress Plugin repository.

This is a very popular plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It has the potential to impact a lot of websites.

The plugin has a hidden call to this URL: httx://i.aaur.net/i.php, which is used to inject “Pay Day Loan” spam into the web sites running the plugin.

The authors report that the malicious code was added only 12 days ago when version 4.0 of the plug-in was released and The H Online IT news site reports that the package had a change of maintainers back in January this year.

Besides removing this particular widget, users are advised to find another plug-in to replace it.
Debian joins OPW

09/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Programme for Women, otherwise known as OPW, in 2010. Many other FOSS organisations joined the programme in the January-April 2013 round. Bits from Debian, the official blog of the Debian Project, announced yesterday that Debian will also be joining in the next round of OPW from June-September and offering one internship.

More details about Debian’s participation in the programme can be found on Debian’s dedicated OPW page.

OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing and web development. The Debian Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects will also be offered as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If potential participants have any idea of a non-coding project and want to mentor one, please contact Debian on the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject line.

OPW works in the same way as GSoC except there’s no Google involvement. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors.

The main goal of OPW is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet Debian developers or maintainers are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don’t have to be students.

Applicants need to take the following 3 steps:
- Choose a project from this list. There are actually two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change over the next few weeks.
- Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
- Create a page on the Debian wiki with your application. Applicants may use a pseudonym, but in that case, please give Debian about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed on the Debian OPW page.
This is a repost from Bristol Wireless.
Hollyweb? Tell the W3C no thanks!

05/04/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.

These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.

However, these open standards are now under attack.

There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.

The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.

Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!

Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.

However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.

The petition page is also available in French.

I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.

This article is reposted with some minor amendments from Bristol Wireless.
2nd release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available

29/03/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

On 28th March, just one day after Document Freedom Day (posts passim) the LibreOffice team made the 2nd and final release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available for evaluation, quality assurance testing, etc.

As per usual, potential users are warned that this is a development version and it should not be installed on production machines: in other words, the developers recommend not using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. These are intended for testing purposes only.

For further information, potential users should consult the release notes.
Weak crypto keys in NetBSD

25/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

A serious error has occurred in the random number generator in free Unix derivative NetBSD, which can result in the system’s cryptographic keys being too weak and allowing them to be cracked, German IT news website Heise reports. The cause is misplaced brackets in the program code of the NetBSD kernel. The developers have made a kernel update available to preclude the problem in future. In addition, they are recommending that users of keys produced with either NetBSD 6.0 or the current version of NetBSD change these as a matter of urgency.

The programming error can result in the system producing random numbers which are not particularly random. This danger is especially great if the system is just booting as the system has very little entropy available at this time. The problem has particularly serious effects on 32 bit platforms where cryptographic keys containing only some 32 bits entropy are produced under these circumstances. The resulting 4 billion possibilities can be tried in turn. NetBSD 6.1 will remedy the error.

In particular, keys for SSH servers (which are normally produced at system start-up) are definitely affected. All SSH server keys which have been produced on NetBSD 6 systems should be changed as a matter of urgency. Since the ECDSA algorithm was first introduced with version 6, the relevant keys are very likely to be weak.

Full details of the problem can be found in this NetBSD security advisory notice.
Ubuntu Kylin is to become reference system in China

24/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

According to German IT news website Heise, the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology has selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems. The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), part of the Industry & IT Ministry, Ubuntu manufacturer Canonical and the Chinese National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) are working to adapt the Chinese Kylin variant of Ubuntu to the requirements of the Chinese markets under the aegis of the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab.

Ubuntu Kylin is to appear in April this year together with Ubuntu 13.04 with support for the input of Chinese symbols and the Chinese calendar and will integrate Chinese web services. The integration of Baidu Maps, the Chinese Amazon competitor Taobao, payment processes for Chinese banks and Chinese timetables and flight schedules is planned for subsequent versions. In addition, the WPS office suite, which is popular in China, is to be adapted for Kylin.

Ubuntu Kylin is to be widely used as the reference for a flexible, open operating system. The announcement of is part of a Chinese five year plan which should promote the use of open source software and speed up the development of an open source ecosystem.

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