Open Source | Steve Woods

Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the northern Greek Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki is in the process of installing the cross-platform LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

According to the press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money (and getting increasingly shorter thereof in many cases. Ed.), to say the least, this is a very smart move.

GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.
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.
Complex Text Layout in LibreOffice

05/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech
I’m currently translating a tender document from a North African Arabic-speaking country. Even though the source language of the translation is French, when I first opened the file in LibreOffice, my office suite of choice, I noticed that the cursor was responding back to front and realised immediately this was going to slow down my progress with the job unless it was sorted out.

Fortunately, a little bit of research and a couple of configuration tweaks soon had it sorted out. Firstly, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai come under what LibreOffice describes as Complex Text Layout (CTL) languages.

To deal with CTL languages, these first have to be enabled in LibreOffice under Tools > Options > Language Settings.

That done, the LibreOffice Help wiki has instructions for working with CTL.
Currently, LibreOffice supports Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic as CTL languages.

If you select the text flow from right to left, embedded Western text still runs from left to right. The cursor responds to the arrow keys in that Right Arrow moves it “to the text end” and Left Arrow “to the text start”.

You can change the text writing direction directly be pressing one of the following keys:
- Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Right Shift Key – switch to right-to-left text entry
- Ctrl+Shift+A or Ctrl+Left Shift Key – switch to left-to-right text entry
- The modifier-only key combinations only work when CTL support is enabled.
Once CTL is enabled, LibreOffice also adds a couple of change text direction icons to the text formatting toolbar too.

Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons
Microsoft deal protested by Egyptian openistas

02/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports.

On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian Prime Minister, announced that the Cabinet had concluded a deal with Microsoft for the next 4 tax years to buy and maintain licensed software worth nearly $44 mn. for the government.

“What the government is buying is the licence to use software and not new [software],” says Ali Shaath, co-founder of the Egyptian Association for Free and Open Software and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation.

The activists’ main contention with the deal is that Microsoft products bought by the government are imported, expensive and their code source is usually closed and protected by rigid copyright rules which do not allow for knowledge sharing and generation. Meanwhile, an alternative lies with locally conceived, less expensive software, whose open code source enables copying, sharing and building more software.

“We’re talking about the same computers, the same software, no extra development and no extra training,” Shaath said, explaining that the free and open software alternative will cost zero in comparison since its licences are free of charge and its only cost is derived from customisation and training.

The activists believe that free and open software developers is could readily provide the software the government needs. A case in point was the portal developed with free and open software to provide voters with information ahead of the March 2011 referendum.

NB: this post was originally published on Bristol Wireless.
Czech libraries protect and show historic documents with open source

31/12/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

In August 2002 a week of heavy rains in central Europe caused serious flooding, resulting damage running to billions of euros in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia.

Amongst the items damaged were a large number of books in the Czech Republic’s archives and libraries. While the damaged documents were being recovered, a decision was taken to make digital copies publicly accessible.

Joinup, the EU’s open source news website now reports that libraries in the Czech Republic are sharing and re-using a specialised open source content management system, Kramerius, to preserve historic documents and make them available online. Kramerius was developed with the support of the Library of the Academy of Sciences, the National Library (both in Prague), and the Moravian Library in Brno.

Kramerius is intended for use for digitised library collections, monographs and periodicals. It can also be used for maps, musical scores and illustrations and to provide access to selections of documents, articles and chapters.

In addition, Kramerius is part of a larger Czech Digital Library Project which aims to digitise the greater part of the resources of the National Library and the Moravian Library and thus to help to preserve them and make them accessible for future generations. It is hoped that over 50 million pages, or approximately 300 thousand volumes will be digitised by 2019.

The Czech Digital Library project has a budget of CZK 20 million (about €800,000) over the next 3 years.

As a matter of course, the Kramerius source code is also available online.

The software itself is named after Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), who was a Czech writer, journalist and publisher. At a time when there was only a single Czech newspaper in print, Kramerius started his own paper and, following its commercial success, established a printing shop and publishing house for Czech language works. The majority of Czech language books were published by his publishing house at that time. Kramerius himself wrote about 80 books.

There’s also an English language summary (PDF) of the Kramerius project available.
TDF @ end of 2012

24/12/2012 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

As the year draws to a close, Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite (and a great replacement for the overpriced, bloated MS Office. Ed., has posted the message below to the TDF discussion mailing list under the subject line ‘TDF @ End of 2012’.

Perhaps the best news is towards the end: the appointment of the TDF’s first paid employee, Florian Effenberger.

This is a very long message, although I have tried to summarize in a single text what we – members, developers, volunteers, native language communities, advocates and supporters – have achieved during 2012. I am sure I forgot some achievements, because they have been too many.

TDF has started 2012 with a hackers community of 379 individuals, mostly volunteers, which has continued to grow steadily – month after month – and has now reached the amazing figure of 567 developers (320 active during the last 12 months, which means that LibreOffice is the third largest open source desktop software project after Chrome and Firefox).

In early 2012, The Document Foundation – an truly community based independent organization – has been registered in Berlin, under the form of a German Stiftung (supervised by the German authorities). The oldest German Stiftung dates back to 1509, and over 250 of them have existed for over 500 years (so, stability is not an issue).

Once established, The Document Foundation has immediately attracted additional sponsors and supporters. Intel and Lanedo have joined the Advisory Board, while Project LiMux (City of Munich) and MIMO (the French Government organization responsible for the migration to FOSS) are actively supporting the project.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice role inside the free software ecosystem have been recognized by the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a formal letter to the members of the French government.

In 2012, The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 3.4.5, LibreOffice 3.5, LibreOffice 3.5.1, LibreOffice 3.4.6, LibreOffice 3.5.2, LibreOffice 3.5.3, LibreOffice 3.5.4, LibreOffice 3.5.5, LibreOffice 3.6, LibreOffice 3.5.6, LibreOffice 3.6.1, LibreOffice 3.6.2, LibreOffice 3.5.7 and LibreOffice 3.6.3.

In addition, the hackers community has started working on LibreOffice 4.0, which is already at Beta 2 and will be announced in February 2013. LibreOffice 4.0 will be a milestone release, and the first of a new generation of free office suites.

In order to further improve the quality of LibreOffice 3.5, 3.6 and 4, the QA community has organized several bug hunting sessions during 2012 and a full bug hunting marathon in December 2012 (with over 500 bugs chased during a full week of tests).

LibreOffice community has met at FOSDEM in Brussels, at LinuxTag in Berlin, at LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, and in Hamburg and Munich for TDF Hackfests. In addition, local hackfests have been organized in the Netherlands and Brazil, and LibreOffice volunteers have attended several local events around the world.

In February 2012, TDF has launched LibreOffice Ask page, and the Windows version of LibreOffice has been made available for downloads from the Intel AppUp Center targeted to mobile PC and UltraBook owners.

In September 2012, TDF has joined the OASIS Consortium (Organisation for the Advancement of Standards in Information Society (OASIS). At the end of the same month, the new Membership Committee has been elected by TDF members: five members – Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Štrba (Chairman), Eike Rathke, Cor Nouws and Jean Weber – and two deputies – Simon Phipps and Leif Lodahl.

LibreOffice has been awarded the title of Free Office Suite of the Year 2011 by LinuxQuestions, and Best Office Suite 2012 by Linux Journal (in both cases, getting over 70% of the votes). In Brazil, LibreOffice has received the “Technology For Citizens Award” from Guarulhos City.

During 2012, many private and public organization have announced the migration of their desktop office suite to LibreOffice: several French ministries (500,000 desktops), city of Munich in Germany (15,000 desktops), the Capital Region of Denmark, Vieira do Minho in Portugal, Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, Regione Umbria, Provincia di Milano and Provincia di Bolzano in Italy, and the Public Library System of Chicago

The Document Foundation has also announced the Certification Program for LibreOffice, and the first group of certified developers. In 2013, the program will be extended to professionals active in migrations and trainings, and later to L1 and L2 support.

The last, and in my opinion the best news of 2012, waits TDF under the Xmas tree: in fact, just a few days before Xmas TDF has hired the first employee, to manage the infrastructure and take care of administrative tasks (which, thanks to the extremely fast growth of the project, are now a full time task): Florian Effenberger, who is already popular inside the project for his volunteer work.

The Board of Directors – with the obvious exception of Florian – has unanimously chosen him for infrastructure and administrative tasks, as he is already familiar with both, being the architect behind the entire infrastructure and the person who has been talking with the authorities during the process of putting in place The Document Foundation.

Florian Effenberger has been active inside the OOo project from 2004 to 2010, as infrastructure and then marketing lead, and has been a founder of TDF. During all these years he has put an incredible amount of hours – of his personal time – behind free software, OOo and LibreOffice.

From now on, Florian will devote his working hours to TDF, and will add the usual amount of volunteer hours for his BoD duties (which must be volunteer based, according to our statutes).

Florian Effenberger is going to be a tremendous asset for TDF, because he knows perfectly our ecosystem, he is a true free software advocate, and he is knowledgeable not only on administration and infrastructure but also on marketing.

Looking at 2013 and beyond, The Document Foundation is ready to face every challenge, and win over the competition not only by providing a better product but also by creating a different and better ecosystem for free office suites.

So far, TDF has been an exciting journey, and I am sure that what has happened is just the first chapter of a long and successful history.

Best wishes to all of you. Ciao, Italo

That’s a very impressive year’s work, TDF. What will you do in 2013?
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.
Recommended browser plug-in: TinEye

18/12/2012 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Have you ever come across an image online and wonder if you’ve ever seen it before?

If so, the browser plug-in I’m recommending today is for you: the TinEye reverse image search plug-in, which is available for the Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Safari, Opera & Internet Explorer web browsers. The links in the previous sentence will take you through to the relevant download page for your browser(s) of choice.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist or if there is a higher resolution version.

If you’re a photographer or a photo blogger, this plug-in can be invaluable for finding out if your work is being used without your permission, particularly as some media organisations seem to regard any image posted online as fair game and thus free of both copyright and royalties.
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.

Posts navigation