open source

  • Polish Economy Ministry to release source code for consultation site

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    Polish eagle emblemPoland’s Ministry of Economy will release the source code that it wrote for linking its back office to a site built with the Drupal open source content management system (CMS), reports the EU’s public sector open source news site Joinup. The site is used for consultations and tgathering feedback on the Ministry’s projects and policies.

    “This is more than a standalone consultation platform based on Drupal”, a Ministry spokesperson explains. The service is made of two parts: firstly, a module for the Drupal-based site to create consultations and share documents and secondly the code that links this module to the document management system. “We’re using Zend Framework to create this second part. The solution allows us to embed the document and work-flow management system, including legislative and technical rules for creating the documents.”

    The applications are currently being readied for a production environment. The spokesperson remarked that the developers are still fixing a few bugs, but live data is already being used.

    The ministry expects this phase to be completed in about a month, after which the code will be published on a software development site, although the Ministry still has to decide which code repository to use.

    Poland’s Foundation on Open and Free Software (FWIOO) says that the Ministry’s site “has the potential to become the default on-line consultation platform of the Polish government.” FWIOO was also involved in drafting the software’s specifications. “One year ago we created a similar tool for the Ministry of Administration and Digitization. That was also a combination of Drupal and free software extensions”.

  • Debian 7.1 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoThe post below appeared on the Debian News website on Saturday, 15th June 2013.

    The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

    Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 7 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

    Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

    New installation media and CD and DVD images containing updated packages will be available soon at the regular locations.

    Upgrading to this revision online is usually done by pointing the aptitude (or apt) package tool (see the sources.list(5) manual page) to one of Debian’s many FTP or HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list of mirrors is available at: http://www.debian.org/mirror/list

    The original post also contained an extensive list of bug fixes and security updates for the affected packages; full details of these can be found in the changelog.

  • The Linux Lord’s Prayer

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Oddities, Tech

    Tux - the Linux kernel mascot
    Tux – the Linux kernel mascot
    One item I missed from my list of highs on last week’s Barncamp post was hearing Naomi from Sheffield recite the Linux Lord’s Prayer she’d devised many years earlier; I first heard Naomi recite it round the campfire in June 2010. This year at Barncamp, Naomi performed it on stage during the Open Mic session on Saturday night.

    The prayer is reproduced below for those you have yet to come across it. I hope you enjoy it.

    Our father, who art in /sbin,
    init is thy name.
    Thy PID is 1;
    Thy children run
    In user space as they do in kernel.
    Give us this day our daily RAM
    And forgive us our interrupts
    As we are nice to those who interrupt us.
    Lead us not into uncaught exception
    And deliver us from SIGKILL
    For thine is the system
    And thou art the saviour
    For ever and ever – until we upgrade yer!

    In addition, Andreas Pothe has translated Naomi’s original prayer into German:

    Vater Unser, der Du da bist in /sbin,
    init ist Dein Name.
    Deine PID ist 1,
    Deine Kinder laufen
    Im Benutzermodus wie auch im Kernel.
    Unser tägliches RAM gib uns heute
    Und vergib uns unsere Unterbrechungen
    Wie auch wir vergeben unseren Unterbrechern.
    Und führe uns nicht in unbehandelte Ausnahmen
    Und erlöse uns von dem SIGKILL
    Denn Dein ist das System
    Und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit
    In Ewigkeit – Bis wir Dich updaten!

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0.0 beta2 available for testing

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    LibreOffice developer Fridrich Strba has announced that the second beta of the forthcoming LibreOffice 4.1.0, which is planned for release between 22 and 28 June, is ready for testing.

    One new feature now allows users to rotate images in Writer, several translations have been improved and a number of bugs have been fixed. The image rotation feature was implemented by Tomaz Vajngerl, who closed a feature request that had been open since early 2011.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 will include a number of new features, such as embedded fonts. This has been called the “most important feature” in the forthcoming release and allows users to include the fonts used in a document within the document, preventing text being displayed differently on systems where the original fonts are not available. This can happen when non-system or custom fonts are used and they have not been installed on the operating system of the reader.

    The change log contains a detailed list of all the bugs which have been fixed in LibreOffice 4.1.0 beta 2.

    This latest beta release can be downloaded from LibreOffice for testing on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (deb and RPM packages) platforms.

  • Barncamp – my highs and lows

    Steve WoodsBristol, Linux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Late yesterday afternoon I returned from Barncamp 2013, – a weekend of “hacktivism, workshops, entertainment, politics and fun in the sun” held at Highbury Farm up the beautiful Wye Valley a few miles south of Monmouth. Barncamp itself was open to attendees from Friday 7th June to Sunday 9th June. As part of the production crew, I got to spend a couple of additional nights on site, wearing out the view. Barncamp is a joint production between HacktionLab, FLOSS Manuals and Bristol Wireless.

    The view up the Wye to Monmouth from the Barncamp site
    The view up the Wye to Monmouth from the Barncamp site

    My highs and lows of the event are listed below.

    The highs

    • Seeing the International Space Station (posts passim) pass overhead on the first evening.
    • Ben Green’s wild food walk – something I’d been promising myself to do for years. I ate wild garlic flowers for the first time while on Ben’s walk.
    • Not reading the online edition (or any other format) of the dreadful Bristol Post.
    • A fine pub lunch – steak and ale pie -at the Lamb & Flag after my visit to A&E in Abergavenny (see below).
    • Leading the Linux command line workshop on the Bristol Wireless mobile LTSP suite.
    • Seeing lots of people I haven’t seen since the last Barncamp, 2 years ago.
    • “Wow!” Charlie‘s one word tasting note for Laphroaig single malt whisky.
    • Getting a surprised reaction from some for annointing the campfire hearth with Laphroaig before lighting (humour an old hippy as he appeases the genus loci, will you? Thanks. Ed.).
    • Excellent beers all weekend (apart from the solitary pint of Nutcracker over at The Boat in Penallt).

    The lows

    • Getting knackered walking up and down the hill from the camping field to the barn and up and down to the village shop.
    • Not catching sight of the ravens I heard all the week.
    • Hitting myself on the left thumb with a lump hammer, requiring a trip to Neville Hall Hospital in Abergavenny and the insertion of 3 stiches (picture below).
    • Having to come back to Bristol and routine.
    Ouch!
    Ouch!

    And finally…

    A big thank you to the folks at Highbury Farm, our hosts for Barncamp, especially Tez for the comfrey to help with my war wounds. Hope to see you again soon.

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0 Beta 1 announced

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoThorsten Behrens of The Document Foundation has announced the first beta release of LibreOffice 4.1.0.

    This will be the sixth major release of LibreOffice in two and a half years and comes with a set of attractive new features.

    However, Behrens points out that LibreOffice 4.1 Beta1 is not ready yet for production use and that LibreOffice 4.0.3 should continue to be used, if stability is preferred to testing bleeding edge versions.

    The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from LibreOffice’s QA builds download page at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

    Any bugs should be reported to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla: https://bugs.freedesktop.org.

    A list of known issues and fixed bugs with 4.1.0 Beta1 is available on the LibreOffice wiki.

  • Debian welcomes Google Summer of Code students

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoReposted from Bits from Debian.

    We are proud to announce that 16 students have been accepted to work on improving Debian this summer through the Google Summer of Code! This is great news, following our 15 accepted students in 2012, and 9 accepted students in 2011.

    Here is the list of accepted students and projects:

    If you’re interested in one of the projects, please follow the links and talk directly to the students or the mentors, or come hang out with us on IRC.

  • Fedora caught in language trap

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Oddities, Tech

    Fedora Pi remix logoFedora, the community spin-off of Red Hat Linux, has announced the release of Pidora – a special remix of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi, as follows:

    Pidora 18 (Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix) Release

    We’re excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 – an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.

    * * *

    There are some interesting new features we’d like to highlight:

    • Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)
    • Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi
    • Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)
    • Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)
    • Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage
    • C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image
    • Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display
    • IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light
    • For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE
    • For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management
    • Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)

    Unfortunately for Fedora, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. As a consequence, the following announcement has been posted on the Pidora website:

    It has come to our attention that the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian, and this has offended some community members and amused others.

    Please accept our apologies for any offence caused. Our goal was to simply associate “Pi” (from Raspberry Pi) and “Fedora” (from the Fedora Project).

    We are actively seeking a broadly-acceptable alternative Russian name in consultation with some community members, and will post more information shortly.

  • Introducing Joeffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    Japplis of Amsterdam has released the alpha version of Joeffice, the first open source office suite written in the Java programming language.

    The office suite comprises a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, database editor and a drawing viewer.

    Joeffice spreadsheet screenshot
    Joeffice spreadsheet screenshot

    Joeffice works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It also works online in a browser. Joeffice is released under the Apache license 2.0 which makes it possible for companies to change the code and redistribute it internally without having the need to share the modified code.

    Unlike some other office suites, Joeffice has a tab and docking system when opening multiple documents. It also can
    be installed online and it has a plug-in system under which third party plug-ins can be downloaded and installed.

    Japplis’ developer Anthony Goubard states he developed this open source office suite in just 30 days, according to Le Monde Informatique. In Goubard’s words: “The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses several popular open source Java libraries, which allowed me to build the program in one month.”

    Joeffice needs Java 7 to run.

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