Chief scribe
To underline the importance of the event for the community, The Document Foundation (TDF) yesterday announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.2 during the opening session of the 2015 LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, which runs until Friday 25th September. LibreOffice 5.0.2 is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of […]
Following closely on the announcement that the University of Bristol in a consortium to research 5G mobile wireless systems within the European 5G-XHaul project (news passim), the university reported yesterday that its 5G research has been given a boost thanks to a grant of £540,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for […]
Matthias Kirschner and Alessandro Rubini are the new President and Vice-President respectively of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). They were elected last week in Bucharest during FSFE’s General Assembly, while Reinhard Müller was re-elected as Financial Officer. They will serve FSFE in those capacities for the next 2 years. Matthias Kirschner has been an […]
The Dutch Standardisation Board would like to see the mandatory use of Open Document Format (ODF) for the country’s public sector organisations, according to a report on Joinup giving details of a presentation made by Nico Westpalm van Hoorn to the recent ODF Plugfest held in The Hague. Van Hoorn stated that over 450,000 documents […]
Ooh aargh me hearties! Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (hat tip: Rich), 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015. The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software […]
The next generation of mobile wireless systems, known as “5G”, will ensure that the internet is always accessible and if a new European project, 5G-XHaul, achieves its ambitious goals then so-called “notspots” with no coverage will be a thing of the past. The aim of the 5G-XHaul project is to find effective solutions to the […]
The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines. The migration […]
ReactOS is now officially regarded in Russia as the most useful alternative to Windows. The developers are in the meantime preparing for the first ReactOS Hackfest, which will concentrate on the forthcoming version 0.4.0.
Last weekend saw the staging of BarnCamp 2015 (in which Bristol Wireless’ volunteers have been involved since its inception. Ed.). Running from Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st, BarnCamp was as usual a low-cost rural DIY skillsharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups and anybody else […]
La Mirada del Replicante reports that Ford is signing up for the revolution in driverless cars and there’s no-one better in whose company to do so than Tux and one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions – Ubuntu. It has therefore launched a development plan for the next 5 years in which it plans to […]
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Some 36 datasets from 26 public sector organisations have now been made available online. Furthermore, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers has also established a dedicated team to overcome public sector resistance to […]
The sad news arrived earlier this week that French Linux gurus Madriva were being wound up (news passim). One of its community spin-offs, OpenMandriva, has now announced that its next release will be a tribute to its Mandrake heritage. OpenMandriva’s history is well known. It was born at the end of 2012 with the help […]
The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices. The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer. LibreOffice Viewer […]
In the Queen’s Speech the Government announced it’s going to introduce an Investigatory Powers Bill (news passim). This is the new Snoopers’ Charter and will more than likely comprise even greater powers for the police and GCHQ to spy on British citizens. (Will the Government’s longer term aim of a British Bill of Rights comprise […]
Like a boomerang curry, the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim) is back – and with a vengeance this time. Wired UK reports that this morning’s Queen’s Speech setting out the government’s legislative programme for the next year. In her speech in the House of Lords, the Queen said new legislation would “modernise the law on communications […]
Things were never easy for Mandriva, which was founded in 1999 as MandrakeSoft: with Mandrake Linux the company was originally aiming for a user-friendly desktop Linux. However, the major breakthrough for Linux on the desktop failed to appear and thus financial squeezes run like a strand through the company’s history in spite of the rapid […]
Barncamp is a low-cost, rural DIY skills sharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups, and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use. All skill levels are welcome and the organisers promise that workshops are not […]
The village of Claverton, a couple of miles south of Bath, was not best pleased when residents discovered they were to be bypassed by the £2 bn. scheme to provide the rural UK with superfast broadband. They decided to do something about it, according to yesterday’s Western Daily Press. What they decided to do was […]
Safecast is a global project to map radiation data from around the world and release this information openly. When the project had just started, they used modified hardware, together with their own custom software and a few clever tweaks, to allow anyone to participate in the project. This kind of ingenuity, the ability to re-purpose […]
The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports. Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May. The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg. […]