The Evolve OS desktop Linux distribution is being forced into a change of name due to potential trade mark problems with the UK government, Softpedia reports. The bone of contention is not the Evolve element, but OS, which is apparently a trade mark registered to registered to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and […]
If no further serious problems are discovered, the forthcoming version 8 of Debian, codenamed Jessie, will be released on 25th April.
The City of Paris has become a member of April, the leading French free and open source advocacy organisation. Making the announcement, April reported that the council wants to intensify its commitment in favour of free and open source. Following a resolution in December 2014 from the council’s Green group and subsequent negotiations conducted by […]
Readers of more mature years will remember the BBC Micro, which was launched in the early 1980s. It was originally designed and built by the Acorn Computer company for the BBC’s then Computer Literacy Project. This machine is reputed to have inspired many of the UK’s leading programmers and games developers. News now arrives via […]
Debian developer Thomas Goirand has announced on his blog that a Debian disk image of the free and open source OpenStack cloud computing software platform is now available from cdimage.debian.org. Thomas writes: About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I’m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to […]
Liliputing reports that leading Hong Kong electronics manufacturer PC Partner has introduced a small form-factor computer with a fanless case that measures 5″ x 5″ x 1.8″. Its model number is the N2581N1-F and it is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 quad-core processor with 192-core Kepler graphics. It’s currently on sale in Japan and may […]
Most people interact with free software every day, but many of those people don’t know what free software is or why they should go out of their way to use it. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) wants to remedy that so it commissioned a short video that makes free software easy for everyone to understand. […]
Honda’s Asimo, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, is apparently programmed using Ubuntu Linux, according a report on IT news website Softpedia. A sharp-eyed Softpedia reader pointed out that the Ubuntu OS has been spotted in a YouTube video on recent advances in robotics. The Linux terminal and the characteristic Ubuntu Gnome terminal maximise, minimise […]
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organisation promoting the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient and easy to use. The Foundation is currently facing a threat to its GNOME trademark from global deal-of-the-day website merchants Groupon, […]
Hamburg’s Green want to wean the city off its Microsoft dependency and are pointing to Munich’s use of Linux, German IT news website heise reports. On the occasion of the impending 2014 Open IT Summit Hamburg’s Greens demanded the liberation of the city council from dependency on Microsoft. For Green Party Hamburg Parliament member Farid […]
On Tuesday, Munich’s first mayor finally responded to an inquiry by the Green Party (PDF, German) about rumours regarding a possible reversion to a Windows-based desktop environment from its current Linux-based LiMux system (news passim). The response shows that there is no factual basis for the claims made by first mayor and second mayor. An […]
Opensource.com reports that Linux purveyor Red Hat is now accepting nominations for the Women in Open Source Award. Created to highlight the achievements women making major contributions to an open source project, to the open source community or through the use of open source methodology, this award is the first of its kind. The award […]
A strategic deal has been announced between Chinese technology manufacturer Inspur and the open sourcerers of Red Hat to combine the latter’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system with Inspur’s x86 platform products, according to the China Tech News website. Inspur and Red Hat will become OEM partners under the agreement. As the first […]
Asus have kindly lent Bristol Wireless a ChromeBox for evaluation and I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces. On opening the box I was surprised by its compact form; it’s about the size of a CD case and an inch high. The boot time’s impressive, taking only a few seconds to launch […]
According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before […]
The Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women get involved in free and open source software and has just announced the opening of a new round of internship applications. Women can apply for an internship to contribute to an open source project from May to August; and OPW is not just asking for applications […]
With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
Malta’s new open data website is running on open source software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site. The site, which is run by the Maltese Local Councils Association, uses Centos Linux as its underlying operating system, the MySQL database management system, the Nginx web server and WordPress as its content […]
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS proved to be the most secure product in a client operating system investigation by British security body Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG), which is part of GCHQ and provides assistance to government departments on their own communications security, according to a report today in Germany’s Linux-Magazin. The test field consisted of 11 […]
Microsoft has announced that it will be ending support for Windows XP, now 12 years old, on 8th April 2014. The Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG) has seen this as an opportunity to introduce people currently using XP to a reliable free and open source Linux operating system and has planned an event […]