Just before Christmas, Slashdot reported that E17 – the latest version of the Enlightenment desktop environment – had 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 […]
Courtesy of a news report today on governmental lists of open source alternatives to proprietary software on EU public sector open source news website Joinup, the chief scribe duly downloaded and read the Open Source Software Options for Government publication (pdf), which forms the basis for a Joinup case study. A quick glance through the […]
IT news site The Register reports today that Linux kernel overlord Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux kernel no longer supports Intel’s 80386 processors, which were first introduced back in 1985 and pottered along at a top speed of 33 mHZ. Torvalds announced the demise of Linux on 386 in a post entitled “Merge branch […]
One of the great benefits of using free and open source software is the manner in which it can be shared, modified and redeployed and the Belgian federal government certainly seems to have embraced this aspect. Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports today that the Belgian government is prepared to share […]
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.4 for Linux and other popular operating systems. LibreOffice is the main office suite that comes bundled with most major Linux distributions. According to the Foundation, this new release of the free and open source office suite is another step forward in the process of improving […]
Debian is a great Linux distribution. Indeed, besides being a distribution in its own right, it acts as the foundation for the very popular Ubuntu distro and countless others. Here at Bristol Wireless, we’ve been using Debian for as long as the chief scribe can remember. The Debian Project is now in the final stages […]
Last Friday saw the launch of Windows 8, the latest “best Windows ever” (not again; isn’t that marketing slogan getting rather hackneyed after nearly 20 years? Ed.) release from the Beast of Redmond, backed by a marketing budget rumoured to be $1.5-1.8 bn. However, the launch was not without its problems for MS, as reported […]
Before we start, let’s be honest. All operating systems have their annoyances. Linux is no exception to this. However, given the foibles of the suppliers of all the Linux distributions, available, the annoyances are likely to vary from distro to distro. Last Thursday Canonical launched the latest version (numbered 12.10) of its popular Ubuntu distribution. […]
Today, 16th October is Ada Lovelace Day, which is a worldwide event about sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians and has the aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics […]
Although the favourite tipple (outside working hours of course! Ed.) of our regular volunteers is cider, we do have a couple – notably Messrs Treasurer and Secretary – who are fond of beer and real ale in particular. Consequently we were intrigued when Phoronix reported that beer and open source are being combined in GBeers […]
The Portuguese local authority of Vieira do Minho in the far north of the country would appear to be an exemplar for the use of open source software for small local authorities everywhere, according to a report posted yesterday on the EU’s open source news website, Joinup. Vieira do Minho has been using open source […]
While Linux is running your phone (if it’s an Android. Ed.), tweets, financial trades, cash machines and much, much more, most people don’t know how it’s actually built. This short video from the Linux Foundation takes you inside the process by which the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing is organised. It’s […]
It’s been a busy time at Bristol Wireless lately. Our Jim was here till nearly 9 pm a couple of nights ago recovering some data for a customer from a dead laptop’s hard drive for transfer to a refurbished machine. In addition, Jim has also been attending to a sick Windows box infected by viruses […]
Now that I’ve got your attention, there are a couple of conditions, but we’ll come to them in a while. The October to December edition of Up Our Street, the magazine of Easton and Lawrence Hill Management, features a competition to win a Raspberry Pi, the little Linux box full of fruity, open source goodness, […]
On August 16, the Debian community will celebrate that epic Linux distro’s 19th birthday since Ian Murdock’s original founding announcement. As is tradition, the Debian communities all around the world will be celebrating it with Debian Birthday parties. A Debian Birthday party is a fun event, globally marking the appreciation and the joy of being […]
Casas Bahia is a major domestic electrical appliances retailer in Brazil with 53,000 employees and over 500 stores. For the last 5 years it’s been successfully running SuSE Linux on its mainframes and point-of-sale systems with zero downtime as the following video explains (with helpful subtitles in English for non-Portuguese speakers).
We’ve been long-term users of Linux LTSP thin client systems for running both our workstations in the lab and our mobile event ICT and public access suites. Moreover, following a tweet earlier today, we’ve been contacted just now by the LTSP developers to see if we can contribute to LTSPedia, the new LTSP wiki, as […]
After the leap second problems reported earlier this week (news passim), Techworld features some more positive news – that Linux was central to the discovery of the Higgs boson by CERN. Techworld quotes a post by a Reddit user called d3pd, which we reproduce below. I don’t see any CERN related things here, so I […]
Joinup reports that figures provided by Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, reveal that switching to a Linux-based open source desktop reduces costs and results in fewer calls to help desks, and that replacing the current pool of almost 10,000 open source desktops with a proprietary system would increase costs by some 25%. Moreover, the latter would […]
A new e-petition has appeared on the Government’s e-petitions site entitled ‘Migrate all government IT to Linux based systems’ (as it’s in a good cause, we’ll ignore the original petitioner’s woeful lack of a hyphen between Linux and based in the title. Ed. 🙂 ) The body of the petition reads as follows: Responsible department: […]