It has long been the habit of purists (don’t you mean pedants? Ed.), such as rms, to correct those who call our favourite operating system Linux by reminding them that it should actually be termed GNU/Linux as it’s actually the GNU operating system with Linus Torvalds‘ Linux kernel. So, like me, you might have been […]
Public internet access in libraries is a well established service nowadays. Indeed it’s been in existence here in Bristol for so long that one hardly ever gives it a thought. However, the other day Jules, the Bristol Wireless Treasurer, emailed the chief scribe with a tale from Albany in Oregon, where he’s currently sojourning. Jules […]
The H Open reports today that the desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has now officially reached its end of life. From 12 May 2011 (yesterday), no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The server edition of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will continue to be supported until May 2013. Users of […]
Two weeks ago, your correspondent made one of his regular trips to Stoke on Trent to do a routine back-up of his 79 year-old mother’s computer, which happens to be running Windows XP. The back-up went smoothly: I took a copy of her personal files to a spare hard drive of my own in a […]
Your ‘umble scribe picked his title ih haste, as it’s actually a series of teach-ins. 😉 Ubuntu Open Week is currently underway from Mon 2 May – Fri 6 May on IRC in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat between 14.00 and 18.00 hrs UTC. In just 7 years, Ubuntu has become one of the world’s most popular […]
Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? If yes, then the Debian Women project and the OpenHatch project want to teach you the basics. They’ll be will be holding an IRC event on Saturday 7th May to help people that want to compile their first Debian package from source, and apply their first […]
Yesterday the Gnome Project announced that the GNOME 3.0 release (as used in the latest Ubuntu release, now imminent, codenamed ‘Natty Narwhal’. Ed.) has attracted far more contributions from women than any previous GNOME release. This results largely from the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Programme for Women interns, who took […]
People who know BW’s chief scribe know he’s a great fan of Twitter, the social networking and microblogging website. Over the past couple of years, he’s tried out various Linux Twitter clients, ranging from quick and dirty Python scripts for tweeting from the command line, via your conventional web browsers to dedicated social networking packages, […]
It’s 8.30 on the morning of Saturday 26th March and your ‘umble scribe is standing on a sunny Stapleton Road station waiting for the train. One and a half hours later, he alights at an overcast and chillier Hereford station and goes ambling into town in search of 2 things: firstly, breakfast and secondly, All […]
Whilst the venerable Debian distro names its releases after characters in the Toy Story film, the popular Ubuntu distro – a spin-off from Debian – uses a formula of an adjective plus wildlife name to characterise its twice-yearly releases. Mark Shuttleworth, an early space tourist in a previous life and now the leading light behind […]
A couple of days ago, we received a generous donation of an Acer laptop from an anonymous caller at the Lab (thank you kindly, sir! We did ask him if he wanted any kind of thanks, but he resisted all our blandishments. Ed.). He only asked that we wipe the data off the hard drive, […]
It’s come to the chief scribe’s attention that Herefordshire, another part of the country with a fine cider tradition, is having a bit of a do on Saturday 26th March and there’s a local Bristol angle, if you read down near the foot of the email reproduced below, which was posted to the Ubuntu UK […]
News reaches the lab that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the Linux operating system which we install on our refurbished machines, is organising a Developer Day on 27th January 2011 in Bangalore, India. The event will be held at Bangalore’s Leela Palace Kempinski Hotel. Ubuntu is different from other commercial Linux offerings that preceded it, […]
A pleasant surprise awaited your scribe on his arrival at the Lab yesterday: one of the happy smiling faces lurking there was Mark, who had to bring a halt to his volunteering activities last year to find a job to pay the bills. Anyway, Mark now has some spare time on his hands again and […]
As previously reported (news passim), France’s Gendarmerie Nationale decided to review its IT infrastructure. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, now reports the force has upgraded 85,000 PCs to Ubuntu Desktop Edition, removing its reliance on the Microsoft operating system almost completely. As well as simplifying maintenance and improving ease of use, Ubuntu Desktop Edition is […]
Our friend Alan Lord reminds us that this coming Sunday the date will be 10/10/10. For those that know their binary, you’ll all realise without being prompted that 101010 is 42 in old money, so the day has been declared 42 Day in honour of the late Douglas Adams, author of some rather interesting sci-fi. […]
It’s hard to make out what’s going on with Ubuntu in the increasingly schizophrenic world of Dell, one of the UK’s/world’s largest suppliers of computer equipment. In June the specialist IT press was buzzing with an announcement from Dell that ‘Ubuntu is more secure than Windows’, whilst praising its ‘fast boot-up speeds and elegant design’, […]
Last week we write about the Ubuntu in Business event being organised in London on 13th July (news passim). News has just arrived via the blog of Canonical, the commercial sponsors of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, that more places have just been made available for the event. According to Canonical’s blog post: Canonical and […]
A brief email dropped into my inbox earlier this week pointing me in the direction of the blog of Joss Winn of Lincoln University. Joss relates his experiences over 10 years of running a Linux desktop on a Mac (several actually. Ed.). At the start of his experiences Joss relates: The first time I installed […]
A few years ago I stumbled across a cracking little application which helped me no end as an introduction to Linux. Wubi is an Ubuntu Linux installer designed for Windows. The great thing about this application is that the benefits of the open source world are literally just a simple mouse click away. The installation […]