Bristol Wireless News

Earlier this week a newsletter popped into your correspondent’s inbox from our good friends at Trinity Community Arts giving details of the centre’s weekly classes for 2010. These include computer classes every Thursday between 4 pm and 6 pm. The classes are free and are being organised by Bristol Refugee Rights.

The newsletter continues:

Tutor Robel will be teaching basic IT skills such as setting up email accounts, word processing, using the web and office skills. For more information on how to access the course click here or email info (at) bristolrefugeerights.org

If you know someone who’d benefit from learning IT skills, this is a perfect opportunity. In addition, just like Bristol Wireless, Trinity is fully committed to using free and open source software (Quite right too! Ed.). Trinity’s reasons for using free and open source software can be read here.

Yesterday news was received from Bristol Wireless Chair Pete Ferne on the future of the Hackspace room in Hamilton House. Pete wrote:

For those of you who came along to the meeting in the Hackspace last Tuesday, just a quick note to clarify what is happening with the room at Hamilton House. As you may know we have, until now, been subletting it from Bristol Wireless. As of this month we are now renting the room directly from Coexist.

Thanks to the generous support of Futurelab, Connecting Bristol and the Arnolfini (and not forgetting the support of Bristol Wireless over the last six months), we can guarantee that the rent will be paid at the very least until the end of March.

We are also now set up to accept personal subscriptions and I hope you will consider signing up to pledge a tenner a month to help us grow and prosper. The money will be put towards rent and any other incidental outgoings (a lock for the door, insurance, etc.) nobody is being paid yet. And if you were thinking of playing with any of the XMOS development kits your membership buys you a healthy discount.

More details are available on the Bristol Hackspace Journal and supporters can sign up here.

Hot on the heels of the New Year comes encouraging news from Munich, where the city council is progressing with its LiMux free software project.

Writing on his blog, deputy project leader Florian Schießl notes a number of major milestones.

Firstly, the open source and ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now the main document exchange standard within the council for files that need editing, with PDF being used for non-editable files. Moreover, the city council’s standard desktops now consist of the free OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, plus other open source applications, such as the GIMP image editor (sounds eminently usable. Ed. ).

Other major achievements during 2009 include:

• 12,000 work stations using OpenOffice;
• 2,000 work stations in four departments migrated to LiMux, Munich’s ‘roll-your-own’ version of Debian with the KDE window manager and desktop environment (similar to what your scribe is using now and at home. Ed.);
• all other council departments starting migration to GNU/Linux in the course of the year.

The migration to Linux is expected to be completed by 2012. Although Bristol City Council was regarded as a pioneer for ditching Microsoft for Star Office, this achievement seems to pale somewhat in the light of Munich’s efforts. When will we see British local authorities emulate their colleagues in Bavaria?

News arrives from Knowle West Media Centre that a South Bristol Digital Mentors Assembly is to be hold on Thursday 21st January 2010 from 5:30-7:30pm at the Tobacco Factory, Raleigh Road, Southville, BS3 1TF (map).

It’s being organised to share digital aspirations for South Bristol and to challenge Bristol’s Digital Leaders to deliver them. Participants are asked to come prepared to suggest three ideas in answer to the question: ‘what needs doing to create a world-class digital South Bristol?’ The ideas will be discussed, shortlisted and presented by supporters before the final vote. You can sign up at Eventbrite.

It’s 3pm on Friday afternoon (aka POETS Day. Ed ) and the lab is in the capable hands of Jim, Stefan & your ‘umble scribe.

Jim & Stefan, both freshly supplied with a hot drink are busy working away on machines for our refurbishment project, whilst yours truly is catching up on paperwork, but that’s boring as hell to discuss: what are the other 2 lads doing instead?

The PCs on which they’re currently working have been kindly donated by our friends at Easton Community Centre (thanks Liz! ). All donated machines are given a thorough hardware health check of drives, cables, power supplies, etc.: any broken parts are replaced and if they’re a tad short of memory, we like to give the latter a boost so they run lightly and speedily. Occasionally, a donor asks that the hard drives of their old kit be wiped and it’s at this stage that it’s done with DBAN, a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks, automatically and completely deleting the contents of any hard disk that it can detect to standards approved by the US military – and it’s open source too! Wiping can take quite a while, e.g. a 200 GB SATA hard drive takes about 9 hours to wipe (sounds like a job to run overnight. Ed.). Only after that can an operating system be installed. At present we’re using Ubuntu 9.10. After the basic install is done, we then have to update the installation, add all the bits that make it useful to your typical user – stuff like audio and video codecs, a Flash player, additional fonts and the final touch: Bristol Wireless desktop wallpaper (far better than Ubuntu brown. Ed.). They’re then ready for sale, apart from the final update before they leave clutched in the arms of their new owners.

At Bristol Wireless we’ve found that most redundant computer hardware being junked by organisations is quite capable of running up-to date Linux systems and its life can be extended, giving it a new lease of being useful to someone. Indeed, your correspondent’s own laptop is now getting close to 7 years old and is still running the most modern version of its distribution, despite being more than twice the age of most commercial hardware replacement cycles and quite incapable in terms of system requirements for closed source proprietary operating systems.

This morning news arrived via your scribe’s Twitter feed that Mozilla’s Firefox, the leading open source web browser, has now overtaken Internet Explorer as the top browser and now accounts for over 44% of installed web browsers, according to the latest user analysis from w3b.org.

Those who feel competent in German may like to try the original article, whilst there is also a Google translation available.

Hat tip: Glyn Moody

Regular readers will be aware that Bristol Wireless wrote during September to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (news passim) and sent them each an Ubuntu live CD (so they could do half of Whitehall each? Ed. ).

We’ve now had a reply (sort of. Ed.) from Tim Bett, Director, Commercial Delivery, ICT at the Office of Government Commerce (OCG). The full text of his response – in all its brevity – reads:

Dear Mr Woods

UBUNTU LINUX

Thank you for your letter of 23 September to the Rt Hon. Gordon Brown MP. I have been asked to reply.

I was interested to read about Ubuntu Linux and its potential for helping the public sector reduce ICT costs. As individual departments are responsible for their own ICT arrangements, if you have not already done so you may wish to contact them direct [sic] to let them know about your product.

Yours sincerely, etc.

Your correspondent wonders exactly what the point the OCG serves if it is supposed to set procurement standards for government departments and its ICT folks are telling third parties to approach individual government departments.

Needless to say a considered response will soon be winging its way to Mr Betts…

CodeWeavers, a leading developer of software products that turn Linux and Mac OS X into Windows-compatible operating systems, have announced the release of CrossOver Games 8.1, masquerading under the codename of Zombie Mallard.

Picture courtesy of CodeWeavers, Inc.

As part of the launch, CodeWeavers will also be giving away a fully loaded, custom built, blingtastic (you just made that up, didn’t you? Ed.) CodeWeavers gaming PC (specification here) to some lucky winner, as long as you’re over 18, a US citizen and buy a copy of the new version of CrossOver Games.

Read CodeWeavers’ press release.

Do you want to find which games run natively under Linux? Consult our Linux games and Open GL games for Linux pages.

Makala Campbell (Cheung) of Knowle West Media Centre writes:

Hi All,

Do you know of an older person that could benefit from getting online? Maybe you know someone who works with older people or has an older relative or neighbour? Please forward the relevant info below (choose which one) and help get older people to this event.

And if you think there is someone I could contact personally to talk to them more about it, maybe a group or individual, then please let me know the contact details, and I’ll chase it up!

Social Networking for Older People
[For organisations and individuals that work with older people]

Tuesday 8 December, Knowle West Media Centre, Leinster Ave, BS4 1NL (map)

As the festive season approaches, the South Bristol Digital Neighbourhoods programme (SBDN) is holding an event for older people and the individuals and organisations that work with them.

At a time of year that can be lonely and bleak for some, this event will explore digital and social networking solutions to the problem of isolation and facilitate easier communication with and amongst older people.

On Tuesday 8 December 2-4pm, older people can receive training on our mobile laptops, sign up to the myguide website and set up their own Facebook account in a friendly environment, using KWMC’s excellent facilities. There will also be free mince pies, tea and coffee.

The event will look at digital issues affecting older people, with a focus on social networking and isolation.

For more information please contact Makala Campbell or Rachel Clarke at Knowle West Media Centre on 0117 903 0444 / makala (at) kwmc.org.uk or rachel.clarke (at) kwmc.org.uk

Hat tip: Glenn Vowles

French newspaper Le Figaro reports that the Government of Latvia, which has been severely affected by the economic crisis, intends replacing Microsoft’s proprietary software with free and open source software. “This is being done with the sole aim of saving money”, a spokesman explained.

The decision, which was recently signed by the Prime Minister, is intended to find a financial and legal opportunity to switch the State “wholly or partially” to the use of operating systems or software “that are not produced by America’s Microsoft Corporation”.

The Prime Minister’s decision has angered local trade body, the Latvian Information and Communication Technologies Association. “The State should not start fighting Microsoft Corporation or any other company to raise the competitiveness of government administration”, the Association stated in an open letter.

The story was also featured in English by Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.