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?