Chief scribe
Robert Ancell of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution (which Bristol Wireless recommends for use by newcomers to Linux. Ed. ), has announced on the Ubuntu desktop mailing list that Canonical is forking the Gnome Control Centre. Robert’s email is reproduced in full below. Hi all, Ubuntu makes use of a heavily […]
There’s an open data meet-up taking place in Bristol next month. It will be held on 30th January 2014 at the Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol, BS1 5TX (map) from 7 pm to 10 pm. The few details that are available at present can be seen here. Topics to be discussed will include licensing, linked […]
Hüseyin Tolu, a PHD student at the University of Bristol, says that public sector organisations in Turkey are neglecting free and open source ICT solutions and its causes include institutional inertia, vendor lock-in and corruption according to a report today in Joinup, the EU’s public sector all things open source website. Part of his thesis […]
Last week Bristol Wireless indulged in some internal training – something we haven’t done for a couple of years. Ably led by Ben Green and Julien Weston, Bristol Wireless volunteers are now more familiar with the ins and outs of Linux system administration, MySQL, the Puppet configuration management tool, vserver environments and web services, to […]
Today’s Le Monde Informatique asks how the world of high-powered computing (HPC) can be reconciled with the needs of companies as regards simulation and modelling. An American research centre is working of the creation of an app store to provide dedicated applications. The major problem for supercomputers is that companies are not benefiting from this […]
So great is the grip of proprietary operating systems and software on the UK that open source success stories are hard to find. However, the UK isn’t a complete desert for open source. Last week Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reported that hospitals in the UK and beyond are showing interest […]
Some time ago, FirstBus, Bristol’s major bus operator, introduced free wifi on its services nos. 8 and 9 (news passim). Today the Bristol Post reports that there’s to be a large scale expansion of free wifi for Bristol’s bus passengers, starting next month. Written by the Post’s business correspondent, Michael Ribbeck, the article states: Free […]
Bristol University seems to be doing a fair bit at present on cyber security matters. Following on from last week’s research contributions to an EU cyber security attacks white paper (news passim), the university has now advised the European Union’s Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on how to protect the personal data of millions […]
In the week a major international summit on government transparency is held in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses. The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from […]
Increasing numbers of recent security incidents against industrial control systems raise questions about the ability of many organisations to respond to cyber-security attacks. Researchers from Bristol University’s Cryptography Group and the Safety Systems Research Centre have contributed to an EU paper on the resilience of critical information infrastructures. The white paper, entitled “Can we learn […]
According to German technology news website Heise, news is emerging on discussion and support forums of graphics problems when updating from Ubuntu 13.04 to the latest version – Ubuntu 13.10. Users are reporting graphics problems in the form of a black screen. The problem most affects systems with AMD graphics cards if the proprietary AMD […]
SWUX (South West Usability Discussion Group), is a free meet-up for UX and people curious about UX, usually held on the first Tuesday of every month in Bristol. It’s a group for open discussion on all usability issues, including software to web design to mobile apps. SWUX usually meets in a pub for a chat, […]
We’ve had an email from Sean Kenny of Circle Interactive informing us of some forthcoming training for CiviCRM, the free and open source CRM used by Bristol Wireless. Sean’s email says: Now London CiviCON 2013 is behind us and we’ve recovered from an exhilarating two days we’ve got some up and coming training in Bristol […]
Bath University’s press office reports that computing student Robin Lee single-handedly solved 9 out of 11 computing problems to win the first ever United Kingdom & Ireland Programming Contest (UKIEPC) held on Saturday 5th October. Robin, a final year Computer Science degree student, worked alone during the five-hour contest which saw 55 teams in five […]
Distro Astro is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu/Linux Mint which aims to cover the requirements of astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts. The project has announced the release of version 1.0.2 of its distribution, codenamed Ceres. Distro Astro has features for almost all astronomy uses — from observatories, planetariums – and for all users from professional […]
Wedged between the M4, M5 and M32 on the northern fringe of the Bristol built-up area, Bradley Stoke has never enjoyed an exactly wonderful reputation locally or even nationally. Started in 1987, the development got caught up in the fall-out from the bursting of the housing bubble in the early 1990s, leading to it being […]
The Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal opendata.admin.ch comprising over 1,600 public data sets, including election results, key figures for cantons and local authorities, as well as demographic information and data at the start of the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, the German technology news site Heise reports. The portal will provide […]
Chris, one of our Bristol volunteers, has been blind since childhood and uses the Vimux distro for the visually impaired, coupled with the Orca screen reader for the GNOME desktop, so he’ll no doubt be very pleased to hear that a new release for Orca is imminent. According to Softpedia, is now at the Beta […]
Today’s Bristol Post reports North Somerset commuters travelling to Bristol during November and December will be able to travel to work for free under a scheme set up by North Somerset Council and coach operator The Kings Ferry Ltd. The service will link Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead with major employment areas around Bristol, including Aztec […]
The release schedule for Ubuntu 14.04 – the next long term support (LTS) release of this popular Linux distribution – has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. According to the schedule, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS should be released in mid-April 2014 after going through the alpha, beta and release candidate stages. Bristol Wireless recommends Ubuntu as […]