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Category Archives: International IT News

News from around the world

Linux kernel is 24 years young on Monday

Although Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux kernel, announced his initial work on the kernel on 25th August 1991, it was not until 5th October 1991 that Linus actually released his code: Linux kernel 0.01. With this October anniversary in mind, it’s worth taking a bit of time to review what’s changed to the […]

LibreOffice 5.0.2 announced at LibreOffice Conference

To underline the importance of the event for the community, The Document Foundation (TDF) yesterday announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.2 during the opening session of the 2015 LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, which runs until Friday 25th September. LibreOffice 5.0.2 is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of […]

FSFE elects new top brass

Matthias Kirschner and Alessandro Rubini are the new President and Vice-President respectively of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). They were elected last week in Bucharest during FSFE’s General Assembly, while Reinhard Müller was re-elected as Financial Officer. They will serve FSFE in those capacities for the next 2 years. Matthias Kirschner has been an […]

Dutch public sector to adopt ODF as standard?

The Dutch Standardisation Board would like to see the mandatory use of Open Document Format (ODF) for the country’s public sector organisations, according to a report on Joinup giving details of a presentation made by Nico Westpalm van Hoorn to the recent ODF Plugfest held in The Hague. Van Hoorn stated that over 450,000 documents […]

Bristol Uni involved in 5G – high-speed internet for future

The next generation of mobile wireless systems, known as “5G”, will ensure that the internet is always accessible and if a new European project, 5G-XHaul, achieves its ambitious goals then so-called “notspots” with no coverage will be a thing of the past. The aim of the 5G-XHaul project is to find effective solutions to the […]

LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines. The migration […]

Ford using Ubuntu in its driverless car

La Mirada del Replicante reports that Ford is signing up for the revolution in driverless cars and there’s no-one better in whose company to do so than Tux and one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions – Ubuntu. It has therefore launched a development plan for the next 5 years in which it plans to […]

Bulgaria releases first open data sets

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Some 36 datasets from 26 public sector organisations have now been made available online. Furthermore, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers has also established a dedicated team to overcome public sector resistance to […]

OpenMandriva’s next release to pay homage to its Mandrake heritage

The sad news arrived earlier this week that French Linux gurus Madriva were being wound up (news passim). One of its community spin-offs, OpenMandriva, has now announced that its next release will be a tribute to its Mandrake heritage. OpenMandriva’s history is well known. It was born at the end of 2012 with the help […]

LibreOffice Viewer for Android released

The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices. The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer. LibreOffice Viewer […]

The right to install other software on your devices

Safecast is a global project to map radiation data from around the world and release this information openly. When the project had just started, they used modified hardware, together with their own custom software and a few clever tweaks, to allow anyone to participate in the project. This kind of ingenuity, the ability to re-purpose […]

Droning on with Ubuntu?

The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports. Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May. The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg. […]

Government’s fast broadband programme ‘feeble’

UK residents can hardly fail to have noticed that a general election is taking place next Thursday, 7th May. As is usual with elections, the record of the previous administration, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, the UK’s first peacetime coalition since that of January 1919 to October 1922, is coming under intense scrutiny from all quarters. […]

The next Debian testing stable version’s codename is stretch

With Debian 8, codenamed ‘jessie’, currently frozen and due for release as the next stable release at the end of April (news passim), many may have been wondering what the next Debian testing stable release will be. However, this particular question has now been answered. Writing on reddit, user dimitrifromparis has revealed the next character […]

Hungarian universities adopt ODF

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF). Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students. In addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 […]

Hate DRM? Tell the world on May 6th

On Wednesday, May 6th, 2015, activists across the world will come together to say no to Digital Rights Restrictions Management (DRM). In the last year, DRM has spread to more types of products; developments include Mozilla giving in to DRM in its Firefox web browser and the sycophantic media fawning over Apple’s DRM-laden “smart” watch. […]

Bristol University Computer Science students win ESA app competition

An app designed by Computer Science students at the University of Bristol has won a top prize, University Business reports today. The European Space Agency App Camp was held in Barcelona from 25th February to 4th March, attracting more than 170 participants from 30 countries. The camp’s purpose was to find innovative ways to use […]