Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, has announced the introduction of the Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. Based on Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix is now available for corporate and government institutions evaluating Ubuntu as a desktop system. The combination of Ubuntu’s ease of use, outstanding free software applications, certified commercial apps […]
The Cabinet Office has announced a consultation on ‘open standards’ for software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT. This is the second such consultation on open standards: in January ComputerWeekly said it had unearthed evidence that Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) had successfully pressurised the UK government into withdrawing its January […]
The Register today carries an article entitled “UK.gov: We really are going to start buying open-source from SMEs“. On Tuesday last in London Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures, said that open source had grown up and it’s time to dispel lingering misconceptions about it. Speaking at the Intellect 2012 Conference, Maxwell said: […]
The British Library, whose main reading room has in the past played home from home for such diverse characters as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Lenin, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud and H. G. Wells, is at present recruiting an experienced […]
Yesterday Jono Bacon published a blog post inviting people around the world to organise events for this year’s Ubuntu Global Jam, which is being held from 2nd – 4th March. The Ubuntu Global Jam is a worldwide fun event that’s a great way to meet other Ubuntu and free software enthusiasts. Event organisers will need […]
At the end of last week, both houses of the New Hampshire legislature passed HB418 (2012). This bill is “relative to the use of open source software and open data formats by state agencies and relative to the adoption of a statewide information policy regarding open government data standards.” That means that New Hampshire has […]
PC World reports that KDE developer Aaron Seigo revealed over the weekend that a 7-inch Linux tablet named “Spark” will soon be available with KDE Plasma Active tablet interface as its default user interface. It will be priced at €200 or approximately £167 in real money. 😉 The Spark tablet’s specification will comprise a 1GHz […]
The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the fork of OpenOffice that emerged after the takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in 2010, today announced that it will base its community-driven entity in Berlin, in the legal form of a German Stiftung (for the benefit of non-German speakers, a “Stiftung” is a German non-profit foundation […]
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has developed a web page for testing the distro, according to Le Monde Informatique. Written entirely in HTML, this page allows potential Ubuntu users to discover and work with the Unity interface, which has received hefty criticism from users of more traditional desktops. As some people are […]
Richard Stallman (pictured), also known as rms, the originator of the free software movement, has posted an article suggesting policies for a strong and firm effort to promote free software within the state, and to lead the rest of the country towards software freedom. Richard’s article makes some very pertinent points in respect of the […]
One of the accusations erroneously levelled against Linux is that there is a paucity of games for the platform. Well, the splendid little sampler video below courtesy of ChemBroTronNo1 may just help to dispel that illusion. Hat tip: Ubuntu Vibes
Simon Phipps, director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), has joined the calls for public sector organisations using open source software to get involved in open source associations (news passim). Speaking at the recent World Open Source Conference, Phipps is reported to have said: “It is nice to have a policy, but if you don’t […]
France has released the beta version of its open government data website, data.gouv.fr, Joinup reports. Data.gouv.fr aims to foster collaboration and innovation and to increase government transparency by facilitating access to and the re-use of public sector information. The portal brings together data from many public agencies, including the French institute for statistics INSEE, most […]
Spain’s Publico recently reported (Spanish) that the autonomous regional government of Extremadura is planning to move all 40,000 of its desktops to Debian Linux. In taking this step, Extremadura would be the leading Spanish public sector organisation for the use of free software, followed by Andalucia, País Valencià and Madrid. It is hoped the migration […]
Ubuntu Vibes reports that the Desura game client has been open sourced. Progress on work to release the client as open source was slow as lead developer ‘lodle’ was taking a break. However, all the necessary work has now been completed and Desura has been open sourced as Desurium, with the code available GPL v3. […]
Karel De Vriendt, a recently retired European Commission official previously involved in the Commission’s policies and activities involving open source software, has recommended that public sector organisations using open source software should join the associated open source communities, or require that their IT service providers join on their behalf, Joinup reports. Using open source does […]
Our friends at Easton’s Kebele Community Cooperative have asked us to let our readers know that they’re running a computer class starting this Friday 20th January 2012 from 6 pm to 7 pm in the Kebele Library (map). According to the Kebele website, the tuition comprises: Basic computer information and getting to know some of […]
Courtesy of OMG Ubuntu and OpenSure, news reaches the lab of the Ben NanoNote, the world’s smallest Linux laptop. From manufacturers Qi Hardware, we learn that the NanoNote “is an ultra small form factor computing device. The device sports a 336 MHz processor, 2GB of flash memory, microSD slot, head phone jack, USB device and […]
It’s not very often we look at education on this blog in spite of our previous involvements with LTSP (news passim) and open source use petitions (news passim), but the past couple of days have provided a couple of interesting stories that deserve examination. Firstly, The Guardian has launched a digital literacy campaign. Whilst the […]
On 23 December government ministers agreed that, by default, the Hungarian public sector will use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April 2012. In December 2011 Hungary’s government also decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools (if only the UK government would – or could – […]