The chief scribe had just been examining our website statistics, as provided by the excellent open source AWstats package (a contraction of Advanced Web statistics. Ed.), and thought readers may be interested in their revelations. For the first time since switching to a new host and a new platform (running the whole site on WordPress, […]
Kerala IT News writes that, as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum-based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of […]
What happened on 25th August 1991? Well, it wasn’t when Sgt Pepper taught the band to play! 😀 Nope. definitely not. However, something very significant in the world of computing occurred on this very day 20 years ago. A young student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds sent the following email to the Minix newsgroup: Hello […]
The H-Online reports that The GIMP, (in longhand, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Ed.) the most widely used open source, cross-platform graphics program, is to gain a fully-functional single window mode with effect from the latest update to version 2.7.3. The news emerges from a news item from the program’s development team. In the single-window […]
Saturday 17th September 2011 is Software Freedom Day (SFD). SFD is an event with hundreds of teams from all around the world running local events to help their communities understand Software Freedom. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim of SFD is to educate the general public about […]
Our friend Sean Kenny of Circle Interactive has contacted us today to let us know that CiviCon London is taking place on Monday August 22nd at SkillsMatter, 116-120 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7DP (map). CiviCon is the international meeting of CiviCRM users, implementers and developers to share knowledge, experience and to discuss the future of […]
Earlier this year we reported that Linux is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (news passim). As part of the celebrations, the Linux Foundation invited video submissions to mark this milestone. A birthday greetings video from Microsoft has now been received by the Foundation. We hope you enjoy this submission from the ‘Beast of Redmond’ […]
OSOR reports that the Canary Islands are using open source software to forecast and manage forest fires. Capaware is an open source 3D geographical multilayer framework which produces realistic images of land and enables virtual navigation to a given area. Based on the environmental conditions of the area (including, inter alia, humidity, vegetation and wind), […]
The other day we heard about Doudoulinux. Leaving aside the rather scatological name of the distro (in English, anyhow. Ed.), it looks rather good at what it’s trying to achieve. Based on Debian – like lots of other fine general-purpose and specialised distros – Doudoulinux is specifically designed for use by children aged between 2 […]
Our friends in the Herefordshire Linux & Open Source Users Group have sent us advance details of their plans for Software Freedom Day on Saturday 17th September. As part of the International Software Freedom Day on Saturday 17th September, the Herefordshire Linux & Open Source Users Group (HLUG) will be holding a free public event […]
As previously announced, the second run of the Bristol Wiki Academy took place on Monday this week up at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Bristol (news passim). We got off to an early(ish) start at 10.30 am with a round of introductions, followed by a brief presentation on Wikipedia’s mission of free knowledge for everyone […]
In the flood of news about open source deployments by the public sector around the world, the UK public sector is beginning to look increasingly isolated with its devotion to closed source, proprietary IT (I believe this is what the experts call vendor lock-in. Ed.). The latest bit of news to reach the lab is […]
The CiviCRM blog reports that CiviCRM 3.4.4 and 4.0.4 have just been released and both are available for download. This release offers several important improvements to permissioning, helping to harden systems. The developers recommend an immediate upgrade to benefit from the new release’s improvements. The new releases can also be tried on the public demos: […]
Yesterday in Berlin a court hearing took place in a case that could set a crucial precedent for the embedded industry. In the lawsuit between AVM and Cybits, AVM maintained that others should not be allowed to modify free software on computers bought from AVM, such as the widely used Fritz!Box. At the heart of […]
The Free Software Unit of the Secretariat of State for Technology of Tunisia’s Ministry of Industry and Technology has launched Taskforce Opensource, an initiative aimed at fostering the adoption and implementation of open source in Tunisia. The site’s home page states: This collaborative space is designed to collate your proposals and your comments on many […]
Two weeks ago, your correspondent made one of his regular trips to Stoke on Trent to do a routine back-up of his 79 year-old mother’s computer, which happens to be running Windows XP. The back-up went smoothly: I took a copy of her personal files to a spare hard drive of my own in a […]
Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? If yes, then the Debian Women project and the OpenHatch project want to teach you the basics. They’ll be will be holding an IRC event on Saturday 7th May to help people that want to compile their first Debian package from source, and apply their first […]
Yesterday the Gnome Project announced that the GNOME 3.0 release (as used in the latest Ubuntu release, now imminent, codenamed ‘Natty Narwhal’. Ed.) has attracted far more contributions from women than any previous GNOME release. This results largely from the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Programme for Women interns, who took […]
People who know BW’s chief scribe know he’s a great fan of Twitter, the social networking and microblogging website. Over the past couple of years, he’s tried out various Linux Twitter clients, ranging from quick and dirty Python scripts for tweeting from the command line, via your conventional web browsers to dedicated social networking packages, […]
News arrives at the Lab that our friends at UWE are organising the 5th annual run of their popular Linux Boot Camp on 20th and 21st June this year. Linux Boot Camp is aimed primarily at people who’ ve done their A levels and might be going on to do something IT-related in further or […]