As of this week, Asus Eee PC 1215P netbooks preloaded with Ubuntu Linux are available in the shops – as long as you do your shopping in Portugal. 😉 The Canonical blog reports that the ASUS Ubuntu netbooks can be bought in 100 Vobis and Worten stores across the country. The Eee PC has a […]
Desura, a community-driven digital distribution service for gamers, announced the release yesterday of a Linux client. After a 2 month beta period, Desura a digital distribution client which supports the installation and patching of games on any Linux distribution has launched. With this release Desura is the only client which works on both Windows and […]
Yes, you did read the headline correctly. However, the government in question is not Her Majesty’s but that of la belle France, which has just issued an invitation to tender for free and open source software support to the amount of €2 million, according to Le Monde Informatique. The Information Systems and Communication Directorate of […]
Despite our best efforts over the last 10 years (and those of others all over the world. Ed.), Linux still accounts for a small percentage of desktop users – a couple of per cent at most. However, there’s one area where Linux is dominant – and that’s supercomputers. The latest list of the world’s top […]
On 8th November the Berlin Regional Court issued its decision in the case AVM Computersysteme Vertriebs GmbH (AVM) v. Cybits AG (Cybits) (news passim). In this case, AVM was essentially trying to stop Cybits from modifying GNU GPL licensed free software inside of their AVM Fritz!Box products. Yesterday, the court dismissed this principal claim. Thus, […]
Your correspondent arrived at the lab last Friday to find there was – initially at least – nowhere to sit down. We had a full complement of volunteers present – both old and new – and a couple of customers too. Looking at our volunteers, I’d like to draw your attention to 2 of them. […]
Today Linux.com reminds us that there’s another anniversary to celebrate this year. In addition to the 20th birthday of Linux (news passim), the venerable Vim text editor has also reached the same age. Vim is, of course, a contraction of Vi Improved. In other words, Vim is actually a take on the even-older vi, the […]
Last week, the lab was pleased to receive a visit from BW member John Palfrey. For those who don’t know him, John is the owner of the Linux Lounge (news passim), an old double-decker bus which he’s refurbished and kitted out as a mobile IT centre, using all open source software, of course! Anyway, to […]
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, announced today (26th October) it is hosting a new project created by its Consumer Electronics (CE) workgroup. The new project, the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), provides for both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of […]
A couple of days ago, Bristol24/7 reported that Bristol is entering the race to be Europe’s top green city in 2014, so it’s perhaps appropriate to have a look at what Bristol Wireless can do as regards green IT (although, of course, we’re not the only people doing stuff like this in Bristol. Ed.). The […]
In an effort to get more women involved in Free Software, the GNOME project is sponsoring several internships for women from 12th December 2011 to 12th March 2012. These dates are aimed at women students from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a summer break during this time, but any woman available for a full […]
Flossie, the network of women who are interested in, use, advocate and/or develop Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), has just announced its unconference for next spring. Queen Mary at University of London (QMUL) has offered to host the Flossie unconference which will be on 25/26 May 2011 at QMUL’s Mile End Campus. Flossie will […]
Waldemar Pawlak, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, saluted Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as the “greatest success of the 20th century” in a conference talk on 27 September 2011, according to OSOR. He added that FLOSS is based on very sound principles and can provide solutions to some of the problems […]
A couple of years ago, we reported on Mr Treasurer’s eeePC (news passim). Regular readers will be pleased to hear it’s still performing well, as evidenced by the following (slightly edited for greater legibility – although the hashtags have been left in! Ed.) tweets from a conversation between Mr Treasurer and the chief scribe on […]
It’s easy to be critical of Bristol City Council; any long-term resident will vouch for that. However, amongst British local authorities it has been a pioneer for its willingness to dip its toes into the waters of open source, although even here it has not had an easy time (news passim). News emerges today on […]
Linus Torvalds, the creator and maintainer in chief of the Linux kernel, is also well known for his hobby of scuba diving and – as The H-online reports – he’s has just released subsurface, a dive-tracking program he wrote after discovering that no dive log software worked for him. Subsurface runs on Linux and uses […]
Yesterday the lab received a visit from Jon Roberts, a journalist from Future Publishing‘s Linux Format magazine. Linux Format’s strapline is ‘The #1 source for Linux’ and is also known as LXF. According to the latest ABC figures, LXF has a circulation 25,000 copies per issue. After a round of introductions and a cup of […]
VolvoIT, the IT division of the major car manufacturer, is testing an open source workstation based on Ubuntu amongst its Chinese users, according to ZDnet.fr. The workstations have 80% of the functionality of the proprietary workstations they are replacing but cost only one-fifth (20%) as much. Volvo IT is a standalone organisation within Volvo, employs […]
Linux.com reports that just before LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, The Linux Foundation released a draft proposal for an update to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Versions of the draft (in plain text, HTML and PDF versions) can be found at http://dev.linuxfoundation.org/~licquia/fhs-3.0-drafts/. This draft removes quite a few historical filesystem artifacts, such as /usr/X11R6 […]
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, […]