When the chief scribe first starting using Linux regularly some years ago, he ventured slightly further than the usual Gnome and KDE desktops, occasionally getting to grips with the slightly more esoteric WindowMaker window manager. Slashdot now reports that a new team of developers has recently resumed development of WindowMaker. The new development team has […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
Regular readers will remember that we had a visit from journalist Jonathan Edwards (news passim) which ultimately resulted in Bristol Wireless being the subject of a four-page feature in the Christmas 2011 edition (issue 158) of Linux Format (news passim). For those who did not take our above advice and go and buy that edition […]
Regular users of Wikipedia will be aware that the main page showcases a different article every day; this is known as the featured article. Yesterday’s featured article was the one on Bristol’s Knowle West area. Those familiar with the Wikipedia article grading process will know just how much effort has gone into getting an article […]
To promote the implementation of the National Infrastructure for Open Data (INDA), the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management last week launched the beta version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. The full version is scheduled for launch in 2012. INDA is a set of standards, technologies, procedures and control instruments for meeting the […]
But who said it? According to Joinup, it was Christian Ude, the Mayor of Munich, whose local authority is a European leader in the deployment of open source by the public sector in general and local authorities in particular. It was said in a letter to Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EU Commission, a great […]