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Tag Archives: open source

Squat ICT

On the morning of Saturday 29th five Bristol Wireless members arrived at the Red Factory social centre off Portland Square, Bristol armed with one of our mobile LTSP servers, 3 of our posher LTSP client laptops, one of our 30 quid Linux PCs and some bumf about free software and BW to assist in the […]

LTSP at ECC

Over the last few weeks Bristol Wireless volunteers have been installing seven LTSP workstations for public use in the foyer of Easton Community Centre in Kilburn Street. In keeping with our greener credentials, the Compaq workstations (also known as clients. Ed.) run on minimal power, having no moving parts such as hard disks and optical […]

LTSP goes to Manchester

July 15-16th Bridgewater hall Bristol Wireless took its new revised LTSP suite for 2 days to the Substance Conference in Manchester. The Dell server laptop has been newly installed and the Evo T20 thin clients have been configured on the server, 7 flat screens and 3 laptops made up a suite of 10 machines: it […]

Where Bristol Wireless leads, Tesco follows

Following on from Bristol Wireless’ sale of internet-ready Linux computers for £50, news reaches the lab that well-known supermarket chain Tesco, once described by a TV comedy programme as “the world’s first retail state”, has now commenced sales of entry level PCs with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Tesco’s Linux machines cost slightly more than ours do, […]

Farewell to Matt

At the start of the weekend Matt Toseland sent a message to our general list announcing he wouldn’t be able to make our monthly meeting in November. Apart from being a bit early, there’s nothing unusual in apologies from people unable to attend meetings. However, Matt has a good excuse: he’s moving to Scarborough (in […]

ODF 1, OOXML 0

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have rebuffed the efforts of Microsoft to have its Open Office XML (OOXML) document format accepted as an international standard. Of the 87 countries that participated in the vote, 26% opposed Microsoft’s bid. Under the […]

Near the hedge, but not ragged

Saturday at the Ragged Hedge Fair started bright and sunny, but to misquote the late Larry Grayson: “What a grey day”. As we’re running off solar, that’s not working at its full capacity due to cloud cover, although Clive, our power supplier, still has the wind. The free first hour of internet access for kids […]

Another weekend, another field… with a hedge

It’s Friday lunchtime and the Bristol Wireless/Psand cybertent at the Ragged Hedge Fair at Abbey Farm near Cirencester has running for about 2 hours now; the suite and the site wireless access (which I’m using) are all running off wind and solar power kindly provided by Magrec Ltd., next to whom we’re pitched. The advance […]

LTSP = Linux Terminal Schools Project?

In June Bristol Wireless were approached by Eddie Smith, Chair of Governors at St Werburghs Primary School to demonstrate our Linux thin client technology. On Monday 2nd July 2007 Bristol Wireless took the 12 volt LTSP suite plus three desktop thin clients to the classroom for two weeks since the school wanted to investigate the […]

Open source music at Trinity this weekend

Bristol Wireless’ Ben Green is organising a Linux Open Source Music Skill Share Day (phew – what a title! Ed.) from 10 am to 4 pm this Sunday, 8th July at Trinity Community Arts Centre, Trinity Road, Bristol BS2 0NW. Ben describes the event as: “A time to demonstrate the power of open source music, […]

BW network streams Venn Festival all over the place

Mike Harris writes: Did you know that Bristol Wireless is involved in a project called XtreamLab along with Psand, Micro-Film and the Venn Festival organisers? As part of the project we’re streaming 3 events for 3 days during Bristol’s Venn Festival and have a nice new website where you can find details, plus information on […]

Japanese government contemplates open source

Linuxworld reports that the Japanese government wants to use open source to reduce its reliance on a single vendor IT software infrastructure. A consortium of 10 major suppliers including Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell is being formed to develop and sell Linux servers and computers to the Japanese market. This follows the Japanese […]

New chat channel added

Psand.net, one of Bristol Wireless’ supporters, is now hosting and supporting #openitup, the IRC chat channel launched as part of the Openitup initiative funded by the National Computing Centre and the National ICT Hub. One promise from Openitup was to establish a channel of support voluntary sector workers could go to get real-time support and […]

Breakthrough by Bristol Wireless

Bristol Wireless is well known in the open source world for its love of playing with the bleeding edge of technology and this occasionally has some unexpected benefits. One of these is that today we publicly announce the development of a new networking protocol – WCTP – or wireless cider transmission protocol. Almost since its […]

Our man in London writes

Richard Higgs reports: “Sam Rossiter, Mike Harris of Psand and myself went to the Emirates Stadium for the second ICT Hub National Conference with about 270 reps from the voluntary sector. The day was organised into workshops and presentations for various levels of ICT skills. Some of the speakers were there to promote open source, […]