Debian developer Thomas Goirand has announced on his blog that a Debian disk image of the free and open source OpenStack cloud computing software platform is now available from cdimage.debian.org. Thomas writes: About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I’m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to […]
Asus have kindly lent Bristol Wireless a ChromeBox for evaluation and I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces. On opening the box I was surprised by its compact form; it’s about the size of a CD case and an inch high. The boot time’s impressive, taking only a few seconds to launch […]
A study by Prof. Jim Norton recommends that CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a report published today by Australia’s ITNews. The report was commissioned by travel business giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems […]
Casas Bahia is a major domestic electrical appliances retailer in Brazil with 53,000 employees and over 500 stores. For the last 5 years it’s been successfully running SuSE Linux on its mainframes and point-of-sale systems with zero downtime as the following video explains (with helpful subtitles in English for non-Portuguese speakers).
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Yes, you did read that correctly; today, Friday 29th July is System Administrator Appreciation Day, the 12th since its inception. For 364 days of the year sysadmins toil away unappreciated, their arcane skills only really being noticed when a problem needs sorting out (and nobody can do any work at all until the sysadmin’s done […]
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 […]
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, […]
It’s been a while (almost 2 years to the day. Ed.) since we last looked at Gnucash, the personal and small-business software that’s available for free under the GPL for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows (news passim). Yesterday in the lab, Jules, our treasurer, announced that he’d migrated the Bristol Wireless […]
A brief email dropped into my inbox earlier this week pointing me in the direction of the blog of Joss Winn of Lincoln University. Joss relates his experiences over 10 years of running a Linux desktop on a Mac (several actually. Ed.). At the start of his experiences Joss relates: The first time I installed […]
A few years ago I stumbled across a cracking little application which helped me no end as an introduction to Linux. Wubi is an Ubuntu Linux installer designed for Windows. The great thing about this application is that the benefits of the open source world are literally just a simple mouse click away. The installation […]
Yesterday John Headstrong, an old friend and supporter of Bristol Wireless, posted the following on his Twitter feed: My 6 year old son is currently installing Ubuntu. What is your excuse for not installing it ? #ubuntu Ubuntu Linux: so simple a 6 year-old can install it. Excuses below in the comments please. 😀
Yesterday Jules, our Bristol Wireless treasurer, took delivery of a brand new Eee PC. Needless to say, Jules chose a model with Linux – a proper operating system. Moreover, ever since he bought it he has had his nose stuck in reference materials and been hacking it around to customise it to meet his needs. […]
Being on a low income it’s virtually impossible to find the money needed to gain access to the latest computer operating systems and software. Many times I’ve found myself angry at being denied access to software simply because of my economic status. I was therefore presented with two options: the first being to use pirated […]
If any one is interested in trying out a bit of digital Djing I would highly recommend Mixxx. I stumbled across it a few months ago whilst having a browse through the Synaptic package manager and to be honest with you, I love IT. It’s quite a simple application to use and the graphical features […]
Bristol Wireless volunteer Tony Stone has been experimenting with increasing the range of USB wifi dongles and has come up with a splendid bit of home-made kit. In Tony’s own words: I was having trouble picking up my local WiFi hotspot. I was using a USB dongle and added an extension cable to put it […]
When I saw that as the subject line in an email we’ve received, I thought it was a great way to open a testimonial to Linux. Last week we had a visitor in the lab who bought one of our splendid £30 computers. Normally, we don’t hear from our customers: the machines just keep running […]