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Was our prediction of the end of open source at Bristol City Council premature?

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless News, Local IT News, Open Source News July 13, 2011 Comments Off

Bristol City Council logo Some time ago, we speculated about the possible end of open source use at Bristol City Council following the decision to replace Star Office with Microsoft Office 2010 (news passim) and allegations of bad behaviour involving one of the council’s suppliers.

It now seems these speculations may have been premature in the light of a post today by Mark Ballard in Computer Weekly’s blogs.

Mark interprets the silence of some of the major players involved both inside and outside the Counts Louse as evidence that there is definitely something still happening down there in terms of open source and bearing out council leader Barbara Janke’s words to your correspondent that ‘the commitment to open source remains the same‘.

Furthermore, Mark makes some of the same pertinent points we at Bristol Wireless have been making to both councillors and officers for nigh on a decade, such as:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you can get a perfectly decent suite of office software for free, then buying a Microsoft Office suite that retails for £200 is a waste of tax payer’s money; or when you can get a perfectly decent operating system for nothing, then buying an operating system that retails for upwards of £200 is a waste of tax payers money.

Will they have more effect coming from a journalist writing for “the UK’s leading IT publication” than from a bunch of local geeks? Only time will tell.

In the meantime you might like to read Mark Ballard’s original article in full.

Bristol Girl Geek Dinners to meet Wikipedia soon

Steve Woods Local Events, Local IT News, Open Source News July 13, 2011 Comments Off

A new post has appeared today on the Bristol Girl Geek Dinners site.

We are currently planning an exciting event in collaboration with Wikipedia on the 18th August – Girl Geeks vs Wikimeet.

This will be a Girl Geek Dinner merged with a ‘Wikimeet’ including a talk from an inspiring female Wikipedian. The theme will be ‘Encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia’ as currently only 13-14% of Wikipedia editors are female. We are hoping to have a hands-on editing session alongside the traditional elements of our usual Girl Geek Event.

Venue and times to be confirmed. IF you would like to help us organise this event then please get in touch.

Canary Islands don’t get burnt in their choice of software

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News July 13, 2011 Comments Off

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), Capaware “gives a real-time forecast which allows to know the evolution and intensity of a fire,” according to José Pablo Suárez, Professor at the Department of Cartography and Engineering Graphic Design of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Suárez explained that the data provided by Capaware is “very important” for forecasting of such incidents as they help manage and control the fire, especially in hot weather.

The program was developed by professors at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University and the Technological Institute of the Canary Islands, together with a local private company; it has been recently published in the international journal ‘Computers and Geosciences’.

In the Canary Islands, Capaware has already been installed at the Insular Operations Coordination Centre (Centro de Coordinación Operativa Insular – Cecopin) of Cabildo de La Palma, where operators make use of it to perform fire simulations and to manage the available human and material resources during a real incident.

Capaware is released under the GNU General Public License.

For more information read CENATIC’s original Spanish report.

Doudoulinux – the right start for children in IT

Steve Woods Open Source News July 12, 2011 Comments Off

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 and 12 years. It aims at making computer use as simple and pleasant as possible.

The DoudouLinux project considers that current mainstream consumer computing environments do not suit children because they offer too many functionalities and require far more technical knowledge that children usually have. Consequently, DoudouLinux has built an environment specially for children.

Doudoulinux can either be run as a live CD, off a USB key or installed permanently on a hard drive. The system requirements are fairly modest too: a PC or Mac with a minimum specification of 256 MB memory and an 800 MHz processor, plus a monitor with a display resolution of 800 x 600.

To get the first stable release, codenamed Gondwana, visit the download page.

As this post goes to press, your correspondent is trying to arrange an actual consumer test and review with one of the youngest members of the Bristol Wireless community. 🙂

HLUG plans free public event for Software Freedom Day

Steve Woods Local Events, Open Source News July 8, 2011 Comments Off

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 at All Saints Church, High Street, Hereford from 10 am – 4 pm. We’d like to invite you along, and ask for your help in publicizing the event by including it in your newsletters and lists of forthcoming events etc.

HLUG has lots of free software discs to give away at the event and there will be a friendly team of expert volunteers answering questions and running demonstrations.

As part of this event, HLUG is working with local schools & colleges on a pioneering project to help bring the real educational and financial benefits of Open Source software to education.

Open Source software is free to use, with no license fees. It is high quality, stable and used by companies including Google, Twitter, Facebook and NASA, as well as behind the scenes in android phones, cashpoints, set-top boxes and in-flight entertainment systems. Open Source applications such as WordPress, Firefox and Libre Office are used by millions of people around the world in corporate, educational and home environments. Implementation of proven free software such as this can save an organization significant sums of money over purchasing traditional proprietary software.

For more information visit the HLUG site at http://www.hlug.org.uk or follow them on twitter at http://twitter.com/Hfd_LUG and facebook at http://tinyurl.com/3ym78gy or email hlug (at) hlug.org.uk

Regards,

Herefordshire Linux & Open Source Users Group

Internet freedom becomes part of EU foreign policy

Steve Woods International IT News July 8, 2011 Comments Off

The European Parliament has decided that internet freedom is a component of EU foreign policy, according to the Dutch news site, Nu.nl.

On account of this step, it shall be EU policy to condemn countries outside the EU as soon as they censor the internet or other means of communication.

According to Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake, this step is also necessary to regulate other freedoms.

She states: “In Tunisia for example the first steps are being taken to censor the internet. This is of course disastrous for the promise of the revolution.” Schaake regards internet freedom as an essential component of democracy.

She also believes hard work must be done within the EU to defend an open internet. “We could seem barely credible as a world player that guarantees internet freedom if we don’t have our own house in order. We also still have plenty of work to do in Europe,” she states.

Read the original article (in Dutch).

Bristol holds its second Wiki Academy

Steve Woods Local Events, Local IT News, Open Source News July 6, 2011 Comments Off

Wikimedia UK logo 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 from Martin Poulter, with some impressive facts and figures on the scope of the world’s fifth most-visited website, including the five pillars of Wikipedia.

Martin was followed at the presentation laptop by Jez who gave a brief summary on quality standards for Wikipedia articles, as well as how articles progress up the scale from stubs right through to featured article status, as well as introducing us to the Wikipedia Bristol Project.

After this, the Academy got down to some practical work, with any new users creating login accounts, setting up user pages and making their first tentative edits with the assistance of the more experienced Wikipedians.

Woodsy of Bristol Wirelessgiving a relaxed sit-down presentation at the Wiki Academy — BW's Woodsy giving a relaxed sit-down presentation at the Wiki Academy. Picture courtesy of Sam Downie

After lunch, the floor was given over to your correspondent, who spoke briefly on the open source and open content aspects of Wikipedia, plus how open source was beneficial to a small organisation such as Bristol Wireless (the dunderhead forgot to mention that open source is also scalable and can be used by organisations of all sizes and types. Ed.).

The afternoon then moved onto examining the some of the concerns of the new contributors. One that stuck in my mind was the one of the vandalism of articles raised by Makala from Knowle West Media Centre.

However, not all that was discussed was negative; some positive elements emerged. These included tentative plans to hold a Knowle West ‘editathon’ at some future date.

Another positive and very welcome development was the high proportion of women involved; I reckon the male-female ratio was 60:40 – a stark contrast with the general 87:13 ratio for Wikipedia as a whole.

The event was also the first outing – and his first day in the job – for Sam Knight, Bristol University’s Wikimedia Outreach Ambassador.

The day was rounded off by Steve Virgin summarising the scope of the work that Bristol has contributed to Wikipedia over the last year or so, as well as reminding us all that Wikipedia is just the most visible part of the work of the Wikimedia Foundation that also embraces Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons and MediaWiki (phew! Ed.).

Finally, a couple of acknowledgements: firstly, a big thank-you to the BBC Anchor Trust for their hospitality in hosting the event; and secondly no thanks to BT for the lousy quality of the ‘broadband’ connection we were trying to use.

Update 07/07/11: further reports of the day have now been posted on the UK Wikimedia blog and Rita Madeira’s blog.

City of Munich to move 12,000 desktops to Ubuntu Linux

Steve Woods International IT News, Local IT News, National IT News, Open Source News July 1, 2011 2 Comments »

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 that the Bavarian City of Munich (population: 1.35 mn.) is to move 80% of its desktops to Ubuntu, the same Linux distro used by Bristol Wireless for its refurbished computers.

Later this year, some 8,500 of Munich’s PCs will be using this open source operating system and office applications. So far 6,500 PCs have been switched to open source. At the end of next year, the city will have about twelve thousand PCs running Ubuntu.

Read the full report on Munich’s move to Ubuntu.

This move will enable Munich city council to enjoy the reliability and cost savings that other public sector bodies around the world have gained from deploying open source.

One would have thought the cash-starved British public sector would follow suit. However, given that the UK’s public administrations, including Bristol City Council, to whom we in Bristol Wireless have been advocating the benefits of open source for nearly a decade, are determined to continue handing over billions of pounds a year to the purveyors of proprietary software – and this is happening in spite of the squeeze on public finances. 🙁

Bristol Wiki Academy no. 2 coming soon

Steve Woods Local Events, Local IT News, Open Source News, Training, Volunteering June 25, 2011 1 Comment »

Wikimedia Foundation logo Following on from its first manifestation (news passim), a second Bristol Wiki Academy is now being planned to take place shortly on Monday, 4th July 2011.

It will be hosted jointly by the BBC Anchor Project and Wikimedia UK.

The details, including the venue, are still being worked out. However, the purpose of the day is to provide an opportunity where people can learn about Wikipedia and its sister projects, including how to contribute.

The event is free, but pre-registration is necessary. If you are interested, send a short email to martin.poulter (at) wikimedia.org.uk and say why you’d like to come to the event. A small number of places are available on a first come, first served basis.

More information will follow as it becomes available.

New CiviCRM versions released

Steve Woods Open Source News June 24, 2011 Comments Off

CiviCRM logo 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: Drupal 6 / Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.5 / Joomla 1.6 sites. The newest CiviCRM versions are:

4.0.4 for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6
3.4.4 for Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5

Read the full release report on the CiviCRM blog.

Hungarian government to adopt Open Document format

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News June 23, 2011 Comments Off

ODF logo OSOR reports that the Hungarian government wants to use the Open Document Format, an open, non-proprietary format for electronic documents, as a default for its documents. Zsolt Nyitrai, Minister of State for ICT, told parliament earlier this month that legislation to use ODF by default is being prepared.

The ODF plans were announced on 1st June, during a conference entitled “The Parliament of Information Society” held in the Hungarian Parliament.

The Hungarian Open Document Format Alliance (ODFA Magyarország) welcomed the government policy in a statement published on 14 June: “Today real change starts. The government’s decision will allow government and users of e-government services, local governments, businesses and citizens to use cost-effective software solutions based on open standards without any hindrance.”

A 2008 by ODFA Magyarország study showed that government use of ODF will result in significant cost savings and the organisation has also offered technical support to the government to implement the change to ODF.

Read the original OSOR article in full.

When is the UK going to look at ODF adoption? From the editor’s chair, it looks like world + dog is leaving the UK public sector further and further behind.

Open source & Bristol City Council – a brief(ish) round-up

Steve Woods Local IT News, Open Source News June 22, 2011 3 Comments »

Bristol City Council logo Information is slowly emerging about the future of open source – or its end – at Bristol City Council (news passim). The Counts Louse has for the most part been a lone flag-bearer for open source since its brave (and now reversed) decision to ditch MS Office and adopt an open source alternative some 5 or so years ago; the only other English local authority to show any enthusiasm for open source is the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

A couple of weeks ago, came the surprise announcement that Sirius Corporation, one of the country’s leading open source suppliers, had had its open source consultancy with Bristol City Council abruptly terminated. This story has been covered extensively by Computer Weekly in both its IT Management and blog sections, as well as by Bristol 24/7.

One consequence of the end of the relationship between Sirius and Bristol City Council is that Bristol will be missing out on some new jobs being created – and Bristol has based a large part of its employment strategy on developing the digital/creative industries. On 18th June Sirius’ Chief Executive Mark Taylor tweeted:

Well I’m very sorry to say that we’ve just cancelled our (well advanced) plan to open an office in the city centre 🙁

As one of the country’s leading open source outfits had abandoned Bristol, one might begin to question the City Council’s commitment to open source. Indeed, your correspondent, cunningly disguised as a member of the public, emailed council leader Barbara Janke about the council’s commitment to open source, highlighting the reliability, lack of licensing fees and lower support costs of open source. Another point I raised with Barbara Janke was the fate of Cllr Mark Wright, the cabinet member with responsibility for IT in the last council and a firm open source advocate, as he did not feature in the new cabinet after the May 2011 council election.

Barbara Janke’s reply is reproduced below.

You are correct that Mark was not re-elected to the Lib Dem cabinet this time. In the current cabinet I have responsibility for ICT in the current cabinet. The commitment to open source remains the same. Mark continues to advise me on this. The council is also heavily engaged with the external digital media and creative sector and this area lies within my area of responsibility.

So there you have it. Bristol City Council remains committed to open source. Perhaps someone less trusting of the City Council than your ‘umble scribe should file a FoI request to ask the council just how far their commitment stretches.

As regards the fate of Mark Wright, Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly has done some fine investigatory work and discovered that Wright’s ousting from the cabinet was a result of internal party politics, not part of a conspiracy to do down open source wherever it reared its head in the public sector. Read Mark Ballard’s Computer Weekly post.

AVM vs Cybits: A small computer is still a computer, says the FSFE

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News June 22, 2011 Comments Off

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 debate is the Linux kernel, distributed under the GNU GPL which guarantees exactly this freedom to users. Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and gpl-violations.org today published a detailed report about the hearing.

FSFE logo “Users have the right to decide for themselves which software they want to run on their computers. If AVM, or any other company, does not want to adhere to the GNU General Public License, they should not use GPL-licensed software,” says Matthias Kirschner, FSFE’s co-ordinator for Germany.

“AVM wants to keep and extend its monopolistic power over those devices, even after they have been sold. Not only does this conflict with the GNU GPL license of the Linux kernel, it is also anti-competitive,” says Harald Welte, a Linux kernel contributor and founder of gpl-violations.org project.

The court made no decision in yesterday’s hearing. The parties may file further written pleas. The court may then either give an immediate verdict or begin hearing oral evidence. FSFE and gpl-violations.org will continue to monitor the case and defend the freedom of software users.

It’s AGM time

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless Events, Bristol Wireless News June 21, 2011 1 Comment »

Your correspondent, in his guise as company secretary, has just sent the following notice to members of the co-operative and our general mailing list:

NOTICE OF AGM

The Annual General Meeting of Bristol Wireless for 2010 will be held at 6.30 pm on Tuesday 5th July 2011 in the Lab, Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, BS3 4EA following our regular monthly meeting. After the AGM we shall adjourn to a nearby place of refreshment .

All members are welcome to attend.

Agenda for AGM

Receipt of the accounts and balance sheet and the reports of the Committee and auditor;

Appointment of an auditor or the application of the audit exemption (in accordance with rule 54);

Election of committee members;

Application of profits:

firstly, to a general reserve for the continuation and development of the Co-operative;

secondly, in making payments for social or charitable purposes within the community served by the Co-operative.

We extend a warm welcome to all wishing to attend our Annual General Meeting. However, voting at the AGM will be restricted to members of the Co-operative (if you wish to join cross our Treasurer’s palm with the customary £1 fee!).

Steve Woods
Company Secretary, 21st June 2011

A trip to BarnCamp 2011

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless News, National Events, Open Source News, Training June 15, 2011 2 Comments »

On Monday the advance crew – by now known as the tat-down team and consisting mostly of Bristol Wireless volunteers – arrived back tired but satisfied from the rural Barncamp site up the Wye Valley.

barncamp_wifi — Bristol Wireless erects a rustic wifi antenna using locally available materials. Picture courtesy of Ludwig van Standardlamp

Our journey began the previous Wednesday afternoon, when the advance crew got to site after a frantic best part of the morning and afternoon spent running around Bristol, loading the van with the kit and food that would be needed for setting up a long weekend event for a few dozen people.

Setting up started gently with our arrival on site on Wednesday, clearing the barn area so that work and catering areas could be established. Thursday morning saw us raising 2 tents – one for workshops and the other as the kids’ space. A neat touch to the infrastructure this year was the use of solar-powered LED lighting at strategic points around the site (e.g. around the marquee guy ropes and in the toilets).

A full workshop of events was held during the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, featuring talks and hands-on sessions with the Drupal CMS package, HTML5 and fractals, social networking with Diaspora, non-corporate email and lists, Bitcoin, broadcasting with Airtime, OpenStreetMap and many, many more topics. A couple of non-technical sessions were also arranged, including Ben’s ever popular wild food walk and Pete’s knot workshop.

h4x0rzz in hacktion. Picture courtesy of Ludwig van Standardlamp

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the event was the launch of Catalyst Radio. The final stages in its conception were put in place and Catalyst began broadcasting from site on the Saturday; this included the magnificent Saturday night entertainment, featuring live folk music by Adelayde, Martian and Mr Green, 90s sing-along karaoke by Mick Fuzz and Ana and her lovely acoustic guitar, music, to name but some.

A first for BarnCamp this year was the addition of board games sessions (Risk and chess), plus a DIY hardware hacking workshop, including tuition in soldering.

For a fuller idea of the scope of the event, see the HacktionLab website.

Finally, your ‘umble scribe on behalf of all the 2011 BarnCampers, would like to thank our hosts at Highbury Farm for all their kind assistance and hospitality.

Tunisia launches Taskforce Opensource

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News June 7, 2011 Comments Off

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 topics related to Free Software. Anyone can take part (citizens, public and private sectors, civic society, teachers, educators, etc.). Don’t hesitate to tell us your ideas in order to benefit from the potential for employability, entrepreneurship, innovation and growth offered by free software.

There’s lots more ideas on the Taskforce Opensource website and the initiative can also be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Sometimes, your correspondent feels that the UK is being left behind by the rest of the world… 🙁

The end of open source down the Counts Louse?

Steve Woods Local IT News, Open Source News June 3, 2011 3 Comments »

The UK public sector has been characterised as an impregnable fortress as far as open source software is concerned. While public sector bodies in other countries are adopting open source (news passim), the British public sector is a virtual closed shop for advocates of openness (in terms of software).

This dire situation has been further reinforced by the proposed actions of our very own dear (do you mean dear in the sense of expensive or affection? Ed.) Bristol City Council.

News reaches then lab via the grapevine and a recent FoI request that the City Council is to abandon its open source Star Office office suite and replace it with Microsoft Office 2010. The text of the FoI request reads:

This is a request for information made under the Freedom of Information Act. I understand the council has recently decided to ‘upgrade’ its office IT systems by installing Microsoft Windows 7 and Office 2010.

I would be grateful if you could let me know the overall cost of these actions.

I would also like to know if any open source alternatives were considered. If they were, I would like to know which systems/packages were considered and the reasons they were rejected.

Bristol City Council was widely praised for its vision when it adopted Star Office as opposed to MS Office. Indeed, Gavin Beckett of the City Council stated in a conference presentation that one of the reasons for the council’s adoption of the open source office suite was that renewing the Microsoft Office licence would have resulted in a 1 percentage point increase in Bristol’s council tax.

Money is now much tighter in the public sector, so we’re wondering how the council is going to pay for the Office 2010 licence, particularly as council tax has been capped. Will public services and/or staff be cut to pay for the Counts Louse’s largesse to Microsoft? Perhaps someone – councillor or officer – from BCC would like to comment below.

Finally, another indirect effect of BCC’s return to the closed source fold is that this will have a negative effect on efforts to have Open Document Format (ODF) adopted as the standard means of exchange for public documents – something that is a reality in some of the UK’s EU partners.

Allergy warning: may contain traces of GNU

Steve Woods Open Source News June 1, 2011 Comments Off

gnu-and-tux_tn — Gnu and Tux - a pair of open source superheroes

It has long been the habit of purists (don’t you mean pedants? Ed.), such as rms, to correct those who call our favourite operating system Linux by reminding them that it should actually be termed GNU/Linux as it’s actually the GNU operating system with Linus Torvalds‘ Linux kernel.

So, like me, you might have been wondering just how much GNU there actually is in a typical Linux distribution.

This question has now been answered by Pedro Côrte-Real. He’s looked at the number of lines of code to determine the proportion of GNU software in a modern Linux distribution by looking at the software available in the main repository of the Natty Narwhal version (aka 11.04) of Ubuntu, which was released earlier this year.

Pedro’s investigations reveal that just 8% of Ubuntu Natty is comprised of GNU. Other major components include Gnome (5%), kde (8%), Mozilla (6%) and the Linux kernel (9%), as shown by the pie chart below.

Pedro has also dug out some more interesting facts about where GNU fits into Linux, which you can read in his original post.

North Korea manufacturing computers – and they’re running Linux

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News May 26, 2011 1 Comment »

PC World reports that North Korea has started manufacturing computers, according to a report on North Korean state TV.

The range of machines available consists of two for educational use and one for office use.

The educational computers both run the same custom software and come in two versions: one is a netbook-sized laptop, whilst the other is a bland-looking box with a keyboard and mouse that’s designed to be connected to a television.

The machines are reported to use Red Star Linux – North Korea’s home-grown version of our favourite operating system.

Read the original PC World article.

Public internet access – Albany (OR) has lessons for Bristol UK

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless News, International IT News, Open Source News May 25, 2011 2 Comments »

Firefox logo Public internet access in libraries is a well established service nowadays. Indeed it’s been in existence here in Bristol for so long that one hardly ever gives it a thought. However, the other day Jules, the Bristol Wireless Treasurer, emailed the chief scribe with a tale from Albany in Oregon, where he’s currently sojourning.

Jules takes up the story below:

Well, I have just been putting the finishing touches to the Helmore & Hunt website this weekend, so Monday comes and I decide it is time to test it with the dreaded Microsoft Internet Explorer (affectionately known to some as Idiot Exploiter or Internet Exploder. Ed. 😉 ). Living in an Ubuntu household, this is a bit of a challenge – so as the North West USA is the assumed land of Microsoft, we decide to visit Albany (Oregon) City Library to give the new website a thorough drive on Exploder.

Imagine our surprise when we log in to one of the many public library terminals to be confronted with Firefox running on Ubuntu! It is everywhere, proving that even our American cousins know what is really good for themselves …

Jules spies a quartet of machines tucked away in a corner sporting Windows log-ons, with a big sign saying: “These computers are for special and longer tasks only, such as job applications and government transactions. Ask a librarian before use.”

It is here that the story takes a curious turn, as Jules continues:

We attempt to explain our predicament, in that we actually ‘wanted’ to use Windows (purely for compatibility testing of course), to which the Librarian responds: “Aren’t all the other machines good enough for ya?” Grudgingly, she agreed to our request and the already W3C-compliant new H&H website rendered pretty good, even in Exploder.

Jules concludes by saying:

The question remains though as to just what job applications and government transactions mean that Albany City Library still feels the need to keep an island of Windows machines in an otherwise Ubuntu-run ocean.

The chief scribe thinks – and concurs with Mr Treasurer – that the experience of Albany has lessons for our own dear Bristol City Council. Internet access is available in Bristol’s libraries. However, all the public access machines in use in Bristol’s libraries use the same proprietary operating system as the machines Albany sees fit to quarantine and whose use it makes subject to approval by a librarian. What is more, due to Windows’ inherent vulnerability and insecurity, our informants report that not all the public access machines are always available, meaning there are always queues.

Perhaps someone from Bristol City Council’s libraries and IT departments might like to arrange a visit to Bristol Wireless to discuss installing Ubuntu on library public access machines or even the adoption of thin client LTSP systems. Bristol Wireless has installed LTSP public access machines in both Easton Community Centre and St Werburghs Community Centre.

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