Linux | Steve Woods

The Document Foundation seeks boost to LibreOffice developer numbers

25/11/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation has announced a new drive to increase its developer community beyond the level of 1,000 reached in October 2015.

The growth of the LibreOffice developer community has been extraordinary, with a monthly average of over 16 new hackers contributing to the code since September 2010. This is due in the main to mentoring by the project’s founders. After five years and 1,000 new developers, though, the complexity has changed, and the project needs to invest on mentoring a new generation of coders.

LibreOffice has always been available on multiple operating systems – Linux, Mac OSX and Windows – and is now on the verge of being available on multiple platforms: desktop, mobile and cloud. Consequently, the project needs a wider range of developer skills, which can be achieved only with a renewed effort targeted to attract new contributors.

“When LibreOffice started, the codebase we inherited was known for being extremely hard to contribute to, for both technical reasons and a lack of mentors reaching out to new hackers,” says Bjoern Michaelsen, a member of LibreOffice engineering steering committee and a director of The Document Foundation. “Today, the LibreOffice project is known for its welcoming atmosphere, and for the fun. We strive to continue on this path for the next 1,000 code contributors.”
A World Without Linux – episode 4

23/11/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

The Linux Foundation has released episode 4 of its A World Without Linux video series.

Called “Avatar Reimagined”, this latest video sees characters Sam and Annie going to the pictures (as we used to call them when I was a lad. Ed.) to watch a film with really bad special effects to make the point that the effects in many blockbuster movies are made on Linux supercomputers.

The Linux Foundation commissioned six episodes for the series, leaving one left before the final episode featuring Mr Linux Kernel himself, Linus Torvalds.
Trusty Tahr brought down by cat

16/11/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail.

However, today proved an exception to the rule, courtesy of one filed a short while ago for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, codenamed “Trusty Tahr“, which has just come to prominence.

14.04, locked screen to go to lunch, upon return from lunch cat was sitting on keyboard, login screen was frozen & unresponsive.

To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard.

Resolution: Switched to virtual terminal, restarted lightdm, lost all open windows in X session.

What should have happened: lightdm not becoming unresponsive.

Ubuntu fans are now trying to reproduce this bug, including some who want to try and reproduce it with other pets, as per the latest comment on the bug report page reproduced below.

will it also work with a small dog, please some one with a small size dogs test it!

LightDM is the display manager running in Ubuntu. According to the Ubuntu Wiki, it starts the X servers, user sessions and greeter (login screen).

What’s a tahr? Wikipedia informs us that tahrs form a family of three species of large Asian ungulates related to the wild goat. The three species are the Himalayan tahr, Nilgiri tahr and Arabian tahr.

Finally, there are millions of pictures of cats and kittens all over the internet. Indeed, there’s even a Firefox add-on called Kitten Block that steps in whenever the user who has it installed attempts to access the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Express websites. However, there are far fewer pictures of tahrs. Let’s remedy that with a fine picture of a male Himalayan tahr courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hat tip: Softpedia
A world without Linux – episode 3: no social connections

09/11/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Social Media, Tech

Although you may not realise it, Linux is the world’s largest collaborative project in the history of computing. It runs most of the world’s technology infrastructure and is supported by more developers and companies than any other operating system. In addition, it’s ubiquitous; it can be found in your phone, car and office. Besides that, it also powers the internet, the cloud, stock exchanges, supercomputers, embedded devices and more.

The latest episode of the series tries to show us how hard it is to have social connections is a universe without Linux.

Three more episodes of this Linux Foundation series are planned, with the final video featuring Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds himself, according to Softpedia.
Alliterative Linux

22/10/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech
The Ubuntu Linux distribution is well known for its use of alliteration in the naming its releases.

This convention dates back to the release of version 5.04 which bore the name “Hoary Hedgehog“.

The latest in the series has just been announced: Softpedia reported yesterday that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be named Xenial Xerus.

What’s a Xerus and how is it xenial?

Wikipedia informs us that the genus Xerus is better known as African ground squirrels. These squirrels form a taxon of squirrels under the subfamily Xerinae and are only found in Africa. A family group of 3 Xerus inauris or Cape Ground Squirrel is shown to the left of this paragraph.

There are four species of African ground squirrels divided into three subgenera.

The subgenus Euxerus is made up of the Striped Ground Squirrel, Xerus erythropus, which lives in south-western Morocco, southern Mauritania and Senegal.

The subgenus Geosciurus consists of 2 species:
1. Cape Ground Squirrel, Xerus inauris (also called South African Ground Squirrel), native to Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa; and
2. Damara Ground Squirrel, Xerus princeps, native to south-western Angola and Namibia.
The subgenus Xerus also consists of just one species, the Unstriped Ground Squirrel, Xerus rutilus, whose home range is from north-eastern Sudan to north-eastern Tanzania.

As for xenial, that’s a great word whose definition is:

1. Hospitable, especially to visiting strangers or foreigners.
2. Of the relation between a host and guest; friendly.

In addition, Dictionary.com informs us that the word originates from the Greek xenía, meaning hospitality.

However, if you want your computing to be powered by a hospitable African ground squirrel, you’ll have to wait until next April!
A world without Linux – episode 1

06/10/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

Below is the first of what will a series of videos seeking to depict what the world would be like had Linus Torvalds not released his kernel 24 years ago, with that kernel then being combined with the tools produced by the GNU project to create a powerful and reliable operating system.

A World Without Linux is a web series that flips this reality on its head to illustrate entertainingly just how pervasive Linux is today.

The video itself reminds your correspondent of how much time he used to spend doing work research in reference libraries before the advent of the internet: now the internet comes to him, which is much more convenient. 🙂

Linux is the world’s largest collaborative project in the history of computing. It runs most of the world’s technology infrastructure and is supported by more developers and companies than any other platform. It’s everywhere – from your phone to your car and your office. It also powers the internet, the cloud, the world’s stock exchanges, supercomputers, embedded devices and more.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Linux kernel is 24 years young on Monday

03/10/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Although Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux kernel, announced his initial work on the kernel on 25th August 1991, it was not until 5th October 1991 that Linus actually released his code: Linux kernel 0.01.

Linus Torvalds in combative mood

With this October anniversary in mind, it’s worth taking a bit of time to review what’s changed to the kernel over the intervening years.

Version 0.01 of the kernel had 10,293 lines of code. In contrast, version 4.1, released in July 2015, has more than 19 million lines of code, according to Phoronix. That’s quite spectacular!

The current Linux kernel is the result of one of the largest collaborative projects ever attempted and since tracking began 10 years ago, more than 10,000 developers working from more than 1,200 companies have contributed to the kernel.

Furthermore, the speed of Linux kernel development is breathtaking. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 7.71, equivalent to 185 changes every day and nearly 1,300 per week.

This rapid development and collaboration have been a spur to others. Writing yesterday on the Linux Foundation blog, Jennifer Cloer states: “In recent years, the powerful growth of the Linux kernel and resulting innovation has inspired others to adapt the principles, practices and methodologies that makes Linux so successful to solve some of today’s most complex technology problems,” and, “We’ve learned so much from Linux and have no doubt that learning will continue.”

Originally posted on Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.
Windows 10 desktop: still catching up with early Linux

16/08/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

July 2015 saw the release of Windows 10.

One feature that Microsoft has been really making a great fuss about is the implementation (finally) of virtual desktops for the first time in a way that can be accessed easily by users.

A virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer’s desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen’s display area through the use of software. This compensates for a limited desktop area and can also be helpful in reducing clutter.

Microsoft is calling the Windows 10 implementation of virtual desktops Task View.

Windows 10 with Task View virtual desktops shown near the bottom of the screen.

Whenever a new release of Windows comes out, users of other operating systems such as Mac OS X and the various distributions of Linux, always wonder what baubles will be ‘copied’ from their OS of choice.

This time, it’s virtual desktops.

On Linux systems both major window/display managers – GNOME and KDE – have had virtual desktops for well over a decade.

Indeed, the first version of KDE, released 17 years ago in July 1998, included them, as shown in the following screenshot.

KDE version 1 showing 4 virtual desktops in use. The virtual desktops can be accessed via the taskbar or pager in the desktop’s top right-hand corner.

GNOME also included virtual desktops as early the GNOME 2.0 release which appeared in 2002.

Windows has actually had API support for virtual desktops since Windows NT 4, which was released back in 1996, which just shows how long it takes a lumbering quasi-monopolostic behemoth to get round to implementing things.

I’d sooner use an operating system that was a pioneer, rather than a laggard that attempted to imitate the best of others. 🙂
Plasma Mobile brings KDE 5 to the smartphone

28/07/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

At this year’s Akademy conference for KDE developers, the makers of the Linux desktop environment presented a version of the Plasma desktop for mobile devices, heise reports. Plasma Mobile will be an open alternative to today’s widely used mobile operating systems, but one in which the user’s privacy and freedom are to the fore.

An early development version of Plasma Mobile is running on the LG Nexus 5. It can be deployed with the Ubuntu Phone flashing tools. The developers have their sights on a usable version for the 2016 Akademy 2016. Ubuntu Phone serves as the technical foundation upon which the Qt GUI framework and KDE Frameworks runs, together with the Wayland display manager which brings the Plasma shell to the display. In addition to KDE and Qt apps, Plasma Mobile can also runs Ubuntu Mobile apps.

What’s a Xerus and how is it xenial?

Posts navigation