Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.5, the fifth release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family. Following the release last week of LibreOffice 5.1 (posts passim), LibreOffice 5.0.5 becomes the latest in the “still” series of releases; the “still” series is a stable version that has undergone more testing over a lengthy and is recommended for deployment in large organisations.
Those interested in the release’s technical details can consult the change logs for both the RC1 bug fixes and RC2 bug fixes.
Professional support
The Document Foundation suggests large scale deployments of LibreOffice 5.0.5 are undertaken only with the backing of professional level 3 support from certified developers, for which the LibreOffice website has a list.
Furthermore, when migrating to LibreOffice from proprietary office suites, organisations should seek professional support from certified migration consultants and trainers, which are listed on the same LibreOffice professional support web page.
Supporting LibreOffice
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation by making a donation.
In addition, supporters can also buy LibreOffice merchandise from the brand new project shop.
It’s 14th February, better known to the world as St. Valentine’s Day. It’s therefore also time to say “thank you” to all free software users and developers on what’s also become the “I love FreeSoftware Day“, according to the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
The FSFE is asking all free software users to use the traditional day of love to think of the hard-working people contributing to the free software we all depend on.
Free software drives a huge number of devices in our everyday life. It ensures our freedom, our security, civil rights, and privacy. It enables everyone to participate in a fair society. However, everyone is different and people have different reasons to love free software.
Your ‘umble scribe relies on free software to play an active part in society and do his work. He’d therefore like to pay thanks to the following people:
The Document Foundation has announced the release today of LibreOffice 5.1, a full featured open source office suite with superior interoperability features, for all major platforms – Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.
Compared with previous releases, LibreOffice 5.1 offers a completely overhauled user interface and several improved features targeted at enterprise deployments, e.g. better support for ODF 1.2, interoperability with proprietary document formats and file management on remote servers.
LibreOffice has been downloaded 120 million times since its launch in January 2011 and is now being deployed by large organisations around the world, the latest addition being for Italian defence staff with over 100,000 desktops (posts passim).
LibreOffice 5.1 Highlights
User Interface: LibreOffice 5.1’s user interface has been completely reorganised to provide faster, more convenient access to its most used features. A new menu has been added to each of the applications: Style (Writer), Sheet (Calc) and Slide (Impress and Draw). In addition, several icons and menu commands have been repositioned based on user preferences.
Interoperability: Compatibility with proprietary document formats – principally MS Office formats – has been improved as a part of continuing efforts for better interoperability with other office packages. The latest interoperability changes include the addition of filters for Apple Keynote 6, Microsoft Write and Gnumeric files.
Spreadsheet Functions: Calc’s formula engine has been improved with features addressing restrictions in table structured references and sticky column/row anchors, interoperability with OOXML spreadsheets and compatibility with ODF 1.2
File Access on Remote Servers: Files stored in the cloud on remote servers such as Sharepoint, Google Drive and Alfresco can now be accessed from the File menu, with read and write options and without the need of a dialog window.
LibreOffice 5.1 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers. Their work has produced an open source office suite that’s easier to develop, maintain and debug. Although this is not visible to users, it is extremely important for enterprise deployments.
“LibreOffice 5.1 is another step forward to fulfilling our vision of an office suite tailored on user needs and preferences”, says Bjoern Michaelsen, a Director at The Document Foundation (TDF) and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through different development cycles to clean up the code and make it more responsive. We are now at a stage where we are close to providing a better user interface.”
Availability and enterprise deployments
LibreOffice 5.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites and is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.0.x branch (soon at 5.0.5). In any case, TDF suggests deploying or migrating to LibreOffice with the backing of certified professionals providing Level 3 support, migration consultancy or trainings according to recognized best practices (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
LibreOffice 5.1 is available for immediate download. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and all community members can also support The Document Foundation with a donation.
UNICEF, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, has launched a US $9 mn. fund to promote technology start-ups.
The conditions for the programme include the following:
The project must be able to improve the living conditions of young people;
There must must a working prototype of the technology available;
Everything must be made available under an open source licence.
In addition, the start-ups must be registered in a country with an active UNICEF programme. This therefore excludes start-ups based in developed economies in North America and Europe.
The sponsorship is being targeted from the outset solely at smaller companies and the maximum capital injection will usually amount to a maximum US $100,000 per company. UNICEF has no intention of taking a stake in the successful start-ups in return for its funding; the fact that the technology will be open source will be sufficient reward for UNICEF. Networking possibilities and technical support are also promised in addition to funding.
The projects should focus on new possibilities for training and social participation, optimising management by making real-time data available or improving infrastructure in the fields of transport, network access or finance. Everything is possible from blockchain applications to drone hardware via 3D printing. Candidates for funding must apply by 26th February.
Kolab Systems, creators of Kolab, the leading open source groupware and collaboration framework, today announced a partnership with Collabora Productivity, the architects behind LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based office productivity suite.
The first version of Kolab with integrated CloudSuite functionality is due to appear around the middle of 2016.
Collabora’s CloudSuite web-based document product will be available as an integrated component in Kolab. The integration of CloudSuite into Kolab will allow users to work on documents simultaneously using a fully-featured online office suite from within the Kolab collaboration suite. Users will be able to create text documents, fill in spreadsheets and design presentations together, even when they are in different locations. Documents can later be saved in popular formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and MS-compatible formats. The CloudSuite offering also comes with Collabora Office, a professional LibreOffice distribution, for offline use on the desktop.
CloudSuite complements Kolab’s integrated editor, which is also gaining collaborative editing capabilities. Users will be able to collaborate in real-time composing emails, setting agendas for meetings or adding contacts to distribution lists before sharing their work with colleagues and clients.
“For too long, closed and insecure solutions have been the industry standard for office and groupware productivity,” said Kolab System’s CEO, Georg Greve. “With this partnership Collabora and Kolab are taking the lead, not only with bleeding edge technological innovation and an office stack with full, user-friendly and comprehensive collaborative features, but also with a product that respects users’ freedoms, protects their privacy, and guarantees their work will not be locked away in proprietary formats.”
“Collabora Productivity is delighted to provide a key building block in Kolab’s comprehensive, new offering,” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “Kolab Systems have been a leading light in open source for many years and we look forward to supporting their ambitious growth plans in the enterprise sector and beyond.”
This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday.
These days the free online encyclopaedia is the world’s seventh most popular website and now includes more than 38 million articles in 289 languages, all maintained by an army of volunteer editors and contributors.
Andy Mabbett, one of that army of editors and contributors, has been musing on Twitter as to how Wikipedia will react having reached this chronological milestone.
Over the last 15 years, although the project was originally initiated by Anglophone geeks, Wikipedia has been working to increase the diversity of its content and contributors through outreach programmes such as edit-a-thons at universities and museums and by trying to appoint more women administrators. However, there is still plenty of work to be done in this field.
The Wikipedia website and the open source Mediawiki software it runs on are managed by the Wikimedia Foundation charity, which is funded by donations, the vast majority of them from small donors.
To mark Wikipedia’s 15th birthday the Foundation has created an endowment fund that it hopes will raise $100 mn. over the next 10 years.
Happy birthday, Wikipedia – and may you enjoy many, many more.
Miklos Vajna of open source consultants Collabora has produced a short video showing the recent changes in mail merge in LibreOffice.
If you ever used the mail merge wizard with a Calc data source, then you know how it worked in the past: you’ve got 3 files: the .odt mail template, the .ods data source and a .odb data source definition that defines how to access the .ods.
The procedure has now been changed. As of LibreOffice 5.1, the .odb data source has been eliminated and the .ods data source is now embedded directly the .odt mail template.
As part of Alternative Bristol’s Breaking the Frame series of talks, an email encryption talk for beginners will be taking place at Hydra Books in Old Market Street, Bristol (map) from 7.30-9.30 p.m. on Friday 22nd January.
How public key encryption works
According to the organisers, an ordinary e-mail is like a postcard without an envelope: anybody who can put their hands on it can read it. Unlike a postcard an email is copied (rather than moved) to many different computers on its travels. All of these computers’ owners we can’t possibly trust and know. This makes them feel uncomfortable and is not necessary with simple email
encryption.
After this short (one hour!) workshop attendees will be able to email anyone else who makes it to the workshop without the email being intercepted by a third party.
Certain organisations (e.g. journalists, unions, activists, etc.) have a responsibility to transmit sensitive messages securely and currently do not always do this. Don’t think what does this one email say about me? (or its recipient), think rather when examined en masse over time (most emails are stored indefinitely these days) what does this reveal about the way you live?
It would save time if prospective attendees had Thunderbird set up and receiving your emails. If you have Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, it would help if you installed both Thunderbird and GPG before attending the talk. If you already use email encryption and want to help or share your key please come by too. No experience necessary, but if you have a laptop and USB stick please bring them with you.
Now that Christmas is just about out of the way for another year, the great speculation amongst Britain’s shoppers will be how soon into the New Year will Easter eggs appear on supermarket shelves. The customary 3 months as with all that Christmas tat? We’ll just have to wait and see.
As a user of free and open source software, I’ve had an early – or late – Easter egg already courtesy of the VLC media player, as shown below.
VLC media player wearing its Christmas hat
Unless you’re familiar with the language of tech aficionados, the previous statement and accompanying screenshot are probably incomprehensible.
In software an Easter egg is defined as “an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in an interactive work such as a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen. The name has been said to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt“.
One of the first occurrences of what are now known as Easter eggs appeared in the Atari video game Adventure, having been planted there by computer game developer Warren Robinett. It wasn’t too fancy or interesting, just a hidden object planted in the game that led to a screen that said “Created by Warren Robinett.” The developer had buried this object within the game code as Atari didn’t credit its games developers at the time.
Anyway, returning to the screenshot above, the Santa hat on the VLC program logo (the traffic cone in the middle of the window. Ed.) appears each year for the Christmas holiday period only; for the rest of the year, the logo is hatless.
Besides VLC, some well-known and widely used applications have also contained Easter eggs. For instance, Easter eggs in the 1997 version of Microsoft Office include a hidden flight simulator in Microsoft Excel and a pinball game in Microsoft Word, whilst on all Microsoft Windows operating systems before XP, entering the text “volcano” in the 3D Text screen saver will display the names of all the volcanoes in the United States. Microsoft removed this Easter egg in XP but added others. Microsoft Excel 95 contained a hidden Doom-like action game called The Hall of Tortured Souls.
Turning away from Microsoft, Apple is also not immune from Easter eggs. In 2012 an update to the Mac App Store for OS X Mountain Lion introduced an Easter egg in which apps, during the download process, were timestamped “January 24, 1984,” the date the original Macintosh went on sale. However, Easter eggs were not popular with Apple’s founder, the late Steve Jobs, who went through bouts of banning them.
In addition to being sophisticated and/or laden with deep significance, some Easter eggs can be very simple and bereft of any meaning, merely reflecting the playful personality of their creators. Here’s a prime example from the GNU/Linux apt-get command line tool used for managing software packages. Typing the command apt-get moo results in something similar to the following screenshot.
The output of typing the command apt-get moo in the Linux terminal
Anyway, I’m enjoying my festive Easter egg and I hope it’s not too late to wish all readers and visitors to this site the compliments of the season.
This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday. 
