Tech | Steve Woods

LibreOffice 2015 Conference – call for papers

16/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech
The call for papers for this year’s LibreOffice Conference has today been announced on Twitter by Collabara’s LibreOffice team.

Proposals should be submitted by 15th July 2015 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference programme.

The conference programme will be based on the following topics:
- Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology;
- Quality Assurance;
- Localisation, Documentation and Native Language Projects;
- Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility;
- Enterprise and Public Sector Deployments and Migrations, Certifications and Best Practices;
- Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability; and
- Building a successful business around LibreOffice.
This year’s event will be held in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, from 23rd to 25th September inclusive.

Venue

The venue will be a completely new venue on the harbour in Aarhus called “Dokk1 – Urban Media Space Aarhus“.

Urban Media Space is described as “a flexible and dynamic sanctuary for everyone in search of knowledge, inspiration and personal development – an open and accessible learning environment supporting democracy and community and is also going to be an example of the library of the future.”

Conference communication channels

The official communication channel during the conference will be the conference mailing list, conference@global.libreoffice.org. All participants will automatically be subscribed to that list, whilst the archives can be browsed at http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/conference/.

Primary Danish conference contacts

The primary conference contacts in Denmark have likewise been announced; they are:
- Carsten Agger (Open Space Aarhus);
- Line Dybdahl (Municipality of Aarhus);
- Leif Lodahl (LibreOffice Denmark); and
- René Lagoni Neukirch (LibreOffice Denmark).
Microsoft finally enters 20th century

03/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Nearly one decade and a half into the 21st century, Microsoft has announced that it is finally going to enter the 20th century by offering SSH support for its PowerShell offering.

Windows PowerShell session screenshot. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This move means that users will in future also be able to access and administer other systems remotely using the SSH protocol.

In its implementation Microsoft will be backing the OpenSSH project, which is popular in the open source world; MS wants to join the project and contribute its own code. It is still not certain when the initial results of this work can be expected as things are currently in an early planning phase.

Microsoft becoming more open to open source

MS’ blog post also reports that the developer team has been attempting to extend PowerShell with SSH functionality for quite some time. This proposal was made as early as the first two versions of PowerShell, but was rejected. “Changes in the management and culture” of the company have now encouraged the development team to attempt it again. Pressure from the community and several requests via social media have resulted in the idea now having full senior management support.

The company has become more amenable to open source ever since Satya Nadella took over running the software giant and as a consequence the complete .NET framework has been released as open source.
Don’t let the Snoopers’ Charter bounce back

30/05/2015 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

In the Queen’s Speech the Government announced it’s going to introduce an Investigatory Powers Bill (posts passim). This is the new Snoopers’ Charter and will more than likely comprise even greater powers for the police and GCHQ to spy on British citizens. (Will the Government’s longer term aim of a British Bill of Rights comprise the right to be spied upon by the State? Ed.)

This is the fifth time a UK Government has tried to bring in a Snoopers’ Charter. The Home Office wants to give the police and intelligence services even more powers to look at what Brits do and who they talk to.

Do Britons really want to live in a country where all their communications are monitored by the State?

Precise details of the Home Office’s plans but there might be an attack on the encryption technology that helps keep our emails and online banking and shopping secure.

The police and intelligence services should concentrate on targeting people suspected of crimes instead of collecting everyone’s data all of the time.

It’s unclear whether the Home Office’s collect-it-all approach is effective or giving taxpayers value for money. The perpetrators of heinous crimes like the murder of Lee Rigby and the Charlie Hebdo attack were already known to the British and French intelligence services respectively, but those services decided to stop monitoring them due to lack of resources.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has set up a petition to campaign against the revived Snoopers’ Charter.

The text of the petition reads:

We demand an end to indiscriminate retention, collection and analysis of everyone’s Internet communications, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.

We want the police and intelligence agencies to have powers that are effective and genuinely protect our privacy and freedom of speech.

Sign the petition.

The ORG will also be organising a lobby day soon so supporters can go to Parliament, get a briefing about the Bill and then talk to their MPs.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless, with minor re-editing.
OpenMandriva’s next release to pay homage to its Mandrake heritage

29/05/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The sad news arrived earlier this week that French Linux gurus Madriva were being wound up (posts passim).

One of its community spin-offs, OpenMandriva, has now announced that its next release will be a tribute to its Mandrake heritage.

OpenMandriva’s history is well known. It was born at the end of 2012 with the help of the community and Mandriva SA to continue the work on the distribution after Mandriva SA could not continue to do so.

OpenMandriva has expressed its thanks to Mandriva SA for the latter’s initial support and it has wished former Mandriva employees well for the future.

The OpenMandriva Association was created to unite the distribution formerly known as Mandriva (aka Mandrake) and to return it to its roots through listening to peoples needs and getting closer to its users and developers. Since then OpenMandriva has been independent (though it still remains open to cooperative effort). It will continue to do this and will be releasing a new release of OpenMandriva Lx 3 (2015) in the near future that will include new features and an update of many of the core components.

OpenMandriva states that Mandrake was the first Linux distribution to make a free operating system available which could be installed and configured by anyone who could use a keyboard and a mouse. When many people first entered the “Linux” world, there were two types of distro: the ones that gave you headaches as soon as you put the CD in the drive; and Mandrake. The vision of Mandrake’s founder Gaël Duval created an operating system which undoubtedly allowed many, many people access to modern technology and in doing so added greatly to the strength of the free software community.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice Viewer for Android released

29/05/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices.

The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer.

LibreOffice Viewer also offers basic editing capabilities, like modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italics.

Editing is still an experimental feature which has to be enabled separately in the settings, and is not stable enough for mission critical tasks. Full-blown editing will be enabled in the future with
the help of LibreOffice’s steadily growing developer community. The editing features provided in the current release have been developed thanks to donations to The Document Foundation.

Feedback and bug reports for the app are very welcome to help developers improve its quality en route to a fully-fledged editor. Users are invited to report problems, using the bug tracker and attaching files that have triggered the issue at http://documentfoundation.hosted.phplist.com/lists/lt.php?id=N09VVkUAB00ABgsI.

LibreOffice Viewer uses the same engine as LibreOffice for Linux, OS X and Windows. This, combined with a new front-end based on Firefox for Android, reads documents similarly to a desktop version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Viewer has been developed by Collabora and Igalia, backed by Smoose, with contributions from Google Summer of Code students, together with The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community. SUSE provided a key foundation of cross-platform support, whilst the Mozilla Corporation – makers of Firefox- made several core components available.
The return of the Snoopers’ Charter

27/05/2015 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

Like a boomerang curry, the Snoopers’ Charter (posts passim) is back – and with a vengeance this time.

Home Secretary Theresa May, the woman who wants to read all your emails
Wired UK reports that this morning’s Queen’s Speech setting out the government’s legislative programme for the next year. In her speech in the House of Lords, the Queen said new legislation would “modernise the law on communications data.”

The new legislation will be known as the Investigatory Powers Bill and will not only cover everything included in the previously-blocked charter, but also allow security services to intercept the content of communications in bulk.

The Bill will allegedly “provide police and intelligence agencies with the tools” to keep people safe, whilst changes will also be made to close “ongoing capability gaps” that the government believes prevent law enforcement and intelligence services from tackling terrorism and serious crime. The new bill would also introduce “appropriate oversight and safeguard arrangements.” The latter are long overdue.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Adieu Mandriva

27/05/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Things were never easy for Mandriva, which was founded in 1999 as MandrakeSoft: with Mandrake Linux the company was originally aiming for a user-friendly desktop Linux. However, the major breakthrough for Linux on the desktop failed to appear and thus financial squeezes run like a strand through the company’s history in spite of the rapid expansion of the product portfolio for commercial solutions, German technology website heise reports.

The company did achieve a successful launch on the French stock market in 2001. However, MandrakeSoft had to apply for creditor protection only two years later. The company’s renaming as Mandriva took place in 2005 in the wake of the merger with Brazil’s Conectiva; Mandrake’s founder Gaël Duval left the company shortly afterwards due to a dispute.

There were financial problems once again in 2010 and Mandriva (at that time the company had over 70 employees) was looking for a buyer. Though an investor was eventually found, some 30 former Mandriva employees , developers and community members nevertheless founded the Mandriva fork Mageia at the end of that year. The fork was intended to ensure the continuity of Mandriva Linux since Mandriva’s commitment to its desktop Linux distribution had declined sharply. Insolvency loomed once again at the end of 2011, but was able to be repulsed ultimately with a recapitalisation.

The idea for OpenMandriva arose from the realisation that there was no money to be made with Linux for the desktop: an independent association was to continue producing Mandriva Linux as a community project. With Mageia and OpenMandriva there are now two community distributions, both of which have nevertheless lost some of their verve: the current Mageia 4 was released at the start of 2014; and OpenMandriva LX 2014.1 from September 2014. However, work is continuing on new versions of both distributions.

Mandriva is now in liquidation according to French company register societe.com. Lawyer Frédérique Lévy has been appointed as the administrator. The mandriva.fr and mandriva.com are no longer available.
Tidy BS5: reporting online

15/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech
Everywhere one travels in the United Kingdom, the common perception of residents is that their council is useless and costs too much.

Bristol is no exception to this commonly accepted opinion of local authorities.

In the past your correspondent has been no stranger to criticising Bristol City Council. However, there is one aspect of its operations where praise is due; and that’s its online presence. Compared with some local authority websites I have visited, Bristol City Council’s ranks amongst the best in my opinion. Indeed this blog has in the past praised Know Your Place, where one can get an intimate knowledge of the city and its long, proud history (posts passim). The open data section is worth a browse too.

Fly-posting: report it online

This amazingly useful online presence is also apparent if one is concerned with street care and cleaning in Bristol. This is where one can report and obtain information on all kinds of problems encountered in urban steets.

The following can all be reported online:
- Abandoned vehicles;
- Removing dead animals from the street;
- Dog & animal fouling;
- Drug & sex-related litter (i.e. needles, syringes, condoms);
- Fly-posting and graffiti;
- Fly-tipping;
- Grass cutting (on council-owned land);
- Litter and overflowing litter bins;
- Street & road problems, i.e. blocked/smelly road drains, damaged road bollards, damaged kerbs or pavements, noisy or faulty manhole covers/potholes, damaged bus stop or timetable information and trees and hedges causing an obstruction on the highway.
Graffiti or overflowing bin? Report it online

Reporting road and cleaning problems online is by far the most convenient way of letting the council know of any problems encountered and as such can help to expedite their remedying, so get reporting. Most problems seem to be resolved within the promised 2 working days, although I must point out to any passing councillors and/or BCC officers that the system does occasionally break down.
LibreOffice 4.4.3 released

08/05/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 80 fixes compared with the previous version, LibreOffice 4.4.2. The new features in LibreOffice 4.4.3 are listed on The Document Foundation wiki.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs for RC1 fixes and RC2 fixes respectively.

Download LibreOffice 4.4.3

LibreOffice 4.4.3 is available for immediate download. By following the download link, more conservative users can find the more tested LibreOffice 4.3.7. The document Foundation recommends all users update their installations to one of these two LibreOffice releases for security reasons.

Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference

The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in late July 2015 and your correspondent is already using a development release, LibreOffice 5.0.0.0 alpha1. Pre-release versions such as this are available from http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.

The first bug hunting session on the 5.0 beta release is scheduled from 22nd to 24th May. Details of this session are on The Document Foundation wiki.

Furthermore, the Call for Papers for LibreOffice Conference 2015 is open 15th July. The conference itself will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September.

The LibreOffice community is growing, and the bug hunting session and conference represent exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localised the software, squashed bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences and acted as advocates for LibreOffice both at global and local levels.
Ubuntu takes to the air

04/05/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports.

Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May.

The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg.

As regards price, the Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone costs €399 for the very basic version, which won’t fly. If you want to buy an Erle-Copter that flies and has the basic components, you will have to pay at least €574.

“Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone is a Ubuntu-powered quadcopter that includes official support for new app store for drones and robots. It has official ROS support, capable of the different flight modes and [is] ideal for outdoor operations,” says Erle Robotics’ Alejandro Hernández.

The version of Ubuntu used by the Erle-Copter is Snappy Ubuntu Core, a new version of Ubuntu for clouds and devices comprising a minimal server image with the same libraries as the conventional Ubuntu distribution, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism.