Tech | Steve Woods

LibreOffice 4.4.2 released

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The Document Foundation has today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 50 fixes compared with LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

New features introduced by the LibreOffice 4.4 family are listed in the release notes.

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified people, of whom the Foundation maintains a list.

People interested in technical details about the release can see the changelogs for the bugs fixed in RC1 and bugs fixed in RC2 respectively.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4.2 is immediately available for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. Money collected will be used to improve the project’s infrastructure and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project at both global and local levels.

I’ve been using version 4.4.2 for a while now since I downloaded a pre-release development build (version 4.4.2.2) and have found it both stable and easy to use.
Evolve OS name change forced by trade mark dispute with UK government

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

The Evolve OS desktop Linux distribution is being forced into a change of name due to potential trade mark problems with the UK government, Softpedia reports.

The bone of contention is not the Evolve element, but OS, which is apparently a trade mark registered to registered to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose trade mark agents are a company called Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP.

In its headline, Softpedia describes this trademark registration as “stupid“.

Writing yesterday on Google+, the developers stated:

This is not an April Fools post

We will be required to change the name of the Evolve OS project, to avoid unnecessary legal action. All I will say right now is that the dispute is UK specific, and I have been informed that the relevant trademarks are held by the Secretary of State.

The letter goes beyond asking for a withdrawal of trademark application and asks we stop using the “mark”.

Clearly this is going to be an expensive and painful road in either direction, so we shall go with a rename.

The developers have also asked for the help of the free and open source community to come up with a new name that would be free of trademark infringements.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Debian Jessie target release date announced

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Niels Thykier of the Debian release team has announced the release date for the forthcoming version 8 of Debian, codenamed Jessie. Jessie should be ready on Saturday 25th April. The could only change, Thykier writes, if something really critical pops up or it is not possible to publish the release on time for technical reasons.

There is still time until 18th April for final bug fixes; there should be no further changes to Debian in the final week before release. Managers of packages with bugs must therefore work speedily on getting them fixed. Until the release packages with critical bugs could still be removed from the distribution. Thykier writes that there are currently at least twelve release-critical bugs which could result in the removal of the packages concerned from Debian 8.
EU Commission updates its open source strategy

27/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The European Commission has announced the updating its strategy for internal use of open source software. The Commission, which is already using open source for many of its key IT services and software solutions, will further increase the internal role of this type of software. The renewed strategy puts a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects and releasing more of the software developed within the Commission as open source.

Highlights

The specific objectives of the renewed strategy are:

Equal treatment in procurement

The Commission will ensure a level playing field when procuring new software. This means that open source and proprietary software will be assessed on an equal basis, being both evaluated on the basis of total cost of ownership, including exit costs.

Contribution to communities

The Commission services will increasingly participate in open source software communities to build on the open source elements used in the Commission’s software.

Clarification of legal aspects

To enable easy collaboration with the open source communities, Commission developers will benefit from appropriate legal coaching and advice on how to deal with the intellectual property aspects of open source software.

Open source and interoperable software developed by the Commission

Software produced by the Commission departments, and particularly software produced for use outside the Commission, will be released as open source under the European Union Public License (EUPL) and published on the Joinup platform. The software produced should aim to be interoperable and use open technical specifications.

Transparency and better communication

The updated strategy emphasises improved governance, an increasing use of open source in the field of security and this strategy’s alignment with the EC’s ISA Programme, enabling the modernisation of cross-border and cross-sector eGovernment services.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice to take to the cloud

25/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

LibreOffice, the best free and open source office suite produced, is set to become the cornerstone of the world’s first global personal productivity solution – LibreOffice Online – following an announcement by IceWarp and Collabora of a joint development effort, The Document Foundation blog reports today. LibreOffice is available as a native application for every desktop operating system and is currently under development for Android. Furthermore, it is available on virtual platforms for Chrome OS, Firefox OS and iOS.

“LibreOffice was born with the objective of leveraging the OpenOffice historic heritage to build a solid ecosystem capable of attracting those investments which are key for the further development of free software,” says Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Director of The Document Foundation. “Thanks to the increasing number of companies which are investing on the development of LibreOffice, we are on track to make it available on every platform, including the cloud. We are grateful to IceWarp for providing the resources for a further development of LibreOffice Online.”

Development of LibreOffice Online started back in 2011 with the availability of a proof of concept of the client front end, based on HTML5 technology. That proof of concept will be developed into a state of the art cloud application, which will become the free alternative to proprietary solutions such as Google Docs and Office 365. It will also be the first to offer native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.

“It is wonderful to marry IceWarp’s vision and investment with our passion and skills for LibreOffice development. It is always satisfying to work on something that, as a company, we have a need for ourselves,” says Michael Meeks, Vice-President of Collabora Productivity, who developed the proof of concept back in 2011 and will oversee the development of LibreOffice Online.

The launch of LibreOffice Online will be announced at a future date.
Document Freedom Day: why open standards matter

25/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech
Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual international celebration of open formats and open standards and an opportunity to promote their use.

The use of open standards is definitely gaining ground, particularly where it matters, such as in dealings with government bodies. This was amply illustrated last year by the UK Cabinet Office’s announcement of the adoption of open standards for collaborating on government documents.

Why do open standards matter?

Open standards are vital for interoperability and freedom of choice. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the accompanying vendor lock-in. This makes open standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.

What is an open standard?

An open standard refers to a format or protocol that is:
- Subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
- Without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves;
- Free from legal or technical clauses that limit its use by any party or in any business model;
- Managed and further developed independently of any single supplier in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
- Available in multiple complete implementations by competing suppliers, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
How do open standards affect you?

April, the French open source advocacy organisation, has produced a handy graphic in English to illustrate the difference between open and closed formats. Click on the image below for the full-sized version.

Examples of open standards

Many open standards are in wide use. Here are 3 examples:
- Plain text (.txt);
- HTML, the language of the web;
- ODF, the default file format of free and open source office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ODF can also be handled by Microsoft Office versions from Office 2007 onwards.
Document Freedom Day is being promoted on social media by the use of the #DFD2015 hashtag.
GNU nano 2.4.0 text editor released

24/03/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Four years after the last major update to version 2.3.0, the developers of the GNU nano text editor have now announced the release of version 2.4.0. In his email Chris Allegretta nano now has a fully functional undo system which is now enabled by default, vim-compatible file locking, linter support, formatter support, syntax highlighting flexibility and many fixes for bugs reported since version 2.2.

Besides the source code package (in tar.gz), the new version of nano is available from the GNU nano website for various Linux distributions and Windows. The latest unstable release of the 2.3 branch is also available for download.
Exorcise: a blessing?

24/03/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Oddities, Tech

From the server room, here’s one for the IT crowd.

# /etc/init.d/daemon stop

Hat tip: Manz.
Bristol City Council & open standards – more

16/03/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light.

It was all sparked by a discussion on Twitter between myself and Alex, a leading member of the Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG).

It all revolved around what was really meant by the phrase “not fully digital” in respect of PDF files.

My speculation was that if text documents are scanned, these are usually converted to image-based PDFs with which the screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people can have problems.

It turned out this was a good point, but not the real reason.

The latter was supplied by Gavin Beckett, BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect, who actually responded to my FoI request. It seems Gavin’s main reason for describing PDFs as “not fully digital” is that PDF is basically an attempt to make electronic files emulate paper. The move by the council away from PDF to HTML when responding to citizens is that more mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) are now being used by the public to communicate with the local authority and the latter wishes to provide the same – i.e. “fully digital” experience to all.

Finally Gavin promised to follow up with his colleagues my gripe about using MS formats for responding to FOI requests. He conceded this was one example where PDF would be better.
Recommended LibreOffice extension: MultiFormatSave

14/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

One of the great things about LibreOffice is the ability to customise and extend the software’s functionality by the use of extensions, for which there’s a dedicated website.

If you use LibreOffice and need to save files in formats other than its native Open Document Formats (in my case, I work in Open Document format, but return work in MS Office formats and send out invoices as PDFs), then the MultiFormatSave extension is a really useful addition to your install since it can simultaneously save your file Open Document, MS Office and/or PDF formats as you choose.

At the moment Open Document, MS Office 97 (.doc, .xls, etc.), MS Office 2007 XML (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) and PDF formats are supported.

Once installed via LibreOffice’s extension manager, MultiFormatSave adds a small icon – shown on the right – to the toolbars of your office suite’s component programs.

Clicking on the icon will bring up the dialogue box shown below.

Saving in up to 3 formats at once is not only convenient, it can in my opinion help reduce one’s chances of falling victim to repetitive strain injury (RSI). 🙂

More information on MultiFormatSave is available on the LibreOffice extensions site.