Tech | Steve Woods

LibreOffice 4.1.3 released

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) blog announced earlier today that LibreOffice 4.1.3 has been released for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features for proprietary and legacy file formats.

According to TDF, the new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. Nevertheless, for enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests the use of LibreOffice 4.0.6, which is supported by certified professionals.

The release of LibreOffice 4.1.3 is taking place just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany, where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced LibreOffice developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 is available for immediate download. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.3.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.3.2).
Open data still not open enough

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Tech

In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.

The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.

Rufus Pollock, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CEO said: “Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.”

However, even open data leaders such as the UK and USA have room for improvement: for example, the USA does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, whilst the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.

Furthermore, there is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons, including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.

Under half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to use, reuse and redistribute data legally and technically. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
Jamaica adopts GNU Health

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.

This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.

After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.

GNU Health provides the following functionality:
- Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
- Hospital Information System;
- Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, GNU Health has won the Best Project of Social Benefit award from the Free Software Foundation, amongst other international awards.
UK government does something right

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics, Tech

The UK’s dreadful, destructive coalition government has done something right – for a change.

As part of the forthcoming Local Audit and Accountability Bill, which will be debated by MPs in the House of Commons on Monday, new rights will be granted to the press and citizens to film and report council meetings, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has announced.

In 2012 the government changed secondary legislation to open up councils’ executive meetings to the press and public. However, this did not apply to councils’ committee meetings or full council, nor to parish councils. Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, asked councils to open up their committee meetings, but many councils are still not complying. Many councils, particularly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are still keeping democracy behind closed doors. Some councils had even banned local residents from recording, blogging and tweeting at council meetings. Ministers believe these councils are clinging to outdated analogue ideals in a digital age.

Mr Pickles said: “An independent local press and robust public scrutiny is essential for a healthy local democracy. We have given councils more power, but local people need to be able to hold their councils to account. I want to do more to help the new cadre of hyper-local journalists and bloggers.

“I asked for councils to open their doors, but some have slammed theirs shut, calling in the police to arrest bloggers and clinging to old-fashioned standing orders.

“This new right will be the key to helping bloggers and tweeters as well as journalists to unlocking the mysteries of local government and making it more transparent for all. My department is standing up for press freedom.”

The council chamber in Bristol’s Counts Louse (aka City Hall © G. Ferguson)

Here in Bristol, the council is well ahead of Mr. Pickles. Meetings have been webcast for years and members of the public and elected councillors freely tweet proceedings from the Counts Louse.
Embedded Linux on a growth curve

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Tech

Tux – the Linux kernel mascot
Embedded Linux developers got together in Edinburgh on 24th and 25th October 2013 for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in conjunction with LinuxCon Europe, German technology news website Heise reports. Sony’s Tim Bird, Chair of the Linux Foundation’s Consumer Electronics working group, presented a wild ride through the achievements of recent years. Linus Torvalds‘ old joke that Linux would one day achieve world domination has become surprisingly serious.

According to kernel developer Wolfram Sang, problems are causing the overloading of the maintainers who can hardly keep up any more with the incorporation of patches in the kernel. Basic devices were also a topic: the microcontrollers from ARM’s Cortex-M series (which are used for applications such as smart metering, human interface devices, automotive and industrial control systems, white goods, consumer products and medical instrumentation. Ed.) have no memory management unit (MMU), which requires appreciable differences in development. As a consequence uClinux uses its own format for binaries for devices without a MMU.
Take care when updating Ubuntu

24/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

According to German technology news website Heise, news is emerging on discussion and support forums of graphics problems when updating from Ubuntu 13.04 to the latest version – Ubuntu 13.10. Users are reporting graphics problems in the form of a black screen. The problem most affects systems with AMD graphics cards if the proprietary AMD driver (fglrx) is used. However, additional package sources can also cause problems.

Anyone wishing to update their current Ubuntu 13.04 installation to the latest 13.10 version, should first check whether they are using proprietary graphics drivers and uninstall them if necessary. This can be done in the System/Software & Updates settings under the “Additional Drivers” tab. Uncheck the Nvidia or AMD driver respectively there and pick the X.Org-X-Server driver instead and then reboot.

Some reports of problems also indicate that there can be problems with the update if individual components of the graphics stack don’t originate from the standard Ubuntu repositories. If you have included PPAs such as Xorg-edgers with the latest X.org code or Ubuntu Unity with the current developer version of the Unity desktop, you should remove these repositories with the ppa-purge tool, which can be installed from the software centre. A reboot before the upgrade is also recommended here to check that everything is working.
Calibre 1.7 released

22/10/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Media, Open Source, Tech
Version 1.7 of Calibre, the cross-platform e-book reader and management software, was released on 18th October, Softpedia reports.

Calibre’s features include:
- Library management;
- E-book conversion;
- Syncing to e-book reader devices;
- Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form;
- Comprehensive e-book viewer;
- Content server for online access to your book collection.
Calibre running on the KDE desktop under Linux

A complete list of changes since the last version release can be found in Calibre’s release announcement.

The new version is available for download for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.
France also targeted by NSA

21/10/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Tech

Leading French daily newspaper Le Monde reports today on how the American National Security Agency (NSA) spies on France.

The documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden also contain information about communications intercepted by the NSA in France. One image in the documents leaked by Snowden, some of which have been accessed by Le Monde reveals that the NSA recorded the data from “70.3 million French telephone calls” from 10th December 2012 to 8th January. The content of SMS (text) messages is also recorded by scanning their contents for keywords.

Quite.

Explanations in the documents consulted by Le Monde suggest that the NSA was targeting “both people suspected of links with terrorist activities and individuals targeted simply for belonging to the worlds of business, politics or the French government” under a programme codenamed US-985D. When contacted on this point, the American authorities simply referred to the statement issued on 8th June 2012 by James R. Clapper, National Intelligence Director which states that the United States Government can only collect data if it suspects activities linked to terrorism, to cyber-attacks and nuclear proliferation, according to Le Monde Informatique.

When questioned about these revelations, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said he was going to ask the American authorities for explanations describing the revelations as “shocking”, whilst French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the American ambassador to a meeting ((translation: to give Uncle Sam’s representative in Paris a dressing down. Ed.).
Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region to save €2 mn. with OpenOffice

15/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

The administration of the Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region will switch to the open source OpenOffice productivity suite, Joinup reports. It thus hopes to save some €2 mn. euro on the licences that it would have spent for updating the ubiquitous MS Office suite. To prepare the migration, a three-month pilot involving 300 workstations has started at the region’s Directorate-General for Agriculture; all other regional departments will switch over to OpenOffice by the end of 2014. The region employs some 3,545 office staff.

The region is currently using a ten year-old version of MS Office. Instead of spending €2 mn. to upgrade 3,200 proprietary licences that are due to expire next year, the province decided to switch to OpenOffice which “offers basically the same functionality”.

The region has set aside a budget of €220,000 for the switch to OpenOffice; this budget includes a staff training element.
Freeze date and Freeze Policy for Debian Jessie announced

15/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
The next version (8.0) of Debian GNU/Linux, codenamed Jessie, will be released in the first half of 2015. Debian’s developers have now announced the freeze date and freeze policy for Debian Jessie. An extract of the announcement (entitled “Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info)”) is reproduced below.
We are happy to announce that we will freeze Jessie at 23:59 UTC on the 5th of November 2014. To avoid any confusion around exactly how we will freeze, we have prepared a draft of the Jessie Freeze Policy in advance

FREEZE POLICY

Notable changes to the policy include:
- Well-defined stages in the freeze policy at certain dates.
  
  After 3 months of freeze, we will no longer allow remove packages to re-enter testing
  
  We only accept fixes for important bugs in the first month.
  
  etc.
- Proactive automated removals 3 months into the freeze.
  
  Note that bug-free packages will be removed if they (build-)depend on a RC-buggy, non-key package.
  
  Also note the interval of 7 days between each removal run.
- Inclusion of “do” and “don’t” guidelines for uploads and unblock bugs.
- Currently, we are undecided whether to maintain “carte blanche” freeze exceptions at the start of the freeze. For now, exceptions are *not* included in the freeze policy (i.e. do *not* rely on them). This means that changes have to migrate to testing *before* the freeze date if they are to be included in the release.
  
  *If* such exceptions are added, they will *not* apply for packages where migration would change the “upstream” version.
  
  Native packages are at a disadvantage here, since all uploads of native packages are considered a new “upstream” version.
  
  It should go without saying, but “urgency” abuse is not an acceptable way of getting your latest changes into the release.
  
  It should also go without saying that embedding a new upstream release in a patch just to get a such “carte blanche” exception is also considered abuse.
  
  As noted we are dealing with a draft, so there may be changes to the actual freeze policy. Should we change the policy in a substantial way, this will be included in subsequent “bits”.

FREEZE POLICY

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