Daily Archives: Thursday, April 2, 2015

  • LibreOffice 4.4.2 released

    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.

    LibreOffice about window

    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

    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.

    Evolve OS screenshot

    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

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoNiels 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.