free software | Steve Woods

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.
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.
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.
Openwords on Kickstarter

04/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Data, Open Source, Tech

Openwords, the foreign language learning app for the world’s open language data the world’s under-served languages, which was reported on some weeks ago by this blog (posts passim), recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

At the time of writing the Kickstarter campaign has 16 days to go and aims to raise $10,000 to take the project to the next stage.

Foreign language learning with open data

There are millions of people around the world who can’t learn the languages in which they’re interested.

While the learning of major languages like Chinese, Spanish and French are supported by large companies, these firms tend to ignore lesser-known languages.

Openwords is doing things differently to solve this problem. Openwords is mining data from the public domain assets like the Wiktionary to provide educational content for all the languages, large and small.

So far Openwords has mined data for 1,000 languages.

The Openwords app has various learning modules for vocabulary, hearing, typing, amongst others. In addition, the Openwords developers are working on simple sentence translation problems. Furthermore, learners have control over the content they want to learn.

Finally, Openwords will be an open source project.

The aim of the Kickstarter campaign is to raise $10,000, which will be enough to develop a beta model of the Openwords app.
Debian 8 released

26/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

Yesterday Debian announced the release of Debian 8, codenamed ‘Jessie’ as the latest stable release of this popular GNU/Linux distribution.

The release will receive support and updates for the next 5 years and has been in development for the last 24 months.

“Jessie” ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in “Jessie”.

The UEFI (“Unified Extensible Firmware Interface”) support introduced in the previous stable release (“Wheezy”) has also been greatly improved in Jessie. This includes workarounds for many known firmware bugs, support for UEFI on 32-bit systems, and support for 64-bit kernels with 32-bit UEFI firmware (with the latter being included only on Debian’s amd64/i386 “multi-arch” installation media).

It’s not just the Debian project’s developers that have been working hard for the release of “Jessie”. Thanks to the huge efforts of translators working on localisation, Debian can now be installed in 75 languages.

Trying Jessie

If you want to try Debian 8 “Jessie” without having to install it, you can use a special image, known as a live image, available for CDs, USB sticks, and network booting set-ups. For the time being, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian. More information is available on the Debian Live homepage.

Upgrading

Those wishing to upgrade to Debian 8 from a previous version, such as Debian 7 “Wheezy”, are strongly advised to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues, plus detailed instructions on installing and upgrading.

Your correspondent has been using “Jessie” on a 5 year-old laptop for the last year (posts passim), i.e from about halfway through its time as Debian’s testing stable version and has found it to be fast, stable and reliable.

In other Debian news, the first release of the new version of Debian Edu, the special education-related distribution, based on Debian 8 “Jessie” is now in beta.
Stretch: the next Debian testing stable version

19/04/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

With Debian 8, codenamed ‘jessie’, currently frozen and due for release as the next stable release at the end of April (posts passim), many may have been wondering what the next Debian testing stable release will be.

However, this particular question has now been answered. Writing on reddit, user dimitrifromparis has revealed the next character from the Toy Story series of films to be used as a Debian release codename.

After the jessie release, there will be a new release codename, “stretch”, and testing will be an alias for that.

See the Debian wiki for an overview of past Debian production release codenames.

Besides testing stable, Debian also has a testing unstable version, named sid. Sid is never released as such and is named after Sidney, the boy next door in Toy Story who always broke his toys. Needless to say, Debian sid is definitely not recommended for production environments.
Hungarian universities adopt ODF

16/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF).

Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students.

In addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 copies of EuroOffice, a free and open source office suite developed especially for the Hungarian market, but based on both major free and open source suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. EuroOffice is available in 2 versions – free and professional – for both Windows and Linux. It can also be installed in 7 languages – English (US variant), German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian – which MultiRáció claims are the native languages of 85% of the EU’s population.

The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of both EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities in 2014. MultiRáció’s senior software developer Kázmér Koleszár described these initiatives as “an important policy change”, given that the country’s public sector had been reliant on MS Office for the preceding 15 years.

MultiRáció is actively involved in the ODF specification, being a member of OASIS, a non-profit consortium promoting the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.
LibreOffice native language projects

08/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

Although the majority of the development for LibreOffice, the world’s most popular free and open source office productivity suite, takes place in English, this doesn’t preclude non-English speakers from being involved.

There’s always help needed on the localisation project, which relies on the work of the Native Language projects.

Native Language projects are worldwide communities of LibreOffice volunteers contributing to the project in their own, native language. The Native Language projects contribute everything from localisation, testing of the localised versions of LibreOffice, users support, local promotion, documentation and much more.

A list of available Native Language projects is posted on the Native Language projects home page and visitors are also encouraged to establish new Native Language communities.
Calibre 2.23 released

05/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech
Softpedia reports that the Calibre eBook reader, editor and library management package has been updated to version 2.23.

The full list of changes since the last release can be seen in the changelog.

One of the major changes is the updating of the Qt cross-platform application framework bundled with Calibre to 5.4.1. This fixes various minor bugs, most notably improving text rendering on machines running Linux.

Furthermore, the new release of Calibre now allows users to add an empty ebook in various formats to existing book records. What is more, the ability to create additional empty formats to the ‘Add empty book’ command has been implemented.

Calibre 2.23 is available for download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

If you’re on a Linux machine like me, your easiest way to update Calibre to the latest version is via the command line by running the following command as root:
```
wget -nv -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/master/setup/linux-installer.py | sudo python -c "import sys; main=lambda:sys.stderr.write('Download failed\n'); exec(sys.stdin.read()); main()"
```
This sets the process in motion and you’ll have the new Calibre installed in no time.

Download LibreOffice 4.4.3

Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference

Foreign language learning with open data

Trying Jessie

Upgrading

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