I’m sure it is really - less travel by big executives, less massive conferences, fewer gadgets given away at trade fairs, just less environmental waste basically.

But here is a brilliant idea to help make your linux powered computer use less power: www.lesswatts.org

I’ll be following this site closely - I’m sure it will be useful for my home server project :-).

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I found this link via a post on the OO.o marketing mailing list this morning.

The figures that follow are probably nowhere near complete either. We know that in Holland they are moving the whole of the Amsterdam administration over to Open Source and I’m certain that there will be many more companies and public bodies that either: haven’t seen this list and know that they can contribute, or are simply not allowed to. If you know of any one using OO.o in their business, public agency or wherever else, encourage them to get it on this list!

There are some pretty amazing numbers on there, showing some very large installations of OpenOffce.org. But what really grabbed my attention was some of the European statistics:

• Austria: 18,000 seats.
• Belgium: 4,000 seats.
• Finland: 10,000 seats.
• France: 490,750 seats!
• Germany: 25,900 seats.
• Spain: 388,000 seats!
• UK: 5000 seats (One entry only, for Bristol City Council)

Now something is surely very wrong here… France and Spain are using, close to, a million (878,750) copies of Open Office. That’s got to be several hundred million pounds worth of license fees they aren’t paying to M$. And not just once, either. That’ll be every three years or so I guess.

If our government wasn’t so in bed with M$ we could probably have built a couple of new hospitals, or a dozen or so new schools with that kind of money… Jeeez, this makes me really angry.

What a WOFM. (Waste Of [insert famous anglo-saxon adjective here] Money)

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If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there.

I’ve been a bit busy recently so haven’t had as much time as I’d like to crack on with this. However, I’ve actually come to a bit of a halt regarding Untangle due to the kernel…

I managed to get the initial Rake (Ruby’s Make) build scripts to run to completion on my LFS-6.3 system :-). For those who are interested, after editing some of the Rake files for hard-coded environment variables, I had to drop down to the last version 5 release of the JDK. Version 6 is not supported due to the issues mentioned in part 4 of this series.

After the build completed, trying to run Untangle caused it to barf badly. But I wasn’t surprised by this. I hadn’t installed Postgresql, and I discovered I was missing a setting in my kernel config (IP Userspace queueing via NETLINK (OBSOLETE)) which caused this file ip_queue_maxlen to be created in /proc. There was another file in /proc missing too: icmp_frag_accept. It was searching for this, that led me to get to the bottom of the kernel issues.

After some dialogue on their mailing lists, it became clear that the build process was not going to be as simple as I’d first thought. The current version of Untangle (5.0.2) uses a very heavily patched Debian kernel (2.6.16-ck11). The method they use for patching relies on some debian tools which, seeing as I am building on LFS, I don’t have - nor do I really want.

A little side note: In the Untangle kernel, they are using the now infamous CK scheduler from Con Kolivas, that is no longer being developed for, or ported to, the main kernel tree (Google for Con Kolivas to read about the saga). I’m not sure how this will affect the UT project in the long run but it is quite an interesting area of kernel development and fuelled some big arguments.

When I have some more time to concentrate, I’ll try and work out what is really needed and see if I can patch my recent 2.6.22.5 kernel. They are developing a new release of Untangle (5.1) which may well give me what I need anyway; the ability to run other apps on the same platform and a more modern kernel version. Watch this space…

In the meantime, I have managed to get Asterisk installed. It’s a fairly straightforward CMMI (configure, make, make install) install for the needed packages (in build order): zaptel-1.4.5.1 drivers for the x100p card, asterisk-1.4.11 and asterisk-addons-1.4.2.

Configuring asterisk however is another ball game entirely. It is fairly complicated and involves a steep learning curve. Although thankfully, there are plenty of resources available on-line. I strongly recommend to get the Creative Commons Licensed O’Reilly book from 2005: Asterisk - The Future of Telephony which is widely available on-line and is an excellent resource. Also, there are lots of good blogs and other online resources to help you get started.

In addition, you will almost certainly need a SIP phone of some description. I’m currently using the Ekiga softphone as it is open source and happily runs on Ubuntu (it’s gnome based). It was originally called GnomeMeeting.

I can now make and receive calls locally between the Asterisk server and my PSTN line. Next is to try and get it work over a NAT’ed firewall to Alan Bell’s (my business partner) Asterisk server. Using IAX2 (Inter-Asterisk Exchange protocol) seems the way to ge here as it was specifically designed to use a single IP port, as opposed to SIP that uses independent ports (and potentially many of them) for connection management (UDP) and actual call data (RDP). Using SIP requires you to open up hundreds, if not thousands, of ports on your firewall. More reading and learning to follow.

Laterz…

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This old story gets even more ridiculous. The fact that the head of the national library is a co-chair and obvious supporter of M$’s OOXML specification, led our National Archive to spend yet more money with Microsoft for a solution that will actually NOT fix the problem. More documents will be stored in a, as yet non-standardised and closed, document format. That will, eventually require us to spend even more money yet again just to get access to old electronic documents.

It seems our antipodean partners have come up with a solution: It’s called Xena. And it’s Open Source and uses the GPL.

Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning ‘Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives’.

Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:

• Detecting the file formats of digital objects
• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Now this sounds like a very decent solution. Read that last bullet once more:

• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Adam Farquhar and the National Archive of Great Britain please take note…

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I just came across this story.

Well blow me down with a feather…

Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

Just think about that for a minute… Over a quarter of the whole software economy likely to be based on open source. That’s really big, nearly $45 billion. In less than 5 years time. Last year it accounted for about$12 billion; and that’s not too shabby in my opinion.

In another interesting quote we get,

Wurster also spoke on some of the market accelerators to open source, which included the low barriers to entry and increased return on investment, the availability of high-quality solutions at low cost, the access to open standards and development processes, vendor independence and flexibility—resulting in investment protection—and faster procurement and a shorter development time.

That sounds pretty compelling to me. I believe we should be showing this to our MPs. Perhaps they might finally grok the idea that not everything needs to come from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle. And that there are BETTER solutions, and not just cheaper alternatives.

We are at an very interesting point in IT and business history. Giving your products away for free is looking like a compelling business model. Although WE all know that anyway…

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My business partner Alan Bell, came up with a neat idea over the weekend (whilst I was really busy; playing golf and partying with the kids)…

Microsoft has developed an XML based file format designed to replace the binary formats used by old versions of Microsoft Office. This new file format is called Office Open XML or OOXML and is currently going through a process to ratify it as an international standard backed by ISO. The designation for the standard is Draft International Standard 29500, or DIS29500. The fast track process the standard has followed has been very controversial, in the initial round of votes a large number of comments were raised. These comments will be brought to a Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February 2008. Currently there is an overwhelming number of comments to resolve at a large meeting in a short time. Many comments are duplicates raised several times by different countries, many are quite trivial and could be addressed easily. Some are really interesting and worthy of discussion.

Our company, The Open Learning Centre, is supporting and maintaining this new site on the net at www.dis29500.org where:

The purpose of this website is to help the countries and the facilitators of the BRM to prepare by sorting and categorising and de-duplicating the comments so that they can focus on the issues of substance.

Currently 2978 comments are listed by country and interested parties are encouraged to review and “de-dupe” the list. And to categorise the comments so issues of substance can be given the attention they rightly deserve.

Oh yes, it’s running and supported on open source software.

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This is absolutely brilliant.

This is living history. I wanted you and your children and your grandchildren to know some of those they can thank, because when almost all the vendors were signing peace pacts with Microsoft, taking settlement money and slinking away from the case, they stayed to fight to the end. Their role was essentially to speak for FOSS and to make sure the court and the EU Commission understood the technology and the needs of Linux and Samba and all those trying to compete with Microsoft from the Free Software/Open Source community. Unbelievably, they won.

PJ. You’re a star.

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“Ignoring open source is costing us [the UK] dear”

The headline is from the Guardian on-line this morning. In a piece written by Victor Keegan, he explains how we [UK PLC] are suffering from our pathetic use of Open Source, especially in terms of leadership from our Government.

You would have thought that a Labour government, struggling to marry the success of market forces with the socialist endowment of its founding fathers, would have latched on to this new cooperativism which brings people together for a common purpose with a burning zeal. In fact, its wanton neglect could damage our economic prospects.

Well yes, apart from the fact that our previous leader was a bosom buddy of Bill Gates (And there are lots more. Just Google for their two names…) and so our Government was highly unlikely to shun M$’s approaches.

The depth of its neglect was made plain by speakers at a seminar last week hosted by Westminster eForum, which tries to make parliament aware of IT issues. It turns out, in contrast to what other governments are doing, that most departments - including Health, Work and the Foreign Office - are so risk-averse they have virtually no open source in their IT infrastructures. The Treasury runs less than 1% of its operations with open source. The Conservatives, who rightly believe Labour is vulnerable in this area, claim that nearly £700m could be saved by switching to open source. This is disputed by others who point to the high initial cost of switching from an embedded system and retraining everyone. But in the long run, low maintenance costs plus the absence of licence fees and upgrade charges must give open source the edge and, even if it didn’t, there is still a strong case for encouraging it because a workforce skilled in open source would be well placed to exploit the enormous opportunities opening up for the future.

See this piece from Glyn Moody for a transcript of the presentation he gave at the eForum meeting. (According to one commenter he received a standing ovation!). If the Government would actually take a look at the big Enterprises, they would discover that Open Source is very much in-place and gaining ground at a rapid pace. Why would Yahoo just spend $350m on an Open Source business with revenues of less than $10m? Why is Redhat so successful? Why are there more and more Open Source companies springing up? Why do IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and even Oracle to a lesser extent, get Open Source? Because their customers (Big Corporates) demand it.

Schools are not much better, a double tragedy because they not only don’t benefit from savings but also lose the opportunity to train children in the skills of the future.

And this is nothing short of scandalous… As I have mentioned before, our schools have been completely sold out to M$. They are locked in to very expensive subscription licensing deals that mean they (we via our TAX) end up paying for software that they can’t use. And there are heinous penalties for cancelling contracts. In terms of the skills gap and the value of Open Source in “learning” I agree and would emphasise this point much, much more. This is the nature of Open Source, one of the Four Freedoms is the ability to investigate and learn. You can’t do that with M$, and other proprietary, products.

There is one other major issue that Victor failed to mention in his otherwise interesting article. Open Standards.

We have seen recently how Microsoft has bullied, bribed and threatened their way through the ISO to try and get a proprietary document specification, the sole aim of which is to continue to lock-in customers and make your data belong to M$ for the indefinite future, passed as an International Open Standard. And now we learn that they don’t intend to implement it themselves anyway!

Open Source software is built on true Open Standards and as such, your data belongs to you and you will always be able to get access to it because the formats are “open” and publicly available. Try opening an old MS Office document with your shiny, new and very expensive Office suite. Oooops. Guess what; you can’t. You have to go back to M$, cap-in-hand, and buy more of their software just to access your own materials. Just as the National Archive has recently discovered.

And finally, on Monday of this week, the EU has upheld the anti-trust decision made several years ago. Microsoft are a bunch of crooks and have been caught. They use their dominant position to smother and throttle competition. Nice. And don’t forget the ridiculous goings on in the BBC where their new iPlayer is Microsoft only (good for the licence payer, that one!) and they are employing ex, Microsoft people to promote and develop the platform.

Please, please, please. Everyone wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.

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If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t go back to Part 1 and start from there.

The server itself is running smoothly and seemingly reliably. Building Untangle (ut for short) is proving somwhat more problematic, although to be honest, it is what I expected.

After fixing a few hardcoded environment variables (JAVA_HOME) in the [m]rakefiles and changing a class declaration from com.sun.java.swing to javax.swing, the build is failing due to some Java declarations which are requesting an unsupported feature. If anyone is interested, here’s a tarball of the build-log so far: Untangle Build Log

A bit of Googling has thrown up some information that using the SwingUtilities2 package is a big no-no. Even in the JDK 5 version. It has been moved out of the way in JDK 6 and is, apparently, unnecessary due to changes in the way swing now deals with anti-aliasing and sub-pixel font rendering.

Anyway, the guys at Untangle are being very helpful, I’ve got subscribed to their developer mailing list and, hopefully, we’ll have a fix soon.

If there are any Java gurus out there who could suggest an alternative way of dealing with this using the JDK 6 release, the error is caused in this try/catch block:

try{ ((JComponent)nameJLabel).putClientProperty(javax.swing.SwingUtilities2.AA_TEXT_PROPERTY_KEY, new Boolean(true)); }
catch(Throwable t){}

or here in the util class:

public static void setAAClientProperty(Component parentComponent, boolean isAAEnabled){
if( parentComponent instanceof JComponent ){
try{ ((JComponent)parentComponent).putClientProperty(javax.swing.SwingUtilities2.AA_TEXT_PROPERTY_KEY, new Boolean(isAAEnabled)); }
catch(Throwable t){}

Meanwhile, I’ve been playing with file systems and sorting out the partitioning to my liking. Reading several articles on-line I have decided to use XFS for the file system on most partitions. According to what I can find, it offers generally better performance and scalability than the more commonly used ext2/3. It certainly takes up less disk space, I gained 4GB on the biggest partition /home: ext3 = 260GB v XFS = 264GB. On the smaller partitions (4.7GB) I gained 100MB when going from ext3 to XFS and lost that silly and irrelevant lost+found directory.

Keep Tuned, and don’t hesitate to comment

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Thought I should just mention, in case anyone missed it, that OpenOffice.org 2.3 has been released. According to the release notes, the main new features include:

• New chart wizard, with support for 3D Charts
• Revamped Toolbars
• Export documents as Wiki pages on OpenOffice 2.3 Writer
• Enhanced Autosum on OpenOffice 2.3 Calc
• Report Builder on OpenOffice 2.3 Base

And a very long list of minor tweaks and fixes… All for free.

And it runs on Linux, Macs, Solaris and — [oh yes that's it] — M$ Windows(tm) too.
Go on, you know it makes sense…

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