The Open Sourcerer

Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex (8.10) Goes Forth

So, it’s out.

Ubuntu 8.10 started shipping yesterday and I’m sure the world’s download servers are groaning yet again.

I was fortunate enough to have been invited to the Launch Party last night in London which was a really fun event. And I even managed to have a brief conversation with SABDFL.

I’ve been using Intrepid since the Alpha 5 release for my main computer and it’s been bloody good to be honest. There were a few niggles of the kind you’d expect from an Alpha build, but it continued to improve day-by-day. For the last couple of weeks it has been solid as a rock.

The main new features in this release are:

• An upgrade to the Gnome desktop to version 2.24 which adds some nice enhancements to the Nautilus file browser,
• xorg 7.4. This is really quite odd if you are used to hacking xorg.conf. This upgrade makes the config file virtually redundant from what I can tell. Here’s what is in mine right now:

Section "Device"
Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier      "Default Screen"
Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

That’s it. Nothing else. No resolution settings, no modelines, no mouse, keyboard… Weird man.

• The encrypted private directory… (Your porn folder?)
• The Guest Session which is nice. This creates a temporary password-less user account with restricted privileges: the account cannot access any users’ home directories, nor permanently store data. This is sufficiently safe to lend your laptop to someone else for a quick email check.
• NM-0.7. The network manager applet has some new features including initial support for 3G dongles.
• And quite a few more interesting features. Here’s the full run-down: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntrepidIbex/TechnicalOverview

Must dash. Got a train to catch.

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Open Source Makes REAL Money

This is such a great story that needs no further comment from me.

http://pythonide.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-make-money-with-free-software.html.

So cooooool.

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Russia teaches the world about FOSS

Glyn Moody (See blogroll) has an absolutely cracking post on his Open Enterprise blog regarding a recent announcement from Russia. The really interesting bit for me is not the article itself so much, although it is indeed great news and very inspirational, but the comments that follow.

Firstly, the main story. It is that Russia has had such a successful time using Open Source software in some School pilots that the government have decided to roll it out across ALL schools in Russia.

It began with a few pilot projects, and apparently these have been so successful that the Russian government has now decided to make it the standard for *all* schools:

До конца 2009 г. на всех школьных компьютерах будет установлен пакет свободного программного обеспечения (ПСПО). Об этом, как передает «Прайм ТАСС», сегодня сообщил министр связи и массовых коммуникаций РФ Игорь Щеголев на пленарном заседании «Информационное общество и современные технологии доставки информации» в рамках международной выставки «ИнфоКом-2008».

[Via Google Translate: By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO). This is how transfers «Prime-TASS», today announced Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Igor Shchyogolev at the plenary session «Information Society and the modern technologies of information» in the international exhibition «InfoCom-2008».]

This isn’t just an option for those brave souls who might want to try something different: this is now the official approach. If schools want to use proprietary software, they have to pay for it themselves:

Read the full article to get further details.

Then scroll down the page and read some of the comments…

It starts with the first post saying we should teach M$ because that’s what business uses today. It’s the only “pro” proprietary comment and rightly gets pretty short shrift from every subsequent commenter.

But then a remarkable thing starts happening, which emphasises yet again, why Free Software is SO important in Education: In that it absolutely encourages innovation, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and – above all – learning from and with others.

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Newsflash! Linux created by IBM, HP.

Remember this?

Another anti-Microsoft (MSFT) front group has emerged in favour of “free and open standards,” hyping what it calls the Hague Declaration and making some absurd connection to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The propagandists, partially funded by publicly traded companies, have a little trouble describing what that term “free and open standards” means (or even using it consistently), but the group has no trouble indicating its political stripes. Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to identify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”

The chap who bizarrely thinks any name ending in “stan” must be terrorist AND fascist is at it again.

This time, he has re-written the history of GNU/Linux and got it completely wrong.

Linux was created by IBM, HP (HPQ) and other former IT systems monopolists that realized that Microsoft was taking their systems monopoly away from them. IBM, HP, Digital Equipment (now part of HP), etc. had banded together for this purpose in the early 1980s while Linus Torvalds, the nominal creator of Linux and who now works for one of the groups IBM, HP, etc. put together for its trust-like purposes, was still in short pants. Ten years later, the consortium chose a small piece of software code, “forked” by Linus from some other code while he was in college, to complement the still ongoing technical development effort by IBM, HP, etc. to come up with “one Unix.” What is today called Linux is the result of that one-Unix effort.

RFLOL.

Honestly, why does he bother to write such crap? I think I know why – just so he gets some comments. Nobody bothers to comment on anything else he writes it seems. Ever.

(Maybe Google uses a comment:post ratio for rankings?)

I guess his portfolio must be looking pretty sick right now. Perhaps we all need to show Dennis some love and comment on his blog once in a while? Just to make him feel wanted…

Thanks to PJ for bringing Dennis’s drivvel to our attention and for putting the history record straight.

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How to Install OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex [Updated]

I have been using the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) since the Alpha 5 testing version; the same time I built Lobsang.

Apart from a few early glitches with the Nvidia graphics drivers and some printing issues, my overall experience with Ibex has been excellent and as we are now in the beta stage it should only get better. Ibex certainly boots faster than Hardy, the update to Gnome 2.24 is most welcome with new features such as tabing in Nautilus, and a major update to the Network Manager applet. You can read about the main additions here.

One thing I wanted to do today, was upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.0. Unfortunately, according to a bug on Launchpad, OOo 3.0 will not make it into the final release of Ubuntu 8.10. It may get added later, but personally I think it is a shame if it will not make the release. It’s a major upgrade to OOo and has appeared 2 weeks prior to the 8.10 ship date so I think it would make a good candidate for inclusion. The new Mandriva 2009 release has it and that was released last week…

I think for many the support for Microsoft’s OOXML format on OOo 3.0 will be the major new feature. It certainly gives one a great reason to not have to upgrade, at vast expense, to MS Office 2007.

Anyway, thankfully some bright spark has built the required packages on a PPA (Personal Package Archive) on Lauchpad making install as easy as adding two lines to your package manager’s source list.

Please remember this is for Intrepid Ibex. I don’t have a Hardy (8.04) install to hand any more and so I don’t know if this PPA will work for Hardy users or not. I’d love to hear from anyone if they do try it though.

Begin How To

[UPDATE] I am not sure if this repo is still maintained for Intrepid. I would strongly suggest that users follow John McCreesh’s suggested method he described in the comments below. Here it is for ease of reading:

I just do:

To get rid of the release candidates I’ve installed previously:

sudo aptitude purge ‘~nopenoffice.org3′
sudo aptitude purge ‘~nooobasis3′

download the debs from the OOo site and tar -xvfz them.
cd to the directory containing the debs

sudo dpkg -i o*.deb
sudo dpkg -i desktop_integration/o*.deb

John

John’s method seems quite straightforward and works for me.

The original method (below) also worked for me but I am not using it any more and am still getting lots of hits to this article so I thought I should update the information.

So the following might work but, as they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

From the menu choose “System->Administration->Software Sources” and enter your password if asked.

Click on the Third Party Software tab and then click on the “+ Add” button. Cut and paste the following line into the box

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

and then click on the “Add Source” button to save it. Repeat and add this line too:

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

Make sure the two new lines have the checkbox ticked (see screenshot above) and then close the Software Sources application. You should then be asked to reload the package manager database:

To install software and updates from newly added or changed sources, you have to reload the information about available software.

Once I did this, the “Updates Available” star appear in the top panel of Gnome. Running the update manager showed me the updates available, e.g. OpenOffice.org, which it then downloaded (about 95Mb) and installed. It was as simple as that.

If for some reason the update manager star doesn’t appear then just open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

End How To

Behold, OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Intrepid Ibex.

[Update]

This morning the auto updater wouldn’t run because of a conflict with the OOo packages I installed from the PPA. The simplest way I found to rectify this, was to simply turn off the PPA repos by removing the tick from the relevant boxes in the Software Sources manager. Then the update went ahead as it should.

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 immensely, staggeringly popular

Just a quick note really on the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 yesterday.

A message on the OOo mailing list from Louis Suarez-Potts says it all:

All,

We must apologize. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is proving immensely, staggeringly popular. And our site is down as a result. While we fix things, we urge you to be patient and try again later on tonight, tomorrow, this week. It will still be there.

Oh, by popular, we mean it: figure hundreds of thousands of users, mostly Windows users, but also Mac OS X and Linux and Solaris users, all trying to download it all at once…..

Cheers, and thanks for your patience,
Louis

Hundreds of thousands of users… That’s really great. Congratulations to everyone who has contributed in whatever way to this release.

If you are still struggling to get to a download, a very fast UK mirror (I just checked it) can be found here:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ny1.mirror.openoffice.org/stable/3.0.0/

Cheers

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