FOSS Week in Review
The Thanksgiving holiday really put a damper on FOSS developments this week — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to report. On the contrary. So without further adieu, and on the heels of Thanksgiving, help yourself to another slice of…
Pi Zero for $5: Our friends at Phoronix reported this week about the Pi Zero, the latest Raspberry Pi board, costing a grand total of $5 American.
From the article: “The Raspberry Pi Zero features a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC that is clocked at 1.0GHz for its ARM11 core, there’s 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM, micro-SD card slot, mini HDMI socket, micro USB sockets, 40-pin GPIO header, and its all on a form factor of just 65 x 30 x 5mm. The Pi Zero is available today in the US and UK for just $5 USD.” You can find out more about the Raspberry Pi Zero via the launch announcement at RaspberryPi.org.
Squash Bugs in LibreOffice: Like the Marines, LibreOffice is looking for a few good people. OK, several good people. Hundreds would be nice, as a matter of fact. Softpedia reports this week that LibreOffice has uncovered around 1,200 user-interface related bugs that need fixing. The next version of LibreOffice is scheduled for February, so it would be great to get these bugs fixed.
FOSS-based Diabetes Monitoring: We touched on this last week when we talked about FOSS and health care monitoring, and OpenSource.com has picked up the ball and run with it when it comes to having Benjamin Kerensa talk about how he came to develop Glucosio. It’s an interesting read on the path that led Mr. Kerensa to where he is right now.
One more thing: It’s interesting to see the comments on my article on Monday regarding using PC-BSD on a daily basis (though many have missed the point that I am still using Linux on some hardware, but never mind). Thanks to those who supported the decision in the name of software freedom, thanks to those who opposed the move with rational and civilized discourse, and thanks to those few who proved my point with desperate arguments that lacked civility and/or rationale. In a related move, I’m changing schedules again: “Larry the BSD Guy” — gettin’ ‘er done for Unix — will premiere on Thursday and will appear every Thursday afterwards on the hallowed pages of FOSS Force. See you then.
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Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
When I saw the head line that included “Exterminating LibreOffice”, I though what am I going to replace LO with?
GNU Gluco Control has been active for many years
http://ggc.sourceforge.net/
http://ggc.sourceforge.net/index.php?show=features
I tested GGC running on PCBSD 10 (FreeBSD with GUI) Lumina desktop.
The are actively supporting Blood Glucose meters with USB interfaces. They already support older Blood Glucose meters the has serial interfaces.
Maybe a RaspberryPI running raspbsd and this GGC software or Glucosi http://www.glucosio.org/ http://raspbsd.org/raspberrypi.html
Would be an interesting combination of products for a person with Type 2 diabetes.