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Posts published in “Software”

GNOME Is Old Enough To Vote

By Christine Hall on August 17, 2015 |

Desktops and Software

GNOME logoOn Saturday the popular desktop environment GNOME turned eighteen. Always looking for an excuse for chocolate cake and ice cream, this is a birthday I celebrated, even though I’m not a user.

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It’s hard to believe that GNOME is only eighteen, since it seems as if it’s been around forever.

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LibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

LibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

By Larry Cafiero on August 7, 2015 |

Community, Desktops, Distros and Software

FOSS Week in Review

LibreOffice 5 Ready for Prime Time: LibreOffice, the office suite of choice of yours truly and others in the FOSS field, is now in the starting blocks to take on the proprietary office suites. The Document Foundation announced this week the release of LibreOffice 5.0, with a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, the latest LO release offers better interoperability with proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, with new and improved filters to handle non standard formats.

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libreofficsplash-300x85“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” said Michael Meeks, a director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingLibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

A Guided Tour of LibreOffice

By Don Parris on July 28, 2015 |

Software and Tutorial

LibreOffice logoI have been using LibreOffice since it was called Star Office and all documents opened in a tabbed interface, as in most modern spreadsheet applications (anyone remember those days?). From those early days until now, I have considered Star Office/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice to be an excellent, if not superior, tool compared to many on the market.

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Don Parris

Don Parris wears a Facility Services cape by day, and transforms into LibreMan at night. He has written numerous articles about free tech, and hangs out with the Cha-Ha crowd, learning about computer security. He also enjoys making ceviche with his wife, and writing about his travels in Perú.

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OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & FreedomLibrem 13 & Librem 15

OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

By Larry Cafiero on July 23, 2015 |

Hardware, News, Security and Software

Your digital rights — do both your hardware and software respect them?

Because if they don’t, Purism might have the answer to this shortcoming.

** If you're finding this article useful, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

Purism logo“We developed Purism so that users can have access to the highest quality computers without compromising these beliefs,” the Purism website states. “The founder of Purism developed the Philosophical Contract, that we all abide by, which was adopted from the Free Software Foundation, and expanded to include hardware manufacturing as it relates to software.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingOSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom
OSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSSOSCON logo

OSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSS

By Larry Cafiero on July 22, 2015 |

Business, Community, News and Software

PORTLAND, Ore. — My colleague Christine Hall beat me to the punch this morning about Capital One’s announcement on their open source development tool, but IBM and Hitachi also both made a big splash at OSCON today.

“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

** If our coverage matters to you, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

OSCON logoThe project is called developerWorks Open, a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. Developers can download the code, but also access various items like blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingOSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSS

Capital One Unveils Open Source Dev Tool at OSCON

By Christine Hall on July 22, 2015 |

Business, Copyright, News and Software

Capital One LogoWho would ever think that Capital One, the what’s-in-your-wallet folks, would want to get serious about becoming an open source software developer? After all, it’s a banking institution, and while it’s not hard to imagine a bank would be developing some back end tools to be used in-house or by its clients, it’s not expected that it would spend big bucks publicizing these tools at OSCON.

** If our coverage matters to you, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

Even more amazing: The application Cap One is unveiling with much fanfare isn’t something designed to help potential clients interact with the bank’s network, but is a developers’ tool. Called Hygieia, after the Greek goddess of health, it’s a dashboard that ties together data from a variety of tracking tools commonly used by software developers and presents them on a single screen.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingCapital One Unveils Open Source Dev Tool at OSCON
Profile of an Everyday FOSS DeveloperIsaac Carter

Profile of an Everyday FOSS Developer

By Ken Starks on July 21, 2015 |

Community and Software

Software. It’s been a thing that has fascinated me for decades. As a layman, the fact that lines of gibberish can be aligned to make a computer do the things wanted or needed is almost miraculous and resides in the shadows between magic and science. I am almost childlike when being shown how that gibberish makes devices do their stuff…stuff I want to do.

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Isaac CarterWhat drives a person to do this? That whole “making my computer do what I want it to do” thing; how does a person even get their head around that in the first place? What was the specific moment in time when a person says, “I want to write software to make my computer do what I want it to do”?

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/
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Yet Another Reason to Avoid Windows 10Windows logo

Yet Another Reason to Avoid Windows 10

By Christine Hall on July 20, 2015 |

News, Operating Systems and Software

Forget that the folks at Microsoft were wrong about the “Start” button and the interface formally known as Metro. It seems they’re still convinced they know what’s best for their users. So much so that the new Windows, due to be released next week, will have users click off on an EULA that pretty much gives Redmond carte blanche to update the system at will, which will include updating apps as well as Windows itself, with no real way to opt out — except for users of the Enterprise edition.

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Windows logoWe learned of this on Friday through Tim Anderson at The Register, who supplied these lines from the EULA:

  • “The Software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you.

  • You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources, and Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with those updates.

  • By accepting this agreement, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice.
Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingYet Another Reason to Avoid Windows 10
Turning Off the Mute ButtonLeft out of the conversation

Turning Off the Mute Button

By Ken Starks on July 14, 2015 |

Accessibility, Community and Software

Anyone who has read FOSS Force for the last couple of months knows that I lost my voice to cancer and that I’ve become personally involved in getting a decent text to speech (TTS) application developed. Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.

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Jigsaw PuzzleNone of them even approach usability for the everyday computer user. None. And you would think that of all these choices, one of them has to work…or provides documentation reasonable enough for everyone. You would think.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/
Continue readingTurning Off the Mute Button
Godfather Ellison’s Protection RacketLarry Ellison

Godfather Ellison’s Protection Racket

By Christine Hall on July 13, 2015 |

Business and Software

On Friday, two business journals ran stories on Oracle’s latest tactic for selling its lagging cloud services. The articles should serve as a warning to business readers, as they say in effect, “If you’re using Oracle software to run your businesses, you should consider running an internal audit to ascertain you’re in compliance, because you don’t want to be caught out of compliance if Redwood City’s goon squad pays a visit.”

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Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison, executive chairman and CTO of Oracle.
It appears that one of the tactics being used by Larry Ellison and his minions to sell the cloud is a new twist on the old protection racket. This shouldn’t surprise. Ellison didn’t become California’s richest person by playing nice — it doesn’t work that way.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingGodfather Ellison’s Protection Racket