Fabián Rodríguez

Well, it seems Brother printer drivers will make it into Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04, coming up next month), under GPL and Brother Software Open License Agreement - all driven by the community and with some help from Canonical.

Although I’d rather have 100% free Brother printer drivers, it’s still nice Brother has made their license clear about what can be done with their drivers, effectively opening the door to packaging by anyone:

This Agreement provides terms and conditions for license grant from Brother Industries, Ltd (”Broher”). Brother, who owns all copyrights to the software that is distributed with this Agreement (”Software”) to recipients thereof (”User”), for use of the Software. User shall have the right to use the Software only in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. Any use by User of the Software shall be deemed as its agreement hereto.
Note:

Please click on “I Accept” while holding down “Shift” or right click on “I Accept” and select “Save Target As,,,” from the menu.

Brother retains any and all copyrights to the Software. In no case this Agreement shall be construed to assign or otherwise transfer from Brother to User any copyrights or other intellectual property rights to whole or any part of the Software.

Brother grants User a non-exclusive license: to reproduce and/or distribute (via Internet or in any other manner) the Software. Further, Brother grants User a non-exclusive license to modify, alter, translate or otherwise prepare derivative works of the Software and to reproduce and distribute (via Internet or in any other manner) such modification, alteration, translation or other derivative works for any purpose.

Even nicer is actually seeing the first mention of these drivers a bit over two years ago and the path and work leading to its final packaging and testing just hours ago by many community people and even Canonical through the bug report on Launchpad and a corresponding wiki page.

I hope this raises the importance of supporting Linux properly for Brother and, who knows, perhaps they will be more visible for scanner and PC to Fax support in Ubuntu (and generally, Linux) in the near future. I would bet increasing Ubuntu + Brother customers would already justify this.

I do own an MFC model at home and it makes me think of the same comparisons I hear about the ” readiness of the Linux Desktop “. Compare this to all Hewlett-Packard does to support its printers under Linux, there still is a lot to do before both can be compared on equal grounds. Or is it ?

I got an email from the FACIL “forum” mailing list telling me about Dawson College in Montreal putting together a Free and Inexpensive Adaptive Technology Database through the Adaptech Research Network.

The Adaptech Research Network consists of a team of academics, students and consumers. We conduct research on the use of computer, information, and adaptive technologies by Canadian college and university students with disabilities. We are based at Dawson College and are funded by both federal and provincial grants.

Our work is guided by an active and enthusiastic cross-Canada bilingual Advisory Board. Our goal is to provide empirically based information to assist in decision making that ensures that new policies, software and hardware reflect the needs and concerns of a variety of individuals: college and university students with disabilities, professors who teach them, and service providers who make technological, adaptive, and other supports available to the higher education community.

I am not the usability and accessibility expert for software in Gnome or KDE that is included in Ubuntu, but I am going to contact them and make them aware of it. I’d also like to ask anyone more knowledegable about this to also contact them. Here’s the quick explanation of what this resource is:

One concern that has been repeated throughout all of our studies has been the issue of the high cost of adaptive software and hardware. In response to this, we have undertaken the compilation of a list of free and/or inexpensive hardware and software alternatives that might be useful. Some of these are long-running demos, while others are fully functional.

We in no way are suggesting that these replace the higher end hardware and software currently on the market. However, as a short-term solution, or for the purposes of trying out different adaptive technologies, we think they are a good place to start.

How can you help? If you use or know of software that is either free or inexpensive ($200 or less) that you feel would be beneficial to students with disabilities, we want to hear about it. Please send the name of the software and, if you have it, the name of the company which makes it and a web site to catherine.fichten@mcgill.ca. Read more about Adaptech’s search for free and inexpensive software. View our Free and Inexpensive Computer technologies video (WMV support required).

Most of the listed software has no clear indication on its licensing or is clearly non-free/open-source, which I believe would be another way to help them.

And I know the videos are not in any open format. I’ve already contacted them offering help in transcoding them.

Apparently Nokia’s Internet tablets (770 or n800) don’t support Ogg Theora / Vorbis open formats. It’s too bad, since the 700 has dropped in price and is now available around U$140. In a 2005 Linux Journal interview, Dr. Ari Jaaksi of Nokia had an interesting answer to LJ’s question about open formats support:

LJ: Given the proclivities of the Linux community, it has to be asked: will Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora be supported on the 770?
AJ: There’s nothing technical that prevents it. However, the 770 is a consumer device. The challenge is that there is not much [Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora] content right now.

So if I understand correctly, there was a decision from Nokia to actually drop support for open formats on their Internet tablet because it’s a consumer product.

I am left wondering why they didn’t use WinCE in the first place. And no, the n800 that was recenly released still does not support Ogg open formats for audio and video.

This morning I was really excited to see the Launchpad 1.1.6 milestone announcement! Launchpad is a collection of services that assist in software development. Ubuntu uses it to manage its specifications, bugs, meetings, events and other assorted things. the Launchpad HowTo describes how this is done.

Among the many details of bugs and new development in this announcement, a few are of particular interest to any Ubuntu LoCo teams using Launchpad to manage their community and keep track of participation:

• Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
• Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
• Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only. - as a team administrator, visit any project’s page (like Ubuntu’s, then go to the Answers tab, and choose ” Set answers Contact” from the left menu. Previously you also received notices in English. If you don’t select a preferred language, it will automatically be set to your browser language preferences.

This last feature alone is very important for local teams that wish to have their members keep track of the help they provide to local communities in their native language. I also think it will be a good way to keep answers to common support question out of the mailing lists - sometimes a few technical questions can generate a *lot* of email traffic. An added bonus, you loco team members will get precious karma for every participation.

There were also two nice changes to improve privacy of participants in Answers and the bug trackers:

• Email addresses inside the Answer and Bug Trackers are now obfuscatedto anonymous (not logged in) users - e.g. Google.
• Quoted emails and standard signature lines are now stripped from emailed responses to Answer Tracker questions and also bug reports.

There are many more improvements and new features, the full announcement is in the Launchpad-users mailing list archives.

Additionally, there is now a Launchpad News blog now available at http://news.launchpad.net/ - it’s great to have another channel with regular updates and insight directly from the users and developers behind Launchpad.

Now, to make this a perfect “Launchpad fans” day, it would have been lovely to see an update about making Launchpad free and open source under the GPL or another licence…

Almost two moths ago I remember reading that Canonical signed a License Agreement with Open Invention Network, but I can’t remember seeing much mentions of that - or any commentary. Earlier today I found some interesting questions and discussion in this blog post, however I’d be interested in revisiting that announcement with the information we have today, in particular the recent Microsoft deals and FUD around those. Well, dear lazy web, you know what I mean by I would be interested in…

The Open Invention Network site has interesting links about their licensing, the patents they own, and other details.

Well, it looks like it’s finally happened, you can now “Shop for Ubuntu” as Dell has put it.

Here are a few links that may help anyone interested get accurate and complete information:

• Information about Dell on Ubuntu’s site, including a description of the support plans avilable
• Dell Open Source, the new site where you can “Shop for Ubuntu” but also “Shop for FreeDOS”
• Ubuntu’s official support web site
• Ubuntu forums thread where you can ask me questions directly
• Dell’s Linux wiki including technical details about the Ubuntu 7.04 factory install: drivers used in each model, customization, etc.
• Dell’s FAQ for Ubuntu
• Dell’s Linux forums
• Today’s official press release from Dell, including pictures and detailed system specs
• Search results for “Ubuntu” on Dell’s site, which will return quite a few useful technical articles
• Information about media codecs: list of supported codecs with links to Wikipedia, handling restricted formats (including video, audio and DVD) - in many cases Ubuntu 7.04 will detect and automatically suggest needed packages when a codec is missing - no need for tools like Automatix.
• Modems and Wireless will be the only hardware with non-free drivers, but will work out-of-the box. Carefully read this post on Dell’s blog for more details.
• help.ubuntu.com - well, you guessed it, it’s Ubuntu’s help site.

In case you missed it in the list above, I have started a new thread where you can ask me questions directly or just start new discussions on related subjects. I’d rather not close comments here and handle questions there for everyone to see, let’s see what happens.

I hope this helps a bit and if you have other information I’ll be glad to edit my post.

Visit http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/, read a bit (includes instructions for Windows users). Download the python script and also install ffmpeg2theora (See #2 at my Drupal Video Guide).

Then:

1. Visit your favorite YouTube video
2. Copy the URL to the clipboard
3. In command line:

   magicfab@suzy:~$ python youtube-dl.py http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcuF7S3r6gM
   Retrieving video webpage… done.
   Extracting video URL parameters… done.
   Video data found at http://lax-v11.lax.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=PcuF7S3r6gM
   Retrieving video data… 1897k of 1897k done.
   Video data saved to PcuF7S3r6gM.flv
   magicfab@suzy:~$ 

4. Convert it (careful, those are TWO dashes before the optimize option):

   magicfab@suzy:~$ ffmpeg2theora PcuF7S3r6gM.flv ––optimize
   Input #0, flv, from ‘PcuF7S3r6gM.flv’:
     Duration: 00:00:47.3, bitrate: N/A
     Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono
     Stream #0.1: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320×262, 25.00 fps(r)
     Resize: 320×262
         0:00:47.33 audio: 36kbps video: 305kbps
   magicfab@suzy:~$

5. An .ogg corresponding file will be created in your current directory.
6. Profit ?

update: youtube-dl has been packaged since Edgy. Install it using the standard Synaptic package manager or through apt-get in command line, by searching for the youtube-dl package.

usage: youtube-dl [options] video_url

Depuis ce matin VMWare a rendu disponible VMWare server dans le dépôt “Commercial” de Canonical. Merci à mon collègue Étienne Goyer qui a fait la révision des packages pour le tuyau, malgré que nous travaillons à 2 mètres de distance je n’en savais rien. VMware propose des produits de virtualisation qui… bof, je vous suggère d’aller voir l’entrée Wikipedia de VMWare pour en savoir plus.

En chercheant sur ubuntu-fr.org je suis tombé sur cet exemple d’utilisation de VMWare server, j’ai donc mise à jour l’information sur l’installation qui s’y trouvait. En gros:

1. Allez chercher un numéro de série d’essai en vous enregistreant sur le site de VMWare
2. Ajoutez le dépôt “commercial” à vos dépôt Ubuntu - consultez les informations sur les dépôts pour les détails. Cherchez le package “vmware-server”:

   

3. Installez le package - n’oubliez pas d’avoir le numéro de série d’essai en main. Lisez attentivement la licence, il s’agît d’un logiciel non-libre dont les conditions d’utilisations sont importantes à connaître:

   

4. Démarrer la console d’accès en allant à l’option Applications > System Tools > VMWare Server Console dans les menus:

   

5. Amusez-vous

En option, téléchargez une des images “appliance” de machines virtuelles existantes.