This year I was able to bring two simultaneaous events together, in different locations.

Cette année j’ai pu programmer 2 événements différents, ça se passe demain, à deux endroits différents .

Les détails à / All details at: http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011/Canada/Montreal

See you there! À demain!

Personellement je commence toujours ce genre de recherche dans mon quartier, À Outremont il y a d’Un Sport à l’autre, qui propose beaucoup de pièces à prix raisonnable, du service sur place immédiat et des amélioration “custom” sur demande pour de très bons prix. Deux employés (toujours les mêmes depuis 2 ans que je connais cette boutique), pas d’uniformes, un seul comptoir… autant de pistes qui indiquent tout de suite qu’il s’agît d’un magasin de quartier très près de ses clients.

Sur le Plateau / Mont-Royal c’est la bicycletterie JR qui me donne la même première impression, quoiqu’on y vende moins ou pas de matériel usagé.

Pour un vélo usagé de qualité la meilleure chose c’est souvent les sites d’annocnes comme lespac ou kijiji mais il faut s’y connaître et c’est long. Pour voir sur place je conseille ÉcoVélo:

Chaque ÉCOVÉLO recyclé dans notre usine est tout d’abord démonté en entier. Les composantes réutilisables selon nos standards de qualité sont ensuite sablées et repeintes. Nous avons développé depuis plusieurs années des processus de fabrication nous permettant d’offrir un vélo de qualité à un prix compétitif.

SOS VÉLO récupère plus de 4 500 vélos par année. Ces vélos proviennent en grande partie de la générosité du grand public qui supporte année après année notre mission sociale.

Attention, c’est pas nécessairement très bon marché mais certainement moins cher que neuf – et un choix de consommation plus intéressant qu’acheter du neuf. Il y a aussi parfois des ventes chez Canadian Tire (!), mais on finit souvent par remplacer les accessoires trop cheap.

Si on veut se procurer un vélo gratuitement, il y aussi les ventes de garage, le réseau Freecycle et les encans annuels qui sont maintenant de compétence de chaque arrondissement. Et pourquoi pas demander dans vos réseaux sociaux (Facebook, G+, etc.) ? Qui ne demande rien n’a rien!

Avez-vous d’autres tuyaux ?

$20,193 pledged of $25,000 goal

69 hours to go

I really like the ideas and work presented by Novacut, so I decided to help the project by pledging some money to it. You can do it too.

Here’s a fan video (by filmmakers, heh) that explains well why this project is important – Ubuntu logo included. If you haven’t read DoctorMo’s Letter to Creative Industry, take a look – then share it with anyone you may know in the film industry. You can also read about Novacut on the Yorba blog. Yorba makes Shotwell, the photo management app that replaced F-Sport in Ubuntu – and Lombard, a video editor for Gnome. Some heavy criticism also comes via Danny Piccirillo’s earlier post. Read the comments in Danny’s blog post, many people bring positive support to Novacut, which I agree with. I hope current FLOSS editors continue evolving and can hook into Novacut (or the other way around) and we can all have a huge mash up someday.

Oh, there is also a wiki page with most useful links to the project as it relates to Ubuntu.

The Internet, January 25, 2011 – The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

1. the developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and the project’s strong ambitions);
2. thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;
3. the Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.

The full announcement is available here.

There are important release notes regarding this version of LibreOffice.

A complete list of new features and fixes included in LibreOffice (with screenshots) is also available.

Getting involved in LibreOffice

Most importantly, the LibreOffice project needs all the help it can get. If you want to join a vibrant, active community around a very visible and dynamic project, there are plenty of ways to do so.

If you or someone you know has some time and resources to dedicate to this important part of Ubuntu and of every libre desktop, come by sometime to the #libreoffice IRC channel and we’ll take care of you

Getting help for LibreOffice

I joined the LibreOffice project a few weeks ago and I must say this is a very exciting day ! I am mostly involved in marketing and documentation, but I’m also proposing the following two resources to become official support and self-help channels:

• http://libreoffice.shapado.com – a questions & answers community driven by reputation and voting
• http://www.libreofficeforum.org – forums dedicated to language specific versions of LibreOffice (I monitor the French & Spanish forums there)

The LibreOffice project has a dedicated page listing all available online help resources.

I believe having additional self-help and support communities that complement the exiting OpenOffice.org existing ones is important, as the LibreOffice code-base will inevitably diverge more and more, and as we have more version-specific issues and bugs that can’t be treated equally. Furthermore, having language-specific communities and tools that can be used in your own language is also an important way to advocate LibreOffice in any part of the world – without depending on English-only tools.

Installing LibreOffice in Ubuntu

If you haven’t tried LibreOffice in Ubuntu yet, this would be a good time

If you are using Ubuntu do not download the .deb files for manual installation, there is a PPA repository that has been available for a few weeks now. Follow these instructions to install LibreOffice from the PPA so you get automatic updates. If you are running Ubuntu 11.04 LIbreOffice is already part of the standard packages, just search for libreoffice in your favorite package manager. Keep in mind the PPA shows version 3.3 rc4 as of this writing (which is bit-for-bit identical to the released 3.3), however a 3.3-numbered release should be available shortly.

The following is needed and works for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu 10.10. Keep in mind a PPA is always considered a third-party application and unfit for production purposes (as far as official commercial support goes), however LibreOffice is becoming part of Ubuntu officially in the next release, due in April 2011, so the PPA will get a lot of attention and care. Make sure you test this and perhaps wait a few weeks if you intend to use this in 10.04 LTS or 10.10 in any significant way.

Here are the steps, then to install LibreOffice in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10:
Start a terminal window and issue these commands (you’ll be asked for your password):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice

To complete the integration to Ubuntu (Gnome) or Kubuntu (KDE), you will also need to either

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

or

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-kde

… accordingly.

Filing a bug for LIbreOffice in Ubuntu is easy, I have documented the process here.

Additional language modules, help files and extensions are also available if you search for libreoffice in your package manager.

LibreOffice 3.3 (release candidate 2) est disponible, grâce aux contributeurs de la Document Foundation. Comme vous l’avez probablement déjà constaté, LibreOffice sera la suite bureautique par défaut dans la prochaine version d’Ubuntu (11.04), du moins c’est le but pour Natty alpha 3 tel qu’indiqué sur le bogue #651124 [needs-packaging] LibreOffice Productivity Suite. Abonnez-vous si vous voulez suivre le progrès des package pour Ubuntu. Alors, pendant les vacances ou en attendant la nouvelle année, pourquoi ne pas augmenter votre bon karma en participant à ce projet ?

On peut parier que LibreOffice remplacera donc OpenOffice.org non seulement dans Ubuntu mais aussi dans la multitude de distributions dérivées mais aussi dans Debian, d’ailleurs on l’y retrouve déjà. Parmi mes lectures à ce sujet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols résume la petite histoire dans une série d’articles sur son blog, Ralph Janke donne les détails techniques et logistiques du projet sur son blog.

LibreOffice et la Document Foundation progressent rapidement, et on retrouve déjà des versions de leur site en danois, allemand, espagnol, français, galicien, néerlandais et russe en plus d’une centaine de language packs pour l’application elle-même!

Essayer LibreOffice sous GNU/Linux, Mac OSX ou Windows

Pour l’instant il n’y a pas de dépôt officiel ou de PPA pour installer LibreOffice pour Ubuntu ni pour Trisquel. Les installateurs Mac OSX et Windows fonctionnent bien, et je les ai trouvé très utiles pour remplacer rapidement des installations OpenOffice.org existantes. Vous pouvez consulter des instructions d’installation détaillés sur leur site mais j’ai préféré résumer mon expérience Ubuntu et Trisquel ici:

1. Si vous désirez supprimer complètement OpenOffice.org, utilisez cette commande:
   sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org*
2. Si vous avez déjà une version antérieure de LibreOffice, il faudra la désinstaller. Consultez les instructions pour GNU/Linux (traduction en cours).
3. Dirigez-vous à http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
4. Assurez-vous d’avoir le bon choix de système d’exploitation
5. Choisissez votre langue (!) Si vous voulez installer d’autres langues, il faudra les choisir et télécharger les fichiers un par un.
6. Une fois que vous aurez les fichiers, dans le cas qui nous intéresse ici (GNU/Linux, paquets deb pour distributions Debian), ouvrez une fenêtre de terminal et éxécuter ces commandes:
   tar -xzvf LibO_3.3.0rc2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
tar -xzvf LibO_3.3.0rc2_Linux_x86_langpack-deb_fr.tar.gz
sudo dpkg -R -i .


Attention, le point “.” est important à la fin de la dernière commande!

Après quelques minutes vous devriez voir le lanceur de LibreOffice.org et ses applications sous le menu Applications > Bureautique. J’ai beaucoup apprécié le nouveau site et surtout la version plus intelligente de cette page de téléchargement!

Vous remarquerez que j’ai ajouté une étape pour supprimer OpenOffice.org. Personellement je n’ai pas constaté de problème majeurs à l’utilisation de LibreOffice, j’ai donc préfére de remplacer OpenOffice.org sur tous mes ordinateurs de bureau, à vous de décider si vous faites la même chose.

Note: j’ai effectué mes tests sous Trisquel 4.0.1 et Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit et 64-bit (pour ces deux distributions) ainsi que Windows 7 et Mac OSX.

Un document intéressant qui saura guider et rassurer les utilisateurs débutants ou experts est déjà disponible: le Getting Started Guide. L’équipe de documentation est d’ailleurs à la recherche de contributeurs et traducteurs. Si vous voulez contribuer aux traductions de documentation anglais -> français, inscrivez-vous à la liste discuss@fr.libreoffice.org.

J’en profite pour laisser quelques liens pour ceux et celles qui voudront bien aider à mener LibreOffice à bon port:

• Assistance LibreOffice
• Participer au projet LibreOffice
• Rapporter des bogues (en anglais)

Pour une prochaine fois, j’écrirais sur comment utiliser et tester LibreOffice en plusieurs langues.

English, as promised

LibreOffice 3.3 (release candidate 2) is now available, thanks to all the contributors to the Document Foundation. As you may have noticed, LibreOffice will be the default office applications suite in the upcoming Ubuntu version (11.04), at least that’s where its heading starting with Natty alpha 3 as indicated on Bug #651124 [needs-packaging] LibreOffice Productivity Suite. Subscribe to it if you wish to follow its packaging progress in Ubuntu. So, during these holidays or while waiting for the New Year to come, is there any excuse not to earn some extra karma by contributing to this project ?

I would bet LibreOffice will be replacing OpenOffice.org in many of the Ubuntu-based distributions but also in others too – see it’s already making its way into Debian. While reading about LibreOffice few writers caught my attention like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols with his blog where one can grasp what happened and when, and Ralph Janke’s opinions and detailed accounts of technical and logistical progress of this project.

LibreOffice and the Document Foundation make great progress each day, and we already see versions of the site in Danish, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Dutch and Russian – nevermind having LibreOffice itself already offering more than a hundred languages packs for immediate consumption!

Trying LibreOffice in GNU/Linux, Mac OSX or Windows

There isn’t an official LibreOffice repository yet (or even a PPA) for Ubuntu or Trisquel, but installing it is rather trivial. The Mac OSX and Windows installers worked really well, and I found them very useful when wanting to quickly replace existing OpenOffice.org. You can find detailed installation instructions on their site but I’ve summarized my experience in Ubuntu and Trisquel here:

1. If you want to completely remove an existing OpenOffice.org installation, issue the following command:
   sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org*
2. If you already have an existing LibreOffice installation, you will need to remove it completely before proceeding any further. see the Linux instructions for that.
3. Go to http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
4. Make sure the right operating system is selected
5. Choose your language (!) If you want to install support for several languages, you will have to download all the language packs separately.
6. Once you have all the files, in my example (GNU/Linux, deb packages for Debian distributions), you can open a terminal window and issue the following commands::
   tar -xzvf LibO_3.3.0rc2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
tar -xzvf LibO_3.3.0rc2_Linux_x86_langpack-deb_fr.tar.gz
sudo dpkg -R -i .


Make sure you don’t forget the dot “.” at the end of the last command!

After a few minutes you should be done and LibreOffice applications will be available in the Applications > Office menu. I really appreciated the clear and easy web site and was impressed by the download page!

You will notice my first step above is to completely remove OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice and OOo will happily co-exist but I like LibreOffice so much after a few weeks using it that I decided to replace all my desktops OOo installations right now. Of course you can decide not to do so!

Note: I made all my tests using Trisquel 4.0.1 and Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit and 64-bit (for those two distributions) as well as Windows 7 and Mac OSX.

An interesting document that will help new users and guide old hats is already available for review: the Getting Started Guide. The documentation team is always looking for contributors and translators, BTW. If you want to help English -> French translation, join the discuss@fr.libreoffice.org mailing list – note all the local mailing lists in that page!

I’ll take this opportunity to share some links that will help those of you interested in joining this project and make it rock:

• Get Help
• Get involved
• Report bugs!

Coming up next: Using and testing LibreOffice in several languages

It just took a few minutes. Considering the massive amount of time Wikipedia saves me every day explaining technical terms and providing historical references to many projects and products I work with, it’s time and money well spent. You can only resist Jimmy Wales for so long

Don’t miss this opportunity !!!

Ok, this is not as exciting as getting your fingerprint reader to work or customizing window close/maximize buttons positions…

If you consider using Ubuntu 10.10 when it releases (or already do), upgrading to it, or suggesting anyone around you doing so, this would be a good time to read the Maverick Technical Overview Making new (or existing, upgrading) Ubuntu users happier also means knowing about its issues before hand, and deciding if you stick to 10.04 LTS, wait a bit longer before upgrading, or else. How else can you help improve such knowledge ?

As many may know, most of Canonical workforce is distributed, but we often get together in sprints where we attack a specific subject. During this week at the Montreal Canonical office we’re having a special event around the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release. We’re literally sprinting until Friday, on a very busy week during which we’ll wrap-up all the information we have from weeks of testing, bug reporting/triaging, support issues reported by customers, escalated issues, knowledgebase solutions, and more.

Lots of fun! Specially when Boris is around

For our sprint this week in the Montreal support office, my team is focusing on desktop issues within the following areas, among others:

* Networking (wifi, drivers, sharing, printing..)
* Boot / install / post-install issues (upstart, GRUB*, casper..)
* Video (multi-head, setup, legacy drivers..)

Other teams are focusing on server, cloud, and more. It’s interesting Desktop and “other” areas intersect in what most would generally call “corporate” use of Ubuntu – mass deployments, OEM issues, etc. So we’ve also learned to never underestimate even the tiniest Desktop papercuts

You can see some of the issues and bugs we consider worth knowing before hand in this Delicious bookmarks feed. If you’re interested in contributing to this list, consider using Delicious and tagging with “maverick” and “bug”. We’ve also chosen some more tags representing tasks around them, for example “relnotes” for those issues already in the release notes and “norelnotes” for those without an entry, but which we consider would benefit from being there. Most importantly, please consider filing a bug against the Ubuntu Release Notes project if you feel something should be there to help evaluating going to Ubuntu 10.10.

You will instantly become a better person, I promise.

Back to what we’re doing this week, this is a bit different than most sprints in that we’re not specifically targeting finding a solution for most issues, but rather workarounds or maybe just even making a small note land in the Maverick Technical Overview (which will later become the Release Notes). Given our workflow, we’re also reporting bugs as we go, but I view that mostly as a labor of documenting existing problems, not necessarily advancing their resolution directly – at least not during this week.

So if you have a particular pet peeve that is not in our release notes or Delicious feed, please let me know, I am always interested and curious to share such information.

Since we hadn’t produced any reports for the past few months, this one is a particularly long one…

Enjoy

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/TeamReports/10/July

You can check if your team’s report has been submitted here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/July2010

If it hasn’t, contact your team’s LoCo contact and ask how you can help make it happen! You can search for your LoCo team contact at the LoCo directory.

As a disclaimer I should mention that I work at Canonical as a senior support analyst for Ubuntu support (both desktop and server) and I also train other people to provide Ubuntu support. I am also the admin and creator of the Ubuntu group in Shapado (10 months ago). So I constantly switch my community and professional hats

I use the Answers system in Launchpad extensively (including its FAQ facility) but it lacks two big features:

• Non-English language support – also known as “l10n” or “localization“. That would be Bug #81419.
• A reputation / trust system

As you can see that bug report is in an odd deadlock. My interpretation of it is Answers and Launchpad itself were not planned from the beginning to be multilingual. It’s so big now that this can’t be done quickly or easily.

The reputation system or “making Launchpad more social” is a huge feature request too, perhaps traditionally out of scope for such technically-oriented online resources (at least in the traditional Free / Open Source communities). It’s also something I am missing from my daily interactions with customers when providing commercial support.

So when I learned about Shapado I found a nice tool that could complement my advocacy needs, and some more. How is it different than Launchpad’s Answers ? To me, it’s primarily the language support, but many other features are a bonus.

Regarding the recent proposal to have an Ubuntu community in Stack Exchange, see How does Shapado compare to StackExchange ?. I honestly don’t want to join yet another English-only site that runs on non-Free software that I can’t fix or translate myself. I can’t ask anyone around me to do that either. That proposal was forwarded to the LoCo Teams contacts mailing list, asking team contacts to forward it. I am sorry but as an Ubuntu Member and Ubuntu QC contact I won’t do that. I am sticking with my principles for now, and using any free, open source alternative I can get.

So if you’re interested in using Shapado for Q&As in English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish (for now), see http://shapado.com/pages/faq and http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

If you’re interested in setting up your own local, localized Shapado Q&A server, see the installation instructions, the question asking about Ubuntu/Debian packages, and the Shapado “needs-packaging” bug report.

Here is more information on Shapado:

• Shapado, the free Q&A Software from South America
• Microblog: http://identi.ca/shapado and http://twitter.com/shapado
• Blog: http://blog.ricodigo.com/shapado
• Live chat: http://shapado.com/chat (or #shapado on Freenode)

In true dogfood fashion, one can report bugs or make suggestions at http://shapado.com directly, just by using the “bug” or “feature-request” tags There is also a more traditional bug tracker.

"Surfin'" by Coda2, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

See you there!