One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do?
For the full original English version, see here.
Voici un texte de Richard Stallman. La version originale en anglais est ici.
Update: Une traduction en français est disponible sur Framablog.
LibreOffice 3.5.5 has been released:
Berlin, July 11th, 2012. The Document Foundation today announces the immediate availability of LibreOffice 3.5.5, the current version of the free office suite.
This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats. [...]
Keep in mind if you are using Ubuntu or Trisquel you need to be using the LibreOffice PPA to upgrade to this version. Make sure you read the LibreOffice notes for Ubuntu if you choose to do this. Remember this is not covered by commercial support.
I took the liberty to categorize the detailed technical change logs, which are available here:
Legend:
If you’re one of the rare species still wanting Thunderbird in Ubuntu as described in Jorge Castro’s recent post, you can help. I am more worried about Jorge’s other comments, following his logic Ubuntu and free software are only less and less relevant by the day – not a trend I am observing.
Considering Canonical decided to include Thunderbird in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – which will keep it around for 5 years, Thunderbird is not going away anytime soon. This essentially puts forward software that is considered irrelevant by its employees (dogfood anyone?) and demonstrates improvisation and miscommunication between Mozilla and Canonical. Many are still waiting for an official statement from Mozilla. I’d love to hear a more formal position than Jorge’s on the subject from Canonical too.
I appreciate the cloud, closed web-services and Google Apps may be all the rage (and the money) but for the rest of us, here are a few links to gather forces and continue. Remember this is not a user-centric or technical issue. The issue at hand are the business deals between Mozilla, Google, and Canonical. If anything, the recent Mozilla announcement will help Thunderbird get a better chance at surviving such forces.
A few years back I started using solid state drives (SSD) whenever I got a new netbook/laptop or when someone asked for hardware upgrade suggestions. The speed increase and shorter boot times on any given system is phenomenal and current GNU/Linux distributions take care of the configuration details. I don’t even take into consideration finer details like bus speed, hybrid disks or other technical features.
I’ll say this just once again, even though the price is high, the speed increase is ridiculous. If your job is in IT or requires using a dedicated computer full-time (some accounting positions or other engineering, graphic design, development, etc.), you may be able to justify the time gain (ie. booting/rebooting/starting apps/loading data) and calculate a short ROI justifying the expense. That’s not my line of expertise but I think I get the point accross.
From the archives: having picnic while waiting for the email indexing to finish. License: CC-BY, source: Moon Stars and Paper
Back from one week at the hospital after two small but painful operations, I have one month leave to get back on my feet. I also just finished my employment and needed to upgrade my older personal laptop, so I decided to also evaluate how to make my housewife’s netbook a bit faster for occasional use at home – I can’t move much or sit down for extended periods at the home computer / with a big laptop.
Although I know the speed increase will justify the upgrade, I still want to confirm how slow the current disk is, and of course what type of disk it is – if the system is using the older PATA interface, I am not even sure if you can find such SSDs. Confirming the system has a SATA interface will make it easier to shop around and prevent ending up with a hard disk I can’t connect.
Most consumer laptop/netbook systems come with the cheapest hard disk at the time of manufacture, which often means 4200 RPM. The hard disk exact model number can be found easily via command line or graphically, without opening your system.
The following information can also be used after booting from a live CD, if you’re evaluating such a hardware upgrade for a system that doesn’t have a GNU/Linux OS installed. That’s right, no need to find (or buy) and install any vendor-specific disk utilities for the simple checks I am sharing how to do here. Just an Ubuntu live CD.
Using the command line from a terminal you can get such information as follows (assuming your system only has one hard disk, extra information redacted):
magicfab@hermes:~$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: Hitachi HTS545016B9A300
Serial Number: 090726PB5B03QCH542MH
Firmware Revision: PBBOC66G
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6; Revision: ATA8-AST T13 Project D1697 Revision 0b
[...]
Configuration:
[...]
Form Factor: 2.5 inch
Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 5400
Using the graphical environement there is the Disk Utility application that will give you the same information. It’s under System > Administration unless you’re using the Unity interface in Ubuntu.
The above results indicate it’s a 2.5 inch 5400 RPM SATA drive, a perfect candidate for an SSD upgrade. On higher-end laptops you may have a 7200 RPM hard disk which may be fast enough if you optimize your system otherwise (and having cheap, matching SSD-per-GB to 7200 RPM drives is not happening anytime soon).
I also use this method to check the firmware version of newly installed SSD drives, which sometimes needs updating depending on its manufacture time and purchase time – if I am buying a drive that has been on the market for some time, there are high chances its initial firmware as shipped at the factory has a new version available for updating.
If you’re somewhat of an SSD geek like me, take a look at my SSD checklist, it has a few tricks to optimize SSD configuration and some of those tricks can also increase performance on non-SSD systems.
Once you have installed and used your first SSD hard disk, please don’t hurt yourself too much for not having done so before 
I still think it’s the best ratio of dollar/performance gain of any hardware upgrade you can simply accomplish on most laptop/netbook systems.
Oh, and don’t forget to sell your older, slower hard disk – or re-purpose it for external storage and backups using an external case!
(English version follows)
La Document Foundation a annoncé la disponibilité de LibreOffice 3.5.3 pour le téléchargement. Je suis membre de la Document Foundation depuis un an maintenant, pour en savoir plus sur mes activités dans le projet LibreOffice, visitez ma page wiki sur leur site. J’encourage aussi ceux qui voudraient participer au projet à le faire, et éventuellement faire une demande de membership! C’est un projet très stimulant, en tout cas pour la partie qui me concerne (surtout de la promotion et formation locale et le support / entraide).
Si vous n’utilisez pas Ubuntu, ou si vous voulez partager cette nouvelle avec des amis, famille ou collègues qui utilisent Windows ou Mac OSX, LibreOffice 3.5.3 est disponible pour téléchargement immédiat à partir du lien suivant: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Rappelez-vous que lorsque vous utilisez Ubuntu, vous n’avez pas besoin de télécharger et installer manuellement ce logiciel!
Si vous avez Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vous n’obtiendrez pas cette mise à jour automatiquement. Correction: cette version sera disponible d’ici 2-3 semaines. Si vous la voulez immédiatement, vous aurez besoin d’utiliser le PPA LibreOffice – ne le faites qu’à vos risques et périls. Vérifiez la page du wiki Ubuntu sur LibreOffice pour plus d’informations sur les autres versions aussi. À noter que le PPA de LibreOffice peut être utilisé tel quel avec Trisquel (dont la version actuelle 5.5 réagira comme un Ubuntu 11.10).
Voici quelques corrections de failles et mises à jour qui ont retenu mon attention:
D’autres nombreux correctifs ont été apportés.
Consultez l’annonce originale publiée sur le carnet de The Document Foundation. Ne manquez pas la section qui parle des fonctionalités à venir, comme le client Android ou le filtre MS Publisher!
Une liste détaillée des correctifs et mises-à-jours est disponible à http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC1 et à http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC2.
Pour terminer, voici deux correctifs qui ont vraiment piquée ma curiosité! Pourrez-vous les trouver? 
—
The Document Foundation has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.5.3 for download.
I’ve been a member of The Document Foundation for a year now, to follow my LibrOffice activities you can visit my wiki page on their site. I’d encourage anyone willing to do so to participate in this project, perhaps even request membership at some point! It’s a very rewarding project, at least for the activities I develop the most (local advocacy and training, and users support/help).
If you’re not using Ubuntu, or want to share the news with friends, family or colleagues that use Windows or Mac OSX, LibreOffice 3.5.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Remember when using Ubuntu you don’t need to manually download and install this!
If you have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS you won’t be getting this update automatically, though. Edit: this version will be available for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS automatically within 2-3 weeks. If you can’t wait and absolutely want to have it now, you will need to use the LibreOffice PPA – only do so at your own risk. Check the Ubuntu Wiki entry for LibreOffice for more information about other versions too. Also note that if you use Trisquel, you can use the LibreOffice PPA for Ubuntu as-is, it will bring updates corresponding to Ubuntu 11.10.
Hera are some bug fixes and updates that caught my attention:
Other numerous bugs were fixed.
Check the release announcement on The Document Foundation Blog. Don’t miss the section about upcoming features, such as the Android client or the MS Publisher import filter!
Detailed change logs are available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC1 and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC2.
And these two bug fixes also stood apart from others! Will you find them among the other bug reports in the release notes ?
If you waited to download or upgrade Ubuntu today, do the right thing, use a torrent (here’s the official list with links to all Ubuntu editions torrents available).
You can get the Alternate ISO from there and upgrade from a local file rather than downloading all the packages individually… specially today!
Trisquel GNU/Linux is a Linux distribution using a free version of the Linux kernel as distributed by the Linux-libre project. The main goals of the project are the production of a fully free software (free as in free speech) system that must be easy to use, complete, and with good language support. (from Wikipedia).
Trisquel 5.5 is an Ubuntu derivative based on Ubuntu 11.10 and was released on Monday. I discovered Trisquel through the Free Software Foundation, which distributes it on a nice wallet-USB key to all new members. Trisquel 6.0 will be based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
I started using it as my main OS at home last year (with version 5.0) when the numerous changes brought with Unity, problems with accessibility and increasing UI regressions prompted me to explore other options. As I’ve been choosing my new hardware and peripherals to be supported with free software, there wasn’t any transition or adjustments needed. Even some PPAs I used (notably, LibreOffice) are fully compatible. To my surprise, several fellow Ubuntu users also already knew about it and have been experimenting with it. So if you’re in a similar situation, I’d encourage you to download and try Trisquel some time.
With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS there has been some improvement to get a good fallback mode but I rely on too many things that used to be there and “just work” like multi-monitor support, applets, directory encryption at user creation, etc. and I kept removing non-free features I don’t use like Ubuntu One. I’ve found it’s actually less effort than I thought to push the IT freedom mindset a bit further, use a derivative that chooses a conservative path (even remaining ~6 months behind current Ubuntu releases) and I am learning a lot from Trisquel’s helpful community – particularly hardware! That’s in no small part thanks to Christopher Waid from ThinkPenguin.
Even being a commercial support services customer at Canonical during the last year wasn’t enough to work around some issues. It’s still a great way to bring attention to important issues when you know how to report bugs and can follow-up tightly on such reports. My current job doesn’t leave much time for experimentation and bug-reporting, but I still used 12.04 LTS both at home and at work as my main environments during alpha an beta. Although there are good intentions to help the “old timers”, I can’t be always afford such experimentation, and exploring ways to get closer the “100% free software” experience also means taking the challenge of exploring other options.
(Lisez ci-bas en français!)
Starting tomorrow I will be in Boston for the annual conference of the Free Software Foundation, “LibrePlanet 2012“. We’ll be four people from Quebec (actually 5, just got last minute confirmation of another former colleague!), wanting to learn about what has been been brewing abroad and also wanting to share about our experiences here in Quebec. The LibrePlanet teams structure offers a way for people in the same area to gather and share their love for Free Software – much like the LoCo Teams welcome Ubuntu users.
I’d like to thank my employer, Microcom, for supporting my participation in this event by releasing me from work for the next few days and providing a vehicle for transport. I would also like to highlight a special sponsorship from Avencall, which will make possible blogging our participation and two presentations summarizing the event withing the next couple of weeks. Keep a close eye at the Agenda du Libre du Québec
Avencall is the company behind XiVO, an open source (GPLv3) unified communications system based on Asterisk for small, medium and large businesses. XiVO communications systems are industrial and packaged solutions with a wide range of value added features such as unified messaging, conferencing, IVR, customer telephony integration, web services, contact center services, fixed-mobile convergence and so on. XiVO systems are a mix of powerful, scalable and cost effective solutions.
XiVO has been awarded by Digium as the First Asterisk Custom Communications Solution in EMEA. Did I mention all their work is freely licensed under the GPL v3? If you haven’t yet, take a look at their open hardware work.
You can follow our progress here and at my identi.ca microblog.
See you in Boston, then!
Comme j’ai écrit ces derniers jours, à partir de demain je serais à Boston pour la conférence annuelle de la Free Software Foundation, “LibrePlanet 2012“. J’emmène quatre autres libristes québécois avec moi (en fait 5, un ancien collègue vient de confirmer!), voulant en savoir plus sur ce qui se passe ailleurs en technologies libres mais aussi voulant partager nos expériences et activités ici au Québec. Les “LibrePlanet teams” offrent une structure semblable au LoCo Teams Ubuntu , où les gens peuvent se rassembler pour échanger sur leur passion – les logiciels et les technologies libres.
Je voudrais remercier mon employeur, Microcom, pour appuyer ma participation à cet événement en me libérant pour la durée de celui-ci et en fournissant un véhicule pour le transport. J’aimerais aussi souligner une commandite spéciale d’Avencall, qui rendra possible la rédaction de billets sur mon carnet pour documenter notre participation et deux présentations résumant nos activités d’ici quelques semaines. Gardez un oeil attentif sur l’Agenda du Libre du Québec!
Avencall est éditeur et intégrateur de XiVO, une gamme de solutions libres de communications unifiées basée sur Asterisk pour les petites, moyennes et grandes entreprises. Les solutions XiVO sont souples, puissantes et industrialisées. Elles permettent de bénéficier de fonctionnalités à valeur ajoutée (messagerie unifiée, SVI, CTI, services centre d’appels, convergence fxe-mobile, etc. )
XiVO a été récompensé par les “Digium Pinnacle Awards” en tant que Première Solution basée sur Asterisk dans la zone EMEA (“Europe/Middle-East/Asia”).
Savez-vous que tout leur code est publié sous license libre GPL v3? Si vous n’avez pas encore jetté un coup d’oeil, allez voir leur design de matériel libre.
Vous pourrez suivre nos activités ici ainsi que sur mon microblog identi.ca.
On se voit donc à Boston!
I’d like to share a few projects and organizations that I’d love to see reaching their goals this time of the year.
I want to stress how important it is to understand that donating even U$25 or U$5 or whatever you can is important. It’s also an easy decision for many people (I am not saying it is the case for everyone), to donate and make a difference, instead of spending that same money having lunch at the restaurant or taking a cab. You can also ask your employer to chip in – just ask! Your employer could donate to these projects, become a corporate member of the associations I mention, or pay your membership as part of mutual benefits (non-profit tax receipt + happy employee) Just ask. The worse that can happen is you get a “no, sorry”.
“OpenStreetMap‘s Operations Working Group, who have the important role of keeping core OSM services running smoothly, have planned to invest in a new server which will provide [them] with a database back-up. This improvement is at the very core of the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, giving services greater resilience. It means [they]’ll bounce back quicker and easier in the event of a hardware failure. In time the new server will also bring about some performance improvements.” – you can read more details about the fund drive and donate here. I am donating 50€ to this project.
The Debian Administrator’s Handbook was first written in French (and is a best-seller already) by two Debian developers who are translating it to English and possibly publishing it under a free license. The latter will only happen if the liberation fund reaches 25 K€. A physical book is a big helper when doing advocacy for free software. Imagine if instead of just showing the book to anyone interested, you could also show them how to search it electornically, cite it, use it, modify it, circulate it, share it at will ? I donated 100€ to this project.
Become a member of the Free Software Foundation and/or The Linux Foundation. I don’t always agree with everything that is said and done by the FSF, although I consider myself an active member and advocate – I certainly couldn’t do any of my advocacy work without all I’ve learned from the FSF and other fellow members. My membership at The Linux Foundation is a way to contribute to finance important projects (such as paying Linus Torvals’ salary). If you have a local free software advocacy group (such as FACIL or APELL in Quebec), consider joining as a full member or even making a donation – meeting space, flyers, CDs and food/drinks go a long way when networking locally. Becoming a member also increases the organization’s footprint, if nothing else. Numbers speak! This coming year I am sponsoring a student associate membership at the FSF.
Do you have any other ideas on where to donate cold, hard cash to further free, open technologies and software ? I’d love to hear them.
Update: I am helping putting together an accordingly “freedom geek” buying guide here, if anyone wants to peek or get inspiration for it.
Don’t miss it! À ne pas manquer!
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!