Encouraging open source in education

I’ve read today a case study by Gregor Bierhals about an Austrian project called desktop4education which creates a desktop environment for school based on open suse.

The fact that really surprised me (and for the better) was the fact that the federal government help the project by sending CDs/DVDs to other school and even willing to award schools to move to open source software and reducing license fees.

While schools don’t pay the the Microsoft Office license fee (10 euro per station), the federal government has decided to pay the schools 10 euro for each station that moved to open source software.

However, by the time of writing the situation is about to change as the Federal government increasingly adopts a policy that promotes the use of open source software in Austrian schools. Exemplary to this is the government’s decision to pay any school €10 for each workstation that runs the free productivity suite Open Office that is provided by Sun Microsystems in replace of Microsoft Office, for which the government introduced a calculative license fee of €10.

I think this decision is radical as it motives the schools to move to open source software, and benefiting financially from the move. So while the government might pay a bit more, the money goes to the schools instead of commercial companies. I’m sure that’s a better investment of tax payers money.

I can just hope more governments will adopt this policy.

Linux Baby Rocker

A new version for InfraRecorder

InfraRecorder, a free software for burning CDs/DVDs in Windows has a new version (0.50). This version comes after a long pause in releases for almost a year.

I’ve been installing InfraRecorder on every Windows computer I can as part of trying to use free software programs even on a proprietary operation system. See my “Can everything except windows can be free software?” for more free and open source software for Windows.

Happy Sweet sixteen for Debian

According to the Debian history documentation, the project was founded 16 years ago on August 16th 1993. So – happy birthday Debian and congratulations to all the developer, contributors and users (:

And me personal note – I hope to be able to contribute to Debian in the coming year, as I was MIA most of the passing one.

Mozilla Israel stand @ August Penguin 2009

As part of August Penguin 2009, Mozilla Israel members Tomer Cohen and Tsahi Asher had a stand for promoting Firefox, web standards and other free software from Mozilla.

Mozilla Israel stand @ August Penguin 2009

The stand was crowded during most of the conference with people coming to talk or ask questions. The visitors enjoyed getting Firefox stickers/pins and web standards bracelets thanks to a shipment of the giveaways from abroad.

The party hats were used to make the August Penguin key signing party to look like a party (:

August Penguin 2009 Key Party

I’ll be happy to see more support for the local Israeli chapter of other projects, so we could have more stands like that in the next August Penguin.

Doing a minimal installation for RHEL 5.3 with kickstart

When installing RHEL 5, it doesn’t matter if you deselect all the packages during the installation. You’ll still end with the @dialup and @java groups.

If you do a kickstart installation, you can set your %packages to
@core
@base
-@dialup
-@java

This also might save you the disks changes (all or some). This will result with about 900+ MB for / (not including /boot). If you want something even more minimal (e.g. only for firewall) you can choose the “%packages –nobase” option.

vendor lock-in in Windows Live?

My university is forcing it’s students to have an account with Windows Live email service in order to get the university announcements/updates. Today I noticed a very strange behavior, in certain situations the website doesn’t let you configure email forward to another account outside of the Microsoft network. The following error message is shown:

You can forward your mail to one other e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains.

I’m using Iceweasel 3.0.11 from Debian, and I complained about missing that feature, other people seemed to have the feature. After a few checks it’s seems to be the way the browser identify itself. When I changed my identification to IE7/Vista (using user agent switcher plugin), the problem was solved.

I’m trying to understand the logic – If i use IE or Firefox, I can do a forward to another account, but otherwise I’m locked in to the Microsoft network. It can’t be a technical issue, as in both cases the interface is the same (no special browser features needed).

Norway: ODF and PDF as official goverment formats

Looks like the Norwegian made a step forward regarding open standards:

Public enterprises should not use other file formats than ODF (version 1.1) and PDF as attachment at the exchange of documents by email. This rule will apply from 1. January 2011.

Besides ODF, they also decided on an encoding, so UTF8 character set standard will be for all new government IT projects.

Source: digi.no and Leif Lodahl

Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010

It seems that Microsoft decision to continue working with the word engine to process/design emails in outlook 2010 is making waves through a twitter campaign, which gained almost 20,000 twits.

Behind the campaign stands the Email Standards Project, which trys to improve the support on web startands in email clients.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

From the free software point of view, I’m happy to see a community of people gathering around to try and make the sure better for the users instead of the developers. This campaign also shows how to use twitter and a cool website to create some pressur on a verdor.

Good luck, and don’t forget you can always use Mozilla Thunderbird (:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle

Last month RHEL 4.8 was released (see release notes). With this release RHEL 4 is entering phase 2 of it’s life cycle. During this phase only urgent software updates will be done and important or critical security issues will be handled.

During the Production 2 life cycle phase, at a minimum, qualified security errata of important or critical impact, as well as, urgent priority bug-fix errata may be released independent of minor releases.

If available, refreshed hardware enablement that does not require substantial software changes may be provided at the discretion of Red Hat via minor releases. New software functionality is not available during this phase. All available and qualified errata will be provided via the minor releases. The focus for minor releases during this life cycle phase lies on resolving defects with a minimum priority of high.

Updated install images will only be provided for minor releases during the Production 2 life cycle phase if required due to installer changes at Red Hat’s discretion.

Regrading RHEL 4, it seems the the release of 4.9 somewhere around Q1 2010, will end the 2nd phase, and the start of the 3rd one. It in the 3rd phase no new hardware is supported, and only mission critical bugs fixes are done. Security bug fixes has the same police like the second phase.

If you’re running RHEL version prior to version 4, notice that RHEL 2.1 just finished it’s 7 years life cycle on may 31st, and RHEL 3 will end it’s life cycle in October 31st, 2010. Details are available at Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle page.