Category Archives: Education, Training and Information

debian kernel, firmware and virtualisation

2009-10-26 by mjr

The debian GNU/Linux kernel’s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it): it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn’t sustainable), it’s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Final Decision Time: Koha Foundation Options

2009-10-23 by mjr

Thomas Dukleth writes in: “Remember to vote for your choices in the final Koha foundation forming election before the poll closes on the 25th. Turnout in the final Koha foundation forming election is lower than in the previous preliminary poll … Continue reading →

Posted in Koha, SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Some Good Does Come From Ubuntu

2009-10-22 by mjr

I’ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting: “Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sharing git repositories

2009-10-19 by mjr

Our co-op uses the git revision control system pretty extensively, both directly and through etckeeper. With more workers, we’re keeping more shared copies of our git repositories. So inevitably, we ran into permissions problems. Thanks a lot to Moser for … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Koha.org Desires Poll Results

2009-10-07 by mjr

Here are the results of the Koha Foundation Desires poll. More than 75% of respondants support the Koha foundation/association doing these things:- 1. ensure the ongoing shared governance of the project = 32 out of 35 = 91.43% 2. owning … Continue reading →

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Concentration, Community and Cooperation

2009-09-28 by mjr

I read the news about the launch of Ubuntu User by Linux New Media AG with some sadness. I believe that free software is stronger because of the informal cooperation between different distributions that usually do different jobs. It lets … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Strange Spammer Sightings

2009-09-25 by mjr

I’ve seen a couple of the conversation-spams described in Misspelled nemesis club: A new twist on spam? It looks like they exploit the typically weak moderation practices of many software discussion mailing lists. Do you think they are human-powered? Are … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Big Bad Biased Bing and Other Search Alternatives

2009-09-22 by mjr

Away from the Yagooglive search engines, there have been some recent changes in the search space. Bing launched a while ago, but I’ve only just read from Anglian LUG that Bing is badly biased, returning pretty poor results for openoffice, … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Co-op Sells Boxed Fairtrade T-shirts

2009-09-18 by mjr

I’ve done a bit of investigating ethical Free Software T-Shirts here in the past. Even when they’re available, it seems a bit odd to buy a fairtrade t-shirt and then get it in plastic wrap and/or on a plastic hanger … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

PHP mime_content_type Alternatives In Debian 5.0

2009-09-17 by mjr

We were called in to help someone with a failing file upload feature on a PHP website. It turned out that we’d recently upgraded their server to debian 5.0 and the mime_content_type() PHP function was no longer available. This isn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments