Free Software
Cooperation with higher education in open source projects

For some time now, I have been advocating that universities should create more free and open source solutions to fill the gaps needed within the education sector itself. Every year, thousands of computer science and engineering students in the UK alone rack their brains looking for undergraduate final year projects. Most of these will be […]

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Free Software
Free software and its relationship to Quality

Yesterday I was given an advance preview of a document for comment. It finished with a paragraph warning the audience that since it was discussing an open source solution it would require more in-house expertise to cope with it. I won't mention more about the context since while this exasperates me, it's not the fault […]

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Free Software
Debian's navel gazing

Debian is my favourite distribution of GNU/Linux. It's a well respected and well known brand, although I was almost stunned while on business in London last Friday to meet someone who knew about Suse, and Red Hat but wasn't even aware of the existence of Debian. I like Debian's astonishing infrastructure, and its community led […]

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Free Software
Dear LazyWeb, Icedove/Thunderbird is annoying because...

I use Icedove for mail mainly (the Debian variant of Thunderbird - a long and not very interesting story). I generally like it. I've used pine and mutt, but generally get too much stuff to view to make a text mode editor much fun. I've used evolution, but it was for a long time very […]

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Free Software
Guided LVM in Debian

I recently reinstalled one of the boxes here, Lorien, from scratch. It was a brand new SATA disk and I used the Debian Lenny beta 2 installer. I'd never tried LVM before, I'd always used "normal" partitioning, but for some reason I figured I'd give this a shot. It all worked ok, but it left […]

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Free Software
Tux droid isn't free

Ok, so I should have checked an odd message I saw when I installed the 32 bit debs, but now I know that tux droid is not entirely free. As some of you will know I've had some spectacular bad luck with failing hardware both at home and at work recently. A few weeks ago […]

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Free Software
OpenIsland Conference

I've had some time to reflect on the OpenIsland conference held in Belfast last Friday, which I was involved in organising and spoke at. We had 170 people registered, and despite dire warning of bad snow storms (5 cm of snow causes Northern Ireland to grind to a halt), which I fear put off many […]

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Free Software
OpenIsland Conference registration now available

The OpenIsland conference on Free and Open Source Software will be held in Spires Conference Centre, Belfast on the 1st February 2008. The registration is now open, and all the details can be found on the conference website.

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