Proving the Obviously Untrue - Free Software

Tux droid isn't free

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:11:25 +0100

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 I started to see the worrying signs of impending catastrophic disk failure on imladris. I bought a new SATA disk, and figured I might as well install an amd64 system (I was previous running an amd64 kernel with a completely 32 bit userland). The process went nice and smoothly (the Debian installer is so much better than it was 3 - 4 years ago). I'm still installing bits and pieces that have been forgotten, and I still have some other problems (can't listen to iplayer radio for example).

Today I resolved to reinstall the manager for tux, and found that the .deb files were available only for i386. Not daunted, I happily downloaded the tarballs to compile, but got lots of errors clearly stemming from a 32 bit / 64 bit mismatch. I found a forum article discussing a library that was packaged in i386 (why?) and downloaded the source and recompiled it for 64 bit. The same message persists, and then I found an unhappier thread. It looks like the whole project is using a closed source text to speech (TTS) system.

They are apparently producing a 64 bit version, but it kind of defeats the point... a poster boy product for an open source operating system, and parts of it are closed. Even if it can be compiled for i386 and amd64, what about the rest?

OpenIsland Conference

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:36:15 +0000

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 participants, we still managed 110 people showing up at the start.

Sir Reg Empey, local minister turned up to launch Open NI the body which should partner Open Ireland in the Republic. We also had senior guests from the University of Ulster and the newly formed Southern Regional College. This was before our two keynote speakers, Bruce Perens, and Robert O'Dea.
Continue reading "OpenIsland Conference"

OpenIsland Conference registration now available

nospam@example.com (ct) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:39:53 +0000

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.