Open Source

There were several interesting items in the news feeds today so let's just cover them all in today's highlights. LibreOffice 4.0.4 update was released and OpenMandriva announced the availability of virtual machine images. And, last but not least, GNOME Music continues to make progress. LibreOffice 4.0.4 Released Today The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.4, another minor version update to the milestone 4.0 release. The announcement said, "LibreOffice 4.0.4 features many improvements in the area of interoperability with proprietary document formats. [It] solves a number of bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of QA volunteers." A lot of interesting bugs appear to have been addressed this release. Just a few are: * fix make animations inside SmartArt work * Autosave causes Macro change not to be stored on save * Firefox plugin not recognized in LibO 3.6 (regression) * LibreOffice crash when opening a non-ascii named file in XML Source  * Command line conversion to HTML fails + crash * a lot more importing and exporting issues from/to proprietary formats Get yours at the usual place. OpenMandriva Virtual Machines The OpenMandriva Gang today announced the immediate availability of OpenMandriva Alpha Virtual Machine images. They can be imported into VirtualBox for your testing pleasure. English is default in these. The rest is for you to discover. "Have fun!" GNOME Music Enters Phase Two The geekiest ogre alive and his team continue to make progress on their new desktop music browser player for GNOME. They want it to play and share music and audiobooks to and from about anywhere you can browse. It's been in development since at least March and Monday said ogre said "we triumphed over phase of one [and] phase 2 is shaping up nicely." It's been playing and browsing music for a while, but now it has different browsing views (e.g., Artist or Song) and repeat & shuffle. See Seif Lotfy's post for more pictures and info. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software LibreOffice (add alternative, post review) Related Blog Posts OpenMandriva Releases Public Alpha (post comment) LibreOffice Gets More Code Clean-up for 4.1.0 (1 comment) Australian Government Considers Requiring ODF Support in Suites (post comment)

The incorporation of Symfony components into Drupal 8 prompted me to take another look at what I’d lumped into ‘yet another PHP MVC framework’. It quickly became clear that I’d horribly misjudged Symfony. Drupal 8 hasn’t quite hit code freeze yet, but the adoption of Symfony has already let it pull in some beautiful pieces of architecture. I was able to code up more than just improvements in the months leading up to DrupalCon, though. If you stopped by our booth, you’ll have heard all about this, but we have a second important release to announce: we have a beta Symfony bundle and a (very!) preliminary port of our module to Drupal 8! While I had initially planned to just work on Drupal 6 and 7 improvements for TraceView, the announcement that Drupal 8?s SCOTCH and WSCII initiatives had resulted in the incorporation of Symfony components into Drupal 8 prompted me to take another look at what I’d lumped into ‘yet another PHP MVC framework’. It quickly became clear that I’d horribly misjudged Symfony. Drupal 8 hasn’t quite hit code freeze yet, but the adoption of Symfony has already let it pull in some beautiful pieces of architecture.read more

Need funding for your open source start-up? Venture capitalist, Salil Deshpande, says build something that leaks up through the floorboard, then support itread more

Seven weeks ago today, Google along with Adobe and the FreeType project, released a new CFF rasterizer into FreeType for beta testing. Well, it’s been put through its paces and is ready for release. In the latest version of FreeType, build 2.5, the new Adobe CFF rasterizer will now be on by default. This means that products using FreeType, such as Chrome OS, Android, and Linux, will have better looking CFF fonts. This new version of FreeType has already been made available in the dev channel build of Chrome OS. FreeType Using the Old CFF Rasterizer with Light Auto Hint (most common setting) FreeType Using the Adobe CFF Rasterizer (now the default CFF rasterizer) The open source community has helped us find and fix several issues during this beta period and we are now ready for a stable release. The Adobe CFF rasterizer will continue to spread to new products. This work paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences. This is only the start! By Stuart Gill, Font and Text Team, Internationalization Engineering

Cumulus Networks, which has been operating in stealth mode, emerged today to unveil Cumulus Linux, billed as "the first true, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking." The platform is being billed as competitive with Cisco's platform offerings, and is also likely to compete with Red Hat as it moves more in the direction of cloud computing, and with cloud hosting providers. Meanwhile, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., focused on enterprise OpenStack, today announced a technology partnership with Cumulus Networks. Cumulus Networks was founded by networking engineers from Cisco and VMware in 2010. Led by CEO JR Rivers and CTO Nolan Leake, the company has gathered more than  $15 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Peter Wagner and four of VMware's founders. That's some impressive financial backing. The company also has a number of heavy-hitting clients and partners. There is an emerging network architecture being adopted by enterprises and service providers consisting of intelligent edge software, decoupled from the underlying physical network, running over general purpose network hardware. There are many benefits to this architecture, such as a software operational model and software innovation speeds, but the biggest benefit is customer choice,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president of networking and security, VMware, in a statement. “Cumulus Linux provides customers more flexibility in choosing the underlying infrastructure used to deploy network virtualization from VMware.” Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/06/19/4958814/cumulus-networks-brings-the-power.html#storylink=cpy Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/06/19/4958814/cumulus-networks-brings-the-power.html#storylink=cpy According to Piston Cloud's partnership announcement: "Cumulus Linux was introduced today as the first true, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking, and validated to run Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a turnkey, bare-metal cloud operating system for deploying and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environment. Piston Cloud and Cumulus Networks deliver innovation in cloud infrastructure and networking to help businesses realize the full potential of the software-defined datacenter." "We share an open approach to the virtual datacenter," said Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud, in a statement. "Cumulus Networks and Piston Cloud were founded on the fundamental belief that specialized software can run on a wide range of hardware to avoid vendor lock-in, decrease complexity, increase agility and reduce cost. By transforming the economics of infrastructure and networking, Cumulus Networks and Piston Cloud are removing the barriers to enterprise clouds, and making the software-defined datacenter a reality." “Pressure is mounting on datacenter networks to provide an agile and dynamic infrastructure that is more closely aligned with the needs of burgeoning application workloads and changing traffic patterns. With the introduction of its Cumulus Linux, Cumulus Networks will respond to those needs in conjunction with its partner ecosystem, placing an early emphasis on hyperscale and cloud datacenters in continuous pursuit of IT agility and CapEx and OpEx efficiencies.” added Brad Casemore, research director for Datacenter Networks, IDC. Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/06/19/4958814/cumulus-networks-brings-the-power.html#storylink=cpy Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts OpenMandriva Releases Public Alpha (post comment) Linux Potpourri: KDE 4.11 Beta, Debian 7.1, & Pisi Linux Beta (post comment) For Red Hat, the Cloud Beckons (3 comments)

Makandra plans to continue providing security updates for the old 2.3.x branch once Ruby on Rails 4.0 is released and official support is ended

Mozilla is moving rapidly ahead with its Open Badges online credential verification initiative. Back in March, the company announced Open Badges 1.0, which it billed as "an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning." Since then, the program has picked up some enthusiastic backing from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and now, the folks behind Blackboard's free,hosted CourseSites platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) are backing Open Badges. According to an annoncement from Blackboard: "With a new update to Blackboard Learn, students can earn and faculty can assign Open Badges to signal the completion of a course or that key learning milestones have been met. Within a course, students can also view and share earned badges and see how much progress they have made toward requirements for earning new ones. Over half a million teachers and learners using Blackboard's free, fully hosted CourseSites(TM) platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) also have the ability to share earned badges on the platform. Because the update is achieved through integration with Mozilla's Open Badges, students can also display badges on their social networking profiles, job search sites or personal Web pages." "We're proud to be partnering with Blackboard on this initiative," said Mark Surman, executive director of Mozilla, in a statement. "Just as it has with the rest of the economy, the Internet is opening radical new approaches in learning. Open Badges are a part of this. They let people learn and show off their skills anywhere." As we've reported often here on OStatic, online learning and obtaining credentials online are trends that directly affect a lot of people involved with technology and open source. Likewise, oDesk and other sites online have communities teeming with tech workers who want ad-hoc, contract work. How does one verify the skills of these people?  Open Badges is partially an effort to bridge that gap. Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton is behind Open Badges, as confirmed on the Open Badges blog and in The New York Times: "Working with Mozilla, the MacArthur Foundation and a consortium interested in virtual learning, former President Bill Clinton announced a project on Thursday to expand the use of Open Badges — online credentials that employers or universities can use in hiring, admissions, promotions or awarding credit. The badges serve as credentials that can help self-taught computer programmers, veterans returning to civilian life and others show skills they learned outside a classroom. At the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago Thursday, DePaul University and the Information Technology Industry Council pledged to incorporate badges into their hiring, admissions or credentialing." Eventually, there is likely to be a standard for verifying skillsets online, and if we're going to have one, it would be good to have an open, nonprofit-driven standard. Open Badges may have the best shot yet at becoming the standard.  Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Mozilla (34 alternatives, post review) Blackboard (add alternative, post review) Related Blog Posts Mozilla Launches Science Lab Project, Seeks Better Scientific Collaboration (post comment) Shape Up! Google and Other Tech Firms React to Government Snoops (post comment) Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale Has Big Things in Mind for Firefox (post comment)

The latest version of the open source office suite brings a number of bug fixes and small improvements. The next release of LibreOffice will be version 4.1, which is expected next month

A bug in Oracle's build system changed the licensing on the manual pages of MySQL, removing the GPL licence. The bug is being corrected and new all-GPL builds will be available soon

The OpenMandriva developers have released the first alpha version of OpenMandriva Lx 2013, the first version of the distribution to be released under the governance of the new OpenMandriva Association