Linux everywhere
2010 was the year in which Linux took over. Not that many people will have noticed. As far as media coverage goes, 2010 doesn’t appear to have been the best year for Linux. In years gone by it was common to see headlines proclaiming this or that government to be moving to Linux, or this or that company switching to free software. Not so in 2010, where tech media was dominated by tablet PCs, web applications and mobile phones.
Extract Text From PDFs And Images With gImageReader, A Tesseract OCR GUI
gImageReader is a graphical GTK frontend to tesseract-ocr, a free software optical character recognition (OCR) engine.
Prakash Advani: Bringing internet to the difficult terrains
AirJaldi is an organisation which has pioneered the art of creating mesh WiFi networks. They have managed to reach Internet to the hills in Dharamshala, where connectivity is a challenge.
Here is a full writeup about them. Some interesting quotes 
The open-source community has also dabbled extensively in it, creating a suite of free software. Most of AirJaldi’s work, Ginguld says, was made possible by “standing on the shoulders of these open-source giants”.
“I hope we’ll be remembered for adding some beauty to this place, not as someone who bought the silicon valleys of Pamela Anderson to innocent Dharamshala,” Ginguld says. For him, the Internet is a basic freedom—as important as security, water or electricity.
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Free software seen as way to resolve many of Lebanon’s economic woes
As some try to release Lebanon’s government from the clutches of political paralysis so it can start tackling economic policy, a small but mighty group of advocates say the solution to many of the country’s economic and social woes lies in free technologies… “Security would improve because the country will depend on itself [for its electronic security] instead of depending on others”
Linux in education: a genuine alternative
Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It’s also about preserving choice, not locking a student’s experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there’s no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it’s going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.
Putin Orders Russian Move To GNU/Linux
Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of ‘a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power
Matt Zimmerman: Rejoining Debian
A couple of months ago, Debian project membership voted, after extensive discussion, to implement a fundamental change in the Debian community: to welcome as members people who make a valuable contribution to the project, even if they are contributing something other than source code.
This was a tremendous milestone for Debian, and one which made me feel proud to have been a part of the project. Historically, only developers had been eligible for membership, including voting and other formal privileges. Although other kinds of contributions were welcome, this disparity gave the impression that they were less valued than code contributions. It seemed to me at the time that Debian’s mission was to package all of the free software in the world, and if one’s efforts didn’t go directly to improving packages, they just weren’t as important.
I don’t remember when I first installed Debian, but I made my first contributions to the project in 1999, and officially joined as a developer in 2000. After several fun and rewarding years of packaging and development, I started a very demanding day job, and spent more and more of my energy into that, and less and less coding for Debian as a volunteer. However, my job with Canonical involved working with Debian, and that was a primary reason why it was interesting to me. It was an opportunity to introduce a whole new population of people to the things I loved about Debian.
The reality, of course, was more complicated. Following the launch in 2004, Ubuntu grew quickly in popularity and scope, diverged from Debian in significant ways, and relations between Debian and Ubuntu became strained. Canonical grew quickly as well, and the combination of a growing community, a growing company and growing user adoption was a challenge for everyone concerned. As a Canonical manager and a Debian developer, I felt the strain as much as anyone.
Meanwhile, and I felt more and more alienated from Debian. Debian developers who had been friendly in the past became suspicious of Ubuntu—and me—and I quickly became an outsider. My code contributions to Debian continued to decline, and I was no longer maintaining any packages. In Debian at the time, that meant that I didn’t exist. I saw it as an important part of my job to work with my counterparts in Debian, in a coordinating role, but found this increasingly impractical. In 2007, I received an inquiry from the Debian Account Manager, who had noticed I wasn’t actively involved in packaging, and wished to disable my account for security reasons if I wasn’t using it. Although I wanted to remain active in the Debian community, I had to agree that it wasn’t good security practice for me to hold onto my developer privileges. I relinquished my upload rights, with the option to come back if I resumed my development work, and officially became a nobody: I lost the right to vote, my email address and mailing list subscriptions, and all other official ties with Debian, except for the record of my GPG key in a special “emeritus” keyring for informational purposes.
Last month, Enrico Zini announced instructions for contributors to apply for membership under the new guidelines, which recognize many kinds of contributions, not only code. Today, after a three year hiatus, I am proud to be the first Debian member to be accepted through this new process. I expect to continue to submit the occasional patch, but my primary interest is in healing the rift which still exists between Debian and Ubuntu by contributing in a more personal way. Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to work together on this. You can reach me as mdz at either debian.org or ubuntu.com, or on IRC.
I would like to thank Stefano Zacchiroli, for proposing the General Resolution which enabled Debian to make this transition, and for all of his other work as Debian Project Leader to help Debian grow and improve. I also appreciate Enrico Zini, Jonathan McDowell and Martin Zobel-Helas for expediently processing me and working through the technical changes needed to implement the resolution correctly.
It’s good to be back.
David Planella: Project Unity L10N
We all know about Unity, the project that is changing the way we interact with our computer by bringing a consistent user experience and a solid, elegant design for desktop and netbook users.
We want to make sure Unity is for everyone, and one of the key aspects to make it possible is that it is available in everyone’s language.
Unity is already available in more than 60 languages, and can be translated into almost any other. Unity is also Free Software, which means it is in your own hands to make it happen.
So, if your language is not in that list, how can you translate Unity?
- If you are new to translations, you might want to read the Ubuntu Translations Quickstart Guide.
- Next thing you can do is go to the Unity translations page and start translating online right away.
- You can then do the same with the Applications and Files places and translate them as well.
- That’s it! You’ll find that contributing to Ubuntu by translating it is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways you can start
If you’ve got any questions, you can contact the translations team in whichever way you prefer.
We’ve got about 150 Ubuntu translation teams, and I’m pretty sure we can make that by the time Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is released there is a translation from each one of these teams.
Hence, I’m proud to announce the Unity L10N project, stay tuned for more updates and join the translation party!
Leigh Honeywell tapped as first of two SCALE 9x keynote speakers
The Southern California Linux Expo is happy to announce that Leigh Honeywell has been chosen as the first keynote speaker for SCALE 9X. Honeywell will be speaking on the topic of “Hackerspaces and Free Software,” and how the two communities are mutually beneficial to each other. Honeywell is co-founder and current president of HackLab.TO, a hackerspace in downtown Toronto. She currently serves on the board of advisors of the SECtor security conference, has served as a Google Summer of Code mentor, and is one of the Tres Chix leading the Ubuntu Women project.