December 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
There have been a number of pieces of good news for the global OLPC community in the past few weeks, including the success of the Give One Get One program, the first order of 100,000 units from Uruguay, and an order of 40,000 plus options on 210,000 more from Peru.
On top of all this, a group has formed to promote and distribute the OLPC XO in India:
“We have received excellent response from at least a dozen state governments in India and we expect that large scale implementation will start from March or April next year, with an initial import of 20,000 to 25,000 laptops. And after that, subsequent imports could far exceed that number” said Joshi.
“Backing OLPC India is one of India’s largest mobile telecom companies Reliance Communications (RCOM) which has tied up with the global OLPC alliance, the OLPC Foundation, to promote e-learning for children. According to RCOM, along with OLPC Foundation, it has assumed the task of evangelizing the concept in the country by working with government agencies, non-government organization (NGOs), content developers, translators, teaching communities and project managers to create a successful ecosystems, and help proliferation of OLPC in India.”
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC Advances in India
December 5th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
gOS is an Ubuntu variant designed for simple end user tasks. In lieu of many (though not all) desktop applications, it points users towards Google’s set of online tools for email, maps, calendar, news and other functions, as well as other web properties like Facebook and Wikipedia.
gOS got its start recently with Everex’s $200 gPC, which quickly sold out (but seems to be back in stock again) at Wal-Mart and is also available at ZaReason.
Linux.com takes a look at gOS to see how it might fit into the marketplace, and is impressed with the product:
“It’s a cute little system with lots of functionality and great looks. It works well and is fast and stable on my laptop. It should work on any computer that any other Linux supports. Enlightenment is an impressive desktop environment, and the iBar is a low-overhead way to blend cool effects with needed functionality. I think users will like it.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Linux.com on gOS
December 3rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
John writes a detailed post on the methodology used by Mozilla to estimate Firefox’s global market share.
Here is a direct quote of his summary points, but the full article is worth a careful reading:
- We think there are at least 125,000,000 Firefox users in the world right now, give or take. That represents a doubling since Firefox 2 was released a little over a year ago, and significant growth in every country.
- At Mozilla we view market share as an important quantitative metric that can help us ask smarter questions and build better products, but it’s only one of many
- We have systems here that tell us approximate number of daily users, and use that information to inform much of what we do.
By all measures, Mozilla (and especially Firefox) is an open source success story. They are also pioneering new metrics to measure the penetration of open source tools into business and user markets. This good data will help to further increase the market share of those very open source tools being measured, by helping guide us to more effective ways to promote them.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Mozilla and Firefox Market Share
November 16th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
InformationWeek writes “Why Linux Will Succeed on the Desktop,” outlining its strategic position and anticipating its future market domination.
Nicholas Petreley begins:
“I believe Linux will become the de-facto standard desktop operating system. Though it’ll take a while for many users to break free from ties to Windows, there is good reason to believe that this day will come… The global community is already beginning to rally behind standard document formats.”
Petreley is surprisingly anti-GNOME, which I personally think is an excellent desktop environment. Aside from my disagreement with him there, I think he raises a number of important points and I certainly agree with his overall conclusion that Linux use will grow until it displaces Windows as the default desktop operating system for most users.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 4 Comments »
November 14th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Miro 1.0 has been released!
Miro is the internet video player and feed reader, bittorrent sharing, HD-capable open source king of the hill of media applications. Of course it’s available for the three major platforms, has a strong developer and user community, and is beloved by Boing Boing.
See the official release announcement in the Miro blog.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Miro 1.0!
November 13th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Wired seems excited about Everex’s $200 Linux PC–and why not, because it is an interesting little item!
Members of the OpenOffice community had predicted that cost pressures would eventually break Microsoft’s hold on the most price-sensitive part of the PC market, leading to OEMs installing OpenOffice on their machines. Everex did so earlier this year for the models they sell at Wal-Mart, and the last I heard, Wal-Mart was planning to require OOo on all the computer brands it sells.
The newest Everex innovation takes its commitment to open source one step further. A customized version of Ubuntu Linux helps the gPC to break the $200 barrier, the first for a retail personal computer.
After their initial post, Wired got even closer to the gPC with a hands-on review. And they like it!
Edit: Slashdot announces Wal-Mart has already sold out its stock of gPCs!
Our friends at Zareason also sell the gPC at the same price point.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Wired on the $200 Everex PC
November 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The Sun Report Builder is a relatively new extension for OpenOffice.org that adds code from the Pentaho reporting tool to OOo. It allows you to create “stylish, smart-looking database reports. The flexible report editor can define group and page headers as well as group and page footers and even calculation fields are available to accomplish complex database reports.”
Much of the new functionality coming in future builds of OpenOffice will be delivered in the form of extensions. This will allow the basic application to remain smaller and more efficient, while users who need particular specialty functions will be able to install an extension for their needs.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Sun Report Builder
November 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Sam Hiser writes a follow-up to several high-profile migrations to OpenOffice.org and Linux for the Financial Times. It’s good to check back in on major migration stories to see how things have progressed after a few years, and in his three case studies, the results are good.
All three of these take place in Europe: the French Gendarmerie police force’s installation of OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird on 70,000 Windows boxes (70% of its total desktops), Munich, Germany’s migration of 14,000 desktops to Linux with OpenOffice (about 100% of its desktops), and Peugeot Citroën’s migration of 20,000 desktops (40% of its total) to Linux with OpenOffice as well.
It’s a great followup with some very encouraging results. It’s got me excited to see the next major round of migrations, which I expect soon.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
November 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Among the many programs that can display ODF files, you can add Firefox to the list. (Though I’m not sure this is fair, since we’re actually relying on OOo in the background with the following trick.)
Mozilla Links explains how to “view OpenOffice.org documents in Firefox.”
It’s pretty easy, in fact: “you need to activate the plugin. To do so, in OpenOffice.org, select Options… in the Tools menu. Expand the Internet item, select Mozilla Plug-in and check Enable.”
Once you have set this option, you can click on a link to an ODF in your browser (with .odt, .ods, .odg, and .odp or the other extensions) to simply open it within your browser window for viewing.
Posted in How-to, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on View ODFs in Firefox
November 5th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Rupert Goodwins blogs for ZDNet UK “Vista versus the Gutsy Gibbon…”
Goodwins is clearly a hardcore computer user going back decades, and currently has seven functional machines with a mix of operating systems. However, he is becoming more and more focused on using Linux as his primary platform.
“How come I’m so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn’t succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.”
Call me curmudgeonly, call me prejudiced, call me atypical, but isn’t computing all about doing what users want?”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 1 Comment »