Showing headlines posted by 420Penguin

Schools in Estonia’s capital Tallinn are piloting a new program, gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools, saving millions of dollars on software fees.

If asked, what would you think is the biggest challenge facing Linux mass adoption? My response to the backlash is to wonder if those crying out against Linux have even bothered to attempt an install of a recent release? Sure, I'll give them this... back in the day, Linux was not easy to install. In fact, there are still a select few distributions that seem to not quite understand the need for an easy-to-use GUI installer. But those tend to fall into the fringes. The mainstream Linux distributions offer an installation process that is as simple as it gets.

Article 6 of the TISA agreement, the "Trade In Services Agreement" which is another secretive trade agreement involving a ton of countries, which will likely have an impact on the internet, seems to prevent governments from transferring source code as a condition of providing services. It seems likely that any government that ratifies the agreement could not then do something like mandate governments use open source office products.

The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft's OOXML formats. "LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love," Jan "Kendy" Holesovsky, who leads the design team for Libreoffice, said in a statement.

As concerns for privacy and data security accompany the use of free cloud services, users and small businesses might be better served by installing the open source package ownCloud.

Coming improvements in Chrome OS will enable easily running Linux directly from a USB stick: "Have you ever installed a full desktop Linux system on your Chromebook? It isn’t all the hard, but it is a bit more complex than it should be. New features in the latest version of Chrome OS will make dipping into an alternative operating system easier. For example, you’ll be able to easily boot a full Linux system from a USB drive and use it without any additional hassle!

(Link to a previous WSJ article was paywalled) PCWorld reports that US and European enforcement agencies have arrested dark web cybercriminals who used Tor. It's still hard to discover Tor users' identities, but will government actions endanger legitimate Tor users?

EU, U.S. Police Say New Techniques Used to Unmask Those Running ‘Darknet’ Sites. Authorities said they made the arrests by piercing the anonymity offered by Tor, a free encryption software that aims to make it impossible for Internet users to be tracked.

Munich city council says a review of its IT has not been triggered by staff dissatisfaction after moving from Windows to Linux on the desktop, in spite of reports to the contrary.