English

As many of you already know by now, Debian 7 is here!

I’ve recently been involved in a project with a customer to set up their development team to use LiveCode on Debian workstations. If you haven’t heard about LiveCode, they recently had 3,342 backers pledge £493,795 of the initial £350,000 goal on Kickstarter. That’s quite an accomplishment! I am not involved in the development part of this project, only in providing infrastructure support and services.

I am really sad to see so much energy spent by the community criticizing Canonical and on Canonical’s side, trying to explain and justify so many decisions and actions.

My main concern is all this energy being directed where it doesn’t stand a chance to make a difference, as we know all the rocket pieces are being discarded. I invite you to consider focusing on other projects that need people like you:

Mon projet d’autonomie télévisuelle à la maison avance et a franchi une étape importante cette semaine: notre compte de câble (service Illico) de Vidéotron est officiellement fermé Un enregistreur numérique conçu à partir de logiciels libres et de composantes informatiques ordinaires remplace maintenant la boîte noire fournie par cette entreprise québécoise.

Chances are that you already heard me say something along the lines of "Don't 'upgrade' tonbsp; WMS 1.3.0 unless you really have to because it's a mess, stick to WMS 1.1.1 if you can". This may sound like an old story to those who have been around since the adoption of WMS 1.3.0 in 2004, but believe it or not we still hit those 1.3.0 issues today 8 years later. The last time was a few weeks ago and that got me started on that same old rant once again.

One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do?

For the full original English version, see here.

Voici un texte de Richard Stallman. La version originale en anglais est ici.

Mark his words and laugh in two years.

LibreOffice 3.5.5 has been released:

Berlin, July 11th, 2012. The Document Foundation today announces the immediate availability of LibreOffice 3.5.5, the current version of the free office suite.

If you’re one of the rare species still wanting Thunderbird in Ubuntu as described in Jorge Castro’s recent post, you can help. I am more worried about Jorge’s other comments, following his logic Ubuntu and free software are only less and less relevant by the day – not a trend I am observing.

A few years back I started using solid state drives (SSD) whenever I got a new netbook/laptop or when someone asked for hardware upgrade suggestions. The speed increase and shorter boot times on any given system is phenomenal and current GNU/Linux distributions take care of the configuration details. I don’t even take into consideration finer details like bus speed, hybrid disks or other technical features.