The Document Foundation Planet

Official TDF BlogOpen documents formats and LibreOffice at FISL 14

By Gustavo Pacheco

The 14th edition of the International Forum on Free Software FISL 14, from July 3rd to 6th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will carry several LibreOffice and OpenDocument Formats (ODF) activities. This year, the good news are the participation of Italo Vignoli (Italy) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Germany) who will talk on the adoption of open standards and free software, respectively. Italo will present a lecture on LibreOffice: the History and A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards. Bjoern will conduct the LibreOffice Workshop and will give the lecture LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved and LibreOffice – Continuous community integration.

The Brazilian LibreOffice community will also be in FISL 14. Klaibson Ribeiro will talk about LibreLogo early in Wednesday 3rd, a new feature included in LibreOffice 4 focusing beguinners-level programming teaching. In the afternoon we will run the panel The importance of of the open source public legal frameworks for the ODF ecosystem, where we will discuss the achievements with existing the open document formats bills, the challenge of the execution and maintenance of these regulations and the strategies for the adoption in administrations. On Friday, July 5th Olivier Hallot will run the workshop Modifying the LibreOffice Interface, and will present the development of the new dialog structures of LibreOffice, an old demand from the LibreOffice community. In the afternoon, Eliane Domingos will coordinate the LibreOffice Community Meeting where José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza will present their experience after one year hacking LibreOffice coding. At the end of the day the lecture The Rio Grande do Sul State Migration to Open Document Formats will show the ODF adoption case in the State Cabinet office.

For more details, please visit the official FISL page and register yourself for these full days of knowledge and collaboration!

Wednesday July 3rd

11:00 – 12:00

Room P11

Lecture – LibreLogo – See how easy is to start programming

Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges

The Logo programming language, created in the 60′s to help teaching programming by moving a small tortoise in the screen with the command line, will be presented. LibreLogo is an implementation of the Logo programming language inside LibreOffice Writer 4.0. We will show examples on how simple it is to start to program, and how to teach kids, teens and not so young people.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 40T – GNU

Panel – Importance of open documents format public regulation for the ODF ecosystem.

Antonio Augusto Ribeiro Guimarães, Gustavo Pacheco, Italo Vignoli, Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges, Vitorio Furusho

In the recent years, the regulation of the preferred use of open document formats for interoperability, specially with respect to the ODF standard, has been a constant issue for IT managers. The goal of this activity is to present and debate with Brazilian and foreign representatives, the challenges of the legal regulation of open formats.

16:00 – 17:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved

Bjoern Michaelsen

LibreOffice is one of the biggest and most important open source projects. Still we actively encourage volunteers to get involved. This talk presents possible entry points for a newcomer to get started and explains how the project takes effort to make your first contribution into the product less intimidating. Building on that, this talk will also showcase what some volunteers managed to archive and finally present you a set of opportunities to easily make your first contribution.

Thursday July 4th

10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – LibreOffice Workshop

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice workshop will be a hands-on workshop, covering these topics, depending on interest in the audience: – Building LibreOffice on Linux – running test suites – finding and fixing EasyHacks – testing developer builds – using gerrit.libreoffice.org and its build bots – tinderbox.libreoffice.org – bug triage – regression hunting with LibreOffice bibisect (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Bibisect) – whatever LibreOffice development topics come up during the session.

15:00 – 16:00, Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice: the History

Italo Vignoli

The birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, and the growth of the project during the first three years: the new governance model, the development strategy through the numbers and the new features, and the future of the free office suite.

Friday July 5th

10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – Modifying the interface of LibreOffice

Olivier Hallot

In this workshop we will show how to transform the decade-old LibreOffice dialogs into a new and modern open source based on GTK + Glade technology. It will also be a hands-on session for developers with abilities to program in C++ and some knowledge of LibreOffice. We aim to motivate hackers to work on the remaining dialogs that are still available for modernization.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 41A – Tux

Lecture – A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards

Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation has developed a reference protocol to ease migrations to free software and open document standards, targeted to enterprises and organizations, which has been thoroughly tested in Italy for the migration of Regione Umbria (Italia) to LibreOffice.

16:00 – 18:00

Room 701

Community Meeting – LibreOffice and Brazil, passion really matters.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa, José Guilherme Vanz, Marcos Paulo de Souza

Brazil has one of the largest LibreOffice user base. Under the coordination of the new developers generation, the Community Meeting of LibreOffice will present the landmark achievements in almost 3 years of existence. Besides the development, we will discuss other important activities of the project.

18:00 – 19:00

Room 41C

Lecture – Migration to open document formats in the Rio Grande do Sul State Administration

Rogério Alves

We will present the implementation case of LibreOffice as standard office suite inside the Cabinet Office to the ITC managers – ITC Forum.

Saturday July 6th

14:00 – 15:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice – Continuous community integration

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice has seen a tremendous growth since it was started 2 1/2 years ago, especially in the number of unaffiliated volunteer contributors. This growth came with a constant challenge to (re-)evaluate the communication and coordination means of the project. This talk gives an insight in how coordination in such a massive and distributed project works, but also tries to give some cautious hints what parts of that might apply to smaller projects.


Loïc DacharyBug Submission Assistant : same origin policy violation fixed

All versions of the Bug Submission Assistant had a same origin policy problem preventing user feedback. It was fixed by asking for a server side reverse proxy definition and a variable that can be controled by the enclosing frame. diagnostic … Continue reading

Loïc DacharyBug Submission Assistant : components interactions

The component interaction described by Kevin Hunter was implemented. The confusing attachment path was hidden from the user. The user agent is included in the bug description. component interaction When the list of components is first displayed, the comment area … Continue reading

Loïc DacharyBug Submission Assistant : sanity checks

The Bug Submission Assistant is built from information found in wiki and bugzilla. When they disagree, either because of a spelling mistake or another inconsistency, the Bug Submission Assistant fails. sanity checks were implemented to detects such inconsistencies and they … Continue reading

Loïc DacharyBug Submission Assistant : attachment improved

The first version of the Bug Submission Assistant only allowed to attach a screenshot after the bug report was submitted. In addition it was not protected from double submission and not comment could be attached to the uploaded document. The … Continue reading

Loïc Dacharylibreoffice Bug Submission Assistant postmortem

From august 29th, 2011 to this day, the Bug Submission Assistant was implemented and released. Getting started After reading the backlog dated back to February 2011, the original script was reimplemented using JQuery to get familiar with the subject. In … Continue reading

Naruhiko OgasawaraOpen Source Conference 2013 Nagoya

Nagoya is very interesting city in Japan.  People in Nagoya has lots of special culture; great morning set in coffee shops (kissa-ten), yummy foods, and in computer world, they love functional programming and BSD ;)

Anyway, this post is short summarized translation of the Japanese report on TDF wiki.  I've not attend, but I hope you may know how active Japanese LibreOffice community is by my (not good) English translation.  Enjoy!


In June 22th, 2013, we, LibreOffice Japanese team, attended Open Source Conference (OSC) Nagoya 2013 (short note; OSC is most famous events series in Japan).  We had a booth and Mr. Tamakoshi, Mr, Kondo and Mr. Enoki had been there.

Lots of people had been there (over the 600!), and our 70 flyer was gone at 2pm (2hr earlier closing the event).  Wow!

Many people coming our booth already use LibreOffice.  We have few questions about development of LibreOffice.  And we had a discussion with a sightless user coming our booth about Japanese a11y environment of Linux desktop with LibreOffice.  It's so impressive.

We also had a 45min seminar of current status of LibreOffice; the room is little bit close (30 seat), but over the 20 people had attended.  Great!
Sorry that only 1/3 people used LibreOffice, and some people didn't know the name.  Oh my, here is a FLOSS event... We need to continue promotion in the FLOSS world (and non-FLOSS world, both).

Anyway, good event.   Here is a presentation (Japanese).

Thanks for coming. See ya!


Charles SchulzThe social side of LibreOffice

The LibreOffice Project has been building an impressively rich and strong infrastructure in just a few years’ time. Today, I’d like to highlight not so much the quirks and the processes that support the everyday development or the flow of contributions, but rather the presence of the LibreOffice community on social networks and micro-blogging services.

Being a worldwide community usually means being part of something exciting, sometimes even disturbing. And yet what’s probably the most disturbing of it all is that the community does not meet in one location at the same time every two days or so. For this there are events, with the LibreOffice Conference being the most official and international one. This year it will take place in Milano, Italy. Yet on an everyday basis, we need communication channels that are open to everyone so that we as individuals in the community may keep up with what’s going on and that others, people who don’t know about us or who would like to know about us, from journalists to the general public, can get in touch with us and interact with the LibreOffice Project.

Both its international and its Free and Open Source nature have prompted our project to have a widely distributed presence among the various social networks. I have listed our “social media outlets” below, and I apologize in advance if I missed any of them. As you will see there are the accounts that the Document Foundation runs on a daily or weekly basis, there are ones that cater to specific languages and there are even the ones that are targeted at specific topics, such as bugs or design. And then there are even the ones run by fans of LibreOffice.

Let’s start with at the beginning goes the quote from the tea party in Alice in Wonderland. Here’s our blog, where the big and small announcements are made and you can follow it through RSS subscription and the like. Then, there’s the planet of LibreOffice blogs here. It’s a great way to check what’s going on at a glance in the community and gain some insight on specific matters, such as website management, marketing, development matters, etc. I stand among the ones who would like to have a multi-lingual blog planet, as one would be able to see the range of the LibreOffice community: French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese and Brazilian blogs also carry great information and remind us that not everyone speaks and works in English.

The micro-blogging services

 While identi.ca is used by the Document Foundation, most of our activity is on Twitter, and so are most of the teams’ handles. The official “official” ones are, both on Identi.ca and Twitter: @LibreOffice and @tdforg (The Document Foundation Organisation). Then by searching Twitter you will see other  accounts, such as:

  • Libreoffice Colombia
  • Libreoffice Arabic
  • LibreOffice French
  • LibreOffice Venezuela
  • LibreOffice Russia
  • LibreOffice in Turkish
  • LibreOffice Hungary
  • LibreOffice Brazil
  • LibreOffice Japan
  • LibreOffice in Espanol
  • LibreOffice Dutch
  • LibreOffice Czech
  • LibreOffice in Catalan
  • LibreOffice in Slovenian

Besides these handles that relay and spread the word about LibreOffice in native languages several other handles tweet the direct activity of specific online services and platforms tied to LibreOffice. One of the most active services is the LibreOffice Bugs Twitter account, telling you about the activity on the LibreOffice bugzilla: fixed bugs, up and coming critical fixes, etc. Another interesting one is the Twitter handle syncing the various questions of ask.libreoffice.org , and the one tweeting about the various code commits in real time. Other handles of interest include the LibreOffice Magazine in Brazil and the unofficial @libreofficenews

Google +

Google + has a very important LibreOffice social presence. This is partly due to the fact that Google rolled out its various features over time and that while we started with one page we ended up with communities catering to LibreOffice users, fans, contributors in several languages. Here are a few pointers, knowing that you can find LibreOffice communities on Google + in several languages already: Italian, Danish, French, Portguese, Turkish, Brazilian, Russian, etc.

LibreOffice has more than these communities, although they work in a great way as they nurture the conversation and ideas that are later brought back to the project. Anybody can join them so there’s no walled garden between them. Google + also offers pages, and while many LibreOffice pages exist for different languages on Google +, you may be interested in these ones:

Reddit

Yes, there’s a subreddit for LibreOffice, and it’s right there for you, Redditers: /r/libreoffice . It’s less popular than cute pets pictures, but the flag must be flown.

Facebook

Facebook is often frowned down upon by many Free and Open Source Software contributors who (rightly) think that whatever you share there is being shared with unknown parties (and not just B. Obama). That’s all true, but then many, many people are on Facebook. Even large amounts of LibreOffice contributors. Being on Facebook matters a lot for brand awareness and to attract people to use or contribute to LibreOffice. There’s a big presence of LibreOffice on Facebook, although the beginning was a bit messy and the duplication of pages and groups may be confusing at first. You will find there that there are several pages or groups for LibreOffice in specific languages (Serbian, Brazilian, Japanese, etc.) but for the rest I’ll only pick the “officially official” pages and groups:

Last but not least, it is important to thank all the people who help maintain these channels, blogs, pages, tweeter handles and others active. Without them, nothing would be possible: fans, regular contributors, developers, little and big hands… We need  all of you to make our community, we need all of you to make LibreOffice!

Andreas MantkeCreating an Plone Environment with Vagrant

I read about a new method to create a Plone development and test environment on a mailing list some days ago. I started with the installation of Virtualbox and Vagrant yesterday. But I run into an error message because there is an issue with Virtualbox 4.2.14 and importing appliances without manifests. I found a workaround / fix  for this problem:
I had to go to ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/MyBoxName/virtualbox and doing there on the command line “openssl sha1 *.vmdk *.ovf > box.mf”

Then I could download and unpack coredev.vagrant from https://github.com/plone/coredev.vagrant/archive/master.zip. I went inside the directory coredev.vagrant-master and run vagrant up. Then I left for a coffee and when I got back the virtual machine was created.

Once this was done I created a Plone environment using the common buildout method. I typed ./runbin.sh buildout into the command line and the buildout process started. Because of a timeout I had to run the buildout command a second time. The Plone environment inside a virtual machine was build successfully. I could start the Plone instance in foreground mode with ./runbin.sh instance fg. I could start a browser and found my Zope-Plone-Environment at http://localhost:8080.

Miklos VajnaSUSE Conference 2013 @ Budapest

Yesterday Novell Hungary organized SUSE Conference 2013 here at Budapest. As you can see above Andras held a LibreOffice-related presentation there — and we also ran a LibreOffice booth. As it was requested, we set up quite some (publicly available) Android demos:

  • Impress remote

  • LibreOffice4Android (document viewer) on my phone (I needed a fix to get it running on a non-tablet, though)

  • The desktop app on a tablet — thanks goes to the organizers who provided that for us!

About 200 visitors attended the conference, which counts as a great success in this category. :-)

Joel MaderoMore Good News with Contest

Image

Well we are down to ~970 UNCONFIRMED bugs which is the lowest that we’ve been at for at least the last 14-16 months!  Furthermore just 4-6 months ago we were near 1,600, with the continued dedication and hard work of everyone, halving that # is not out of the picture by end of contest (although the goal is still 25% deducation which is ~80 more triaged in the next few days). This chart shows how fast we’ve seen a decline: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/reports.cgi?product=LibreOffice&datasets=UNCONFIRMED

More so, on the list of top bug closers we can see that our team (including some new names) dominate FDO :) https://bugs.freedesktop.org/page.cgi?id=weekly-bug-summary.html — I only wish the list included # of bugs moved from UNCONFIRMED to some other status — oh well.

I hope to get some preliminary #’s out per person this weekend – but don’t hold your breath, it’s pretty tedious getting the #’s together.


Michael Meeks2013-06-27: Thursday.

  • Up early; mail chew, poked at some build horrors on different platforms; seems you can get ccache to corrupt it's cache if you reset in just the right way; hmm. Poked at Minh's VLC integration work briefly.
  • Team meeting, ESC meeting. Pleased to see Eike's Hamburg Hackfest blog. Packed for a long-weekend in Brussels with Julia - should be fun.

Eike RathkeLibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest Retrospective

So the weekend before we had the LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg, a roundup of 22-24 LibreOffice developers exchanging ideas, hacking on things, fixing bugs and having fun, Club-Mate, cola, beer, pizza, börek, bread rolls and strawberries.

This time we even had not only participants from different countries but also different continents, as 5 devs from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia were present. KACST recently joined The Document Foundation's Advisory Board and sponsors the Saudi Arabian National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies.

Friday evening we started with the socializing event ...

... at the Schach-Café (chess café)

These previous three images and the next one are embedded from Miklos' Flickr album.

 

Saturday and Sunday then we met at the Attraktor Makerspace (site in German) for the actual hacking to take place.

After quite a short Saturday night for a few ...

... we ignored Sunday's sunshine and continued.

Space and people.
Space and people.
The KACST group.
The KACST group.
David thinks I'd photograph him.
David thinks I'd photograph him.
Yes, that is a working Star Trek pinball machine!
Yes, that is a working Star Trek pinball machine!

 

The overall achievements are captured on the Hackfest's wiki page, in summary among others we

  • fixed at least 8 bugs
  • implemented 2-3 features
  • made the French Bug Submission Assistant (BSA) go ready for production
  • worked on Java unit test to Python migration
  • bootstrapped two new tinderboxes for Windows builds
  • did lots of small things
  • last but not least, socialized with known and new people

You missed it? Or want to join (again)? The next opportunities will be

See you then, and Happy Hacking on LibreOffice!

 

Eike Rathkecharacterize.vim - Unicode character metadata

Just came across and installed the characterize.vim plugin that in Vim modernizes the ga command to reveal character representation. Displayed are now

  • Unicode character names: U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SYMBOL
  • Vim digraphs (type after <C-K> to insert the character): Co, cO
  • Emoji codes: :copyright:
  • HTML entities: &copy;

So for example with the cursor on a letter ö hitting ga in command mode displays in the status line

<ö> 246, \366, U+00F6 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS, ^Ko:, &ouml;

Neat.

Joel MaderoA Week In

First let me continue to say that I’m thrilled at the progress we’ve had. A couple more people have joined in the last day or so and I’m seeing my email spammed (in a good way) with the meta tracker bug being commented on – meaning bugs are being marked against the meta bug. The # of UNCONFIRMED bugs has plummeted from 1,190 to just 982 – the goal was to have 25% done which means the total needs to be 100 less than where we currently are which seems to be more than manageable.

Just a few short months ago we were hovering in the 1600 range, nearly halving that is really amazing :-D

Thanks all for your great work


Michael Meeks2013-06-26: Wednesday.

  • Up early; mail chew, one-to-one with Vojtech, patch review, merging pieces; partner call, TDF board call. Heated the dinner, Mary kindly over to manage the babes; fed & storied them, put them to bed etc. Did a bit of prioritisation in the evening.

Michael Meeks2013-06-25: Tuesday.

  • Up early, mail chew; admin, misc. calls, thrilled to see the KACST Advisory Board Membership finally announced - it's fantastic working with those guys who support the project in many ways; thanks to all who made it possible - particularly Kendy.
  • Built ESC bug stats & prototype agenda, some really encouraging stuff going on in the QA world at the moment it seems, and another week of the Bug Triage Contest to go.
  • Lydia and Janice over in the evening.

Marketing TeamThe Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board: King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

Reblogged from The Document Foundation Blog:

Click to visit the original post
  • Click to visit the original post

Berlin, June 25, 2013 - The Document Foundation announces that King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah: http://www.motah.org.sa/), which has been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new features.

Read more… 365 more words

Official TDF BlogThe Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board: King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

KACSTBerlin, June 25, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces that King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah: http://www.motah.org.sa/), which has been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new features.

Motah LibreOffice Project (http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/94) is only one of the activities of Motah at KACST, where several software products are studied to explore the extent of Arabic support and their suitability for Arab users. LibreOffice was selected to be the first localization project because most Arab users need a full feature office suite.

liberoffice_image.png“Motah software engineers have been regularly contributing to LibreOffice since 2012, and are now one of the largest groups of full time developers hacking LibreOffice code, together with SUSE and Red Hat”, states Michael Meeks of SUSE, a Member of TDF Board of Directors. “Thanks to the injection of these new groups of hackers, during the last months we have been able to increase the number of contributors, which is now around 100 on a monthly basis and over 330 on a yearly basis”.

“It is fascinating to see The Document Foundation combining people from different cultures, languages and geographical locations around the development of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever”, says Dr.Turki Alsaud, KACST VP for research institutes. “Having KACST inside TDF Advisory Board reflects our support to the development of LibreOffice, extending our reach from the improvement of the Arabic language version to the development of new features and the improvement of the user interface”.

With the addition of KACST, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation has now ten members: FSF, Google, Intel, KACST, MIMO, Red Hat, SPI, Lanedo, Freies Office Deutschland e.V. and SUSE (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Advisory_Board).

About KACST

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime Minister’s Office. KACST is both the Saudi Arabian national science agency and its national laboratories. The science agency function involves science and technology policy making, building national scientific database, funding of external research, and conducting applied scientific research in varius disciplines through its own research institutes and providing services such as the patent office, scientific information, and scientific consultations to public and private sector etc. KACST has currently over 2500 employees.

Media Contact KACST

Mohamed Alkanhal – Director of Computer Research Institute
Phone: + 966 11 4813765 – Email: cri@kacst.edu.sa (website: http://www.kacst.edu.sa)


Joel MaderoContest Banner – Thanks!

For those of you who haven’t seen it – our marketing team (thanks Astron!) and our website team (Cloph, cheers to you) teamed up and got a banner on our site. Looks perfect so wanted to share

Qa-contest-2013-banner-relpage

which of course links to the wiki :)

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest


Michael Meeks2013-06-24: Monday.

  • Up early, practise with babes. Mail chew, poked at a bug, got some -4-1 branch builds going. Pleased to see that Saudi Arabia is switching to a weekend that should help Ahmad join us for ESC calls more easily. Lunch. Plugged away at weekend catchup.

Joel MaderoSome More Good News – Initial Numbers through Yesterday

Pull_Date Total Bug Count Per Day Reported Unconfirmed Count Absolute Daily Change Per Day Triaged (Absolute + # Reported)
06/19/13 19,817   1,190    
06/20/13 19,834 17 1,132 -58 -75
06/21/13 19,865 31 1,095 -37 -68
06/22/13 19,885 20 1,090 -5 -25
06/23/13 19,918 33 1,073 -17 -50

Joel MaderoContest – A Few Days In

Well the good news continues coming in – we’re now at -158 UNCONFIRMED bugs over the course of the past few days – furthermore we’re at -51 open bugs (meaning we’ve set the bug to WFM, DUPE, etc…) and they are no longer open issues needing to be addressed by devs.

Really great work everyone, goal is still 25% and I think this is definitely a realistic goal at this point.

Keep up the great work everyone :)


Charles SchulzFacebook ads for the community

In this post I would like to report about the ad campaign that the marketing team organized on Facebook during the month of May and at the beginning of June. The experiment was interesting and while the results remain for large part hard to interpret, they also open new possibilities. The detailed results are listed in spreadsheets on the wiki. But what do they really mean?

I’m no expert in online advertising but  the key numbers are actually quite clear, so let me cut to the chase as to what they are:

  1. the campaign lasted for 30 days, the demographics were broad, mainly English speaking countries, no specific age or gender segmentation.
  2. the areas of interest were tentatively chosen along broad lines: DIY fans, interests in technology, education, real estate, small business, personal finance, arts and crafts, home decoration .
  3. each day the maximum amount allowed to be spent in ads was 30 Euros.
  4. The end results are (roughly): the ad was seen by 550 thousands Facebook members. On these 10000 clicked on it and about 800 unique people who were not in anyway related to LibreOffice or to LibreOffice Facebook “members” liked the official LibreOffice page. In a nutshell, we spent a bit less than one dollar for each new “Like”.

So what should we take from this experiment? Is 85 cents for a like too much or affordable? I’d say it depends on the objective and how the ad was defined. Facebook ads do not advertise for a product page on an external website. It will always lead you to a Facebook page, profile or application.  Each person clicking on the ad was thus taken to our offiical LibreOffice page. The reason we felt fine about this was that our first objective with this ad campaign was to raise the brand awareness of LibreOffice. Too often we work and produce on marketing materials and projects that end up targeting audiences that are aware of Free and Open Source Software. This time we really tried to go out there and let people know about the LibreOffice brand. And spending roughly 900 Euros to have our ad seen by over 500 thousand people appears to be quite effective in retrospect.

Having said that, the next question that comes is of course what we could have done better and most importantly how to entice people to join the LibreOffice community. At the Document Foundation we do not believe that LibreOffice is a product. We believe it is a community, it is a living entity, made not only of code, but of actual social relationships, people, entities, companies, universities and governments. Because of this Facebook is seen as a potential great venue to attract new people and future community members. The LibreOffice Facebook page itself has a a great audience and the “trick” would now be to raise the brand awareness on Facebook while the Facebook Page would act as the catalyst between individuals and the community, enticing them to switch from Facebook to communication channels of the community on www.libreoffice.org . This calls for another campaign on Facebook, one that would be configured in a different way. We don’t have to set it to obtain the most Likes (just like the previous one); we can set it to increase the number of people clicking on the ad and go to the LibreOffice Facebook Page, or advertise specific posts like release announcements or community related messages.

At any rate there’s room for improvement and experiment. Some time in the future, we will also have to think about the growing and already important mass of people who neither use Forums or mailing lists to contribute to the community but who use social networks. That will be a challenge for the project as it will have to work out a system that does not create communication silos while ensuring that the bridges between all these channels are open, active and favouring contributions and contributors.

Let’s open the conversation!

Michael Meeks2013-06-23: Sunday.

  • Up lateish; H. M. and J. off for a netball match with people significantly taller than H. Mended bike, did some metal-work in the workshop with N. and E. played a game or two, cooked lunch. Large lunch, and into Cambridge to Grace Church - talk by the director of the FIEC and caught up with a number of interesting people there. Back, quick dinner, babes to bed, sleep.

Florian ReisingerSI-GUI — Configured parallel installation within 2 minutes

SI-GUI -- Configured parallel installation within 2 minutes

Hi,
Just a short notice. With a fast enough internet connection, you could download, install and conigure LibreOffice within 2 Minutes with the help of ServerInstall GUI (See pic)


Tagged: LibreOffice, master, Server Installation GUI

Efe Gürkan YalamanCommunity Bonding Period and First Week – Topluluğa Katılma Safhası ve İlk Hafta

[EN]

Hi,

I assume you know what this is blog about and I am directly diving into the subject. :)

After the announcement of the accepted students there is a gap until start of the coding named community bonding period. This is pretty important because you are working full-time with the community and you have to know each other to communicate. I couldn’t hacked around the code after sending proposals because of my final exams. But I am trying really hard to catch up.

So whatever, on this period we meetup with my mentor on IRC, and Hangouts. Talked about what will happen on project and what should I do.(That was probably my first talk completely in English with someone.)

BTW my project is “implementing an about:config utility for LibreOffice”

The result:

  • Reading manuals for gdb,
  • Creating stacks for indexers(ctags),
  • Digging CUI(Common User Interface) module,
  • New feature branch on git (feature/aboutconfig)
  • And an initial glade file

I am implementing it with C++. It will sit on CUI module.

I spend first week mostly to the researching the code. We need an multi-column listbox for this implementation, and I probably use one of the current multi-column listbox as base. I spend some time to understand backend of visual staff (event handlers etc.). If you are a newcomer to the development here is a note “There is a lot of 90′s fashion code on the project. Be prepared.”.

And drink mineral water. Really. I was drinking mineral water when I felt moments of enlightenment :) .

This is probably the longest post for this blog. Next posts probably will be shorter.

[TR]

Merhaba,

Bu bloğun ne amaçla yazıldığını bildiğinizi varsayarak direk konuya dalıyorum. :)

GSOC’ta kabul edilen öğrencilerin açıklanmasından kodlamanın başlamasına kadar olan Türkçe’ye “Topluluğa Katılma Safhası” olarak çevirebileceğim bir süreç var. Oldukça önemli bir süreç aslında çünkü tam zamanlı çalışman gereken bir projede çalışacağın insanları tanımak zorundasın. Ben bu sürece final sınavlarım sebebiyle son anda katılabildim, haliyle kodlarla da çok ilgilenemedim. Ancak aradaki farkı kapatmak için şu an oldukça çabalıyorum.

Bu bağlanma sürecinde mentorumla önce IRC üzerinden sonra Google+ Hangouts üzerinden bazı toplantılar düzenledik. Projenin nasıl gelişeceğini, neler yapmam gerektiğini belirledik. Biriyle tamamen İngilizce konuştuğum ilk seferdi sanırım bu.

Unutmadan projem LibreOffice’e Firefox’taki about:config sayfasına benzer bir alan eklemek.

Toplantı sonucunda yaptıklarım:

  • GDB(Debugger) kullanımı hakkında bolca belgelendirme okudum,
  • Indexleyiciler için etiket yığını oluşturdum(ctags),
  • CUI(Hemen hemen her modülde kullanılan özellikler var (toolbar, ayarlar gibi)) modülünü bolca kurcaladım.
  • Git üzerinde yeni bir dal oluşturdum, (feature/aboutconfig)
  • Bir glade dosyası prototipi oluşturdum.

İlk haftayı genel olarak kodda araştırmalar yaparak geçirdim. Projem için birden fazla kolunu olan bir listbox yapısına ihtiyacım vardı. Neyse ki kodda taban olarak alabileceğim benzer yapılar var. Arayüzü koda bağlayan araç setiyle alakalı kodları biraz anlamak için biraz zaman harcadım.(Event handlerlar vs, Küçük bir tavsiye daha önceden kendi küçük projelerinizde görsel arayüzü olan bir şey olsun. İşin arkaplanını iyi anlayın.) Eğer yeni geliştirmeye başlayacaksanız küçük bir not. Kodda birsürü benden yaşlı 90ların modası parça var. Hazırlıklı olun.

Ve maden suyu için. Gerçekten . Maden suyu içerken aydınlanma anları yaşadım. İşler kafamda böyle oturmaya başladı. :)

Bu büyük ihtimalle en uzun yazı olacak. Kalın sağlıcakla. :)


Official TDF BlogLibreOffice community gets free e-mail, Jabber and SIP addresses @libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, the leading free office suite, today announces the upcoming availability of @libreoffice.org addresses for its members, starting July 1st. To foster the rapidly growing community and help it with their daily engagement, the foundation will provide a variety of free services under this domain. As of today, these are:

  • an e-mail address with a fully-featured IMAP account, alternatively an e-mail forwarder
  • a Jabber/XMPP address for instant messaging
  • a SIP/VoIP account for voice conferencing

Those services will be, beginning July 1st, provided free of charge to all members of The Document Foundation, and are made possible with the generous help of our supporters, whom we’d like to thank on behalf of the community!

The SIP accounts are provided by iptel.org, the free VoIP service since 2002. The Jabber/XMPP accounts, that feature a shared roster for members to see immediately who else is online, are courtesy of ProcessOne, experts in personalized instant messaging, using Hosted.IM platform. The professional e-mail accounts, supporting server-side filtering, shared folders and webmail access, are hosted by the mail server experts of Heinlein Support.

By using this new and free service, the community not only has access to up-to-date communication tools that easen their daily lives, but also can proudly show their support and appreciation for LibreOffice.

Membership at TDF is free and open to everyone who contributes to the community. Join us today at http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/application-for-tdf-community-membership/

All details on applying for the new free service will be made public on July 1st, 2013, and sent out to all eligible members.


Official TDF BlogThe Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.4

Berlin, June 19, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.4, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the fourth minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family and the last before the announcement of LibreOffice 4.1 in late July.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 features many improvements in the area of interoperability with proprietary document formats. This ongoing activity has been instrumental for the choice of LibreOffice by all major migration projects to free software since early 2012, including several central and local governments in Europe and South America.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 also solves a number of bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of QA volunteers. On June 20, the team is launching a 15 day Bug Triage Contest to prepare for the release of LibreOffice 4.1. Details here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest. The top 5 triagers – amongst the known ones – and the first 10 new contributors will win a TDF/LibreOffice T-shirt.

LibreOffice 4.1 will introduce many new and exciting features, which are listed here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.1 (including the long awaited font embedding in documents, which is pushing forward the Open Document Format).

In addition, there is a massive amount of improvements less visible to end users but equally important, as cumulatively they add up to a code-base that is far easier to understand and contribute to: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-06-13-under-the-hood.html.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.4/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.4.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.4/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.4.2).


Miklos VajnaLibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest 2013

This year, LibreOffice’s Hamburg hackfest happened last weekend, with more than 20 attendees. Thanks to the sponsors, we had free drink and food during the whole hackfest. ;-)

My original plan was to add support for tables inside text frames in Writer, when importing from RTF. At the end I managed to do that, though not the way I originally wanted to implement that feature. :-)

Here is how this looked with the RTF importer we inherited from OpenOffice.org (LO 3.4), and then with the new RTF import filter (LO 3.6):

Here is how this looks like in latest master, and how it should look like:

Other than that, there were a few other topics I hacked on:

  • various additional fixes for fdo#58819, so watermark is exported (with correct size, position, rotation, opacity, etc.), and reasonably imported

  • the last character of the git hash is no longer missing from the about dialog (commit)

  • number of leaking files when running the writer filter tests is now down to 2 from 527 (commit)

  • RTF import of text frame’s AutoSize property (commit)

  • File → Properties → Security → Record Changes is now imported and exported in the RTF filter (commit)

  • finally added UI for fine dashing — so not only existing documents are rendered correctly, but you can create such documents as well (commit)

You can see some photos here.

Last, but not at least, thank you Eike and Bjoern for organizing this event! :-)

Tamas ZolnaiLIMIT improvements in LibreOffice 4.1

 Some new things get into this version of LO.

1. The primary improvement is adding a combobox to the design view and so not needed to use SQL view to limit the number of resulting rows. This new edit is get place on the query design toolbar and in the Query Properties dialog (Edit -> Query Properties).

Place of the new toolbar item is on the rightmost side of the query toolbar.
New toolbar item to limit a query result
in query design view.

Query properties dialog has the same box as the query design toolbar. These two box are in sync.
New dialog to add query properties like limit and distinct values.

2. LO uses HSQLDB (version 1.8.0) as an embedded\default database so this is an commonly used driver for Base. However it has a bug which lead to an exception when user intend to run a query like "SELECT * FROM table LIMIT n". The problem is HSQLDB's parser does not handle "LIMIT" as an keyword and so in this case "LIMIT" parsed as a table alias and the following number as an unexpected token. Inside LO this bug is fixed by now.

An error box saying the number after the LIMIT is unexpected.
In older versions, HSQLDB throws an exception when
use LIMIT directly after from clause.

The rows are listed with expected number.
LO 4.1 doesn't throw the HSQLDB's exception and return
with the expected result.

Of course it also means LIMIT keyword can't use as a table alias anymore in LO as it was used before. These usage is stand only when use "Run SQL command directly" option. (LO has an own parser which notice that LIMIT is a keyword and so can't be a table alias, but with this option this syntax check can be avoided)

Limit used as an table alias in SQL statement and Base return with all elements of the table without problem.
Before, user was able to use LIMIT as a table alias.

An error box is opened which say that LIMIT is unexpected token.
LO 4.1 throws an exception, when use LIMIT as a name
(get from fixed HSQLDB)

3. This is my favorite. In SQL mode, in the SQL edit the LIMIT keyword was highlighted wrong as a single name (green colour) and not as a keyword (blue colour). The origin of this problem may be the same as in case of HSQLDB's bug. The LIMIT keyword got into the code later as other keywords and it was missed to add all of places where a keyword has to appear.

In the SQL edit the LIMIT word has green color.
Before, the LIMIT keyword was highlighted
with green color like a simple name.

In the SQL edit the LIMIT word has blue color just as the oder keywords like SELECT, FROM and so on.
In LO 4.1, the LIMIT keyword has the same highlighting as
other keywords (blue character color).

Marketing TeamThe Document Foundation welcomes France’s MIMO in the Advisory Board

MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite) represents several bodies of the French government, and fosters the diversity of TDF Advisory Board by adding the voice of 500,000 professional users

MIMO

Berlin, June 17, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that MIMO – the working group of the French government including several ministries and administrations [1], for a total of 500,000 desktops – is now an official member of the foundation’s Advisory Board. MIMO primary goal is to give CIOs and their staff a way to share experience on office suites and operating systems, in order to speed up desktop modernisation.

MIMO is focused on the free desktop, and is one of a number of working groups focusing each one on a specific area of the information system under the guidance of the DISIC (French state CIO). Together, the working groups are creating an official set of free software for the ministries, with a specific application for each task.

MIMO has standardised on LibreOffice, developed by the Document Foundation, and is contributing to the development of the office suite through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers. The role of MIMO is to validate successive versions of LibreOffice and make them compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member ministries. A single, standard LibreOffice version is validated and approved every year, according to the roadmap planned by MIMO members 

To be approved, a version of LibreOffice is submitted to a qualification process: the software is tested to verify its compatibility with other business applications, and becomes a certified MIMO version only after all QA tests have been passed. The Ministry of Interior – for example – has a ten-step qualification process, with tests including compatibility with business applications, macros and deployment tools. The decision is taken by all the members representing the ministries.

MIMO is joining the current 8 members of TDF Advisory Board – Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – and will be represented by Laure Patas d’Illiers, of the Department of Treasury and Finance of the French government.

[1] Ministries: Agriculture, Culture, Defense, Economy, Education, Environment, Finance, Interior, Justice. Administrations: CAF (Family Allocation Funds), DILA (Direction of Legal / Administrative Information), ENA (National Administration School), National Assembly.

About MIMO

The MIMO working group was created by the Agency for Digital Development in Administration (ADAE) in 2005, under the governance of the Prime Minister. Since 2011, MIMO has been controlled by DISIC (Direction Interministérielle des Systèmes d’Information et de Communication), whose mission is to coordinate IT policy in French administrations. DISIC has launched working groups on cloud computing, the organisation and planning of IT systems, and Open Source. MIMO and the Open Source working group are managed by the CIO of the Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture).


Official TDF BlogThe Document Foundation welcomes France’s MIMO in the Advisory Board

MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite) represents several bodies of the French government, and fosters the diversity of TDF Advisory Board by adding the voice of 500,000 professional users

MIMO

Berlin, June 17, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that MIMO – the working group of the French government including several ministries and administrations [1], for a total of 500,000 desktops – is now an official member of the foundation’s Advisory Board. MIMO primary goal is to give CIOs and their staff a way to share experience on office suites and operating systems, in order to speed up desktop modernisation.

MIMO is focused on the free desktop, and is one of a number of working groups focusing each one on a specific area of the information system under the guidance of the DISIC (French state CIO). Together, the working groups are creating an official set of free software for the ministries, with a specific application for each task.

MIMO has standardised on LibreOffice, developed by the Document Foundation, and is contributing to the development of the office suite through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers. The role of MIMO is to validate successive versions of LibreOffice and make them compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member ministries. A single, standard LibreOffice version is validated and approved every year, according to the roadmap planned by MIMO members

To be approved, a version of LibreOffice is submitted to a qualification process: the software is tested to verify its compatibility with other business applications, and becomes a certified MIMO version only after all QA tests have been passed. The Ministry of Interior – for example – has a ten-step qualification process, with tests including compatibility with business applications, macros and deployment tools. The decision is taken by all the members representing the ministries.

MIMO is joining the current 8 members of TDF Advisory Board – Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – and will be represented by Laure Patas d’Illiers, of the Department of Treasury and Finance of the French government.

[1] Ministries: Agriculture, Culture, Defense, Economy, Education, Environment, Finance, Interior, Justice. Administrations: CAF (Family Allocation Funds), DILA (Direction of Legal / Administrative Information), ENA (National Administration School), National Assembly.

About MIMO

The MIMO working group was created by the Agency for Digital Development in Administration (ADAE) in 2005, under the governance of the Prime Minister. Since 2011, MIMO has been controlled by DISIC (Direction Interministérielle des Systèmes d’Information et de Communication), whose mission is to coordinate IT policy in French administrations. DISIC has launched working groups on cloud computing, the organisation and planning of IT systems, and Open Source. MIMO and the Open Source working group are managed by the CIO of the Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture).


Tim JanikUsing distcheck with ccache + colorgcc

Waiting for unit compilations to finish during development, particularly with G++ and heavy optimizations can be quite time consuming. A run of make distcheck escalates the problem, because all files during a dist need to be rebuilt. Small errors triggered late in the dist build might require several time consuming restarts of the build process.

With ccache, a tool exists that can majorly speed up this process. I’ve been using it successfully for several years now. A related development aid is colorgcc which is a colorization wrapper for gcc. This also is under heavy use for my development. It turns out that some tweaks are needed to get it working together with ccache though.

Here’s how to use the tools in combination to speed up regular project builds and also distcheck:

  • Get and install ccache.
    Wrapping compiler invocations with ccache will cache recompilations of the same units. ccache needs a directory to store the cache contents; this defaults to ~/.ccache which might not be the best choice for network homes or encrypted homes. Using /tmp is also suboptimal since it is usually cleaned upon reboots. So I’d recommend to put this into your .bashrc:

    export CCACHE_DIR="/var/tmp/ccache-$USER"

    This will retain the compiler cache across reboots in /var/tmp.

  • Get and install colorgcc.
    Then some patching is in order, especially if you use multiple versions of gcc and need ccache integration. Based on colorgcc from Ubuntu-9.10, I’ve prepared a patch for this (it has been sent to Jamie Moyers some while ago) to be found here: http://testbit.eu/~timj/blogstuff/xyv-colorgcc.diffTo briefly summarize its effects:

    • This allows colorgcc to be used through a bunch of links, e.g. by creating:
      ln -s colorgcc colorg++
      ln -s colorgcc colorgcc-4.4
      ln -s colorgcc colorg++-4.4

      Invoking the script through those links will cause it to strip the ‘^color’ prefix and invoke the respective compiler.

    • Using this patch, /usr/bin/ccache will be used to wrap the compiler invocation if it exists.
    • The patch also contains some UTF-8 quotation fixes needed for gcc-4.4 support.
    • Finally, the patch enables colorgcc to correctly deal with g++ error message that span multiple lines (e.g. template error messages).
  • Use colorgcc as a compiler replacement for project builds:
    rm -f config.cache
    ./autogen.sh CC=colorgcc-4.4 CXX=colorg++-4.4
    nice make all -j4
  • Use colorgcc as a compiler replacement for distcheck builds:
    CC=colorgcc CXX=colorg++ nice make all distcheck

Finally, you might want to tweak the colors of colorgcc’s output which can be adjusted in /etc/colorgcc/colorgccrc. FYI, here’s the color setup I prefer to use in a black terminal window:

  srcColor:             bold white
  introColor:           bold magenta
  warningFileNameColor: cyan
  warningNumberColor:   bold cyan
  warningMessageColor:  yellow
  errorFileNameColor:   cyan
  errorNumberColor:     bold cyan
  errorMessageColor:    bold yellow

UPDATE: Fixed ccache default dir thanks to anonymous.

Naruhiko OgasawaraLibreOffice Conference 2012 Berlin videos online

http://hub.libreoffice.org/libocon2012

I only say I realized my English is tooooo bad....sigh.

Anyway, thanks for TDF conference team to spend lots of time to the videos :)

Charles SchulzWasted time?

Last week I blogged about the features of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.1. I tried to explain the way we work and why LibreOffice should not be seen as a product, but as a community.
The post had some good success and a few comments as well. One of these attracted my attention. The poster “jsc” – Jürgen Schmidt if I’m not mistaken – is obviously an Apache contributor and an IBM engineer who in a previous life was also a long time StarOffice/Sun employee . I’m grateful for his comment as he’s tried to present the work on the sidebar from his  perspective and that’s of course always interesting to understand his points.

To start with, let me stress that while I do recall the issues with the IAccessibility2 Framework, the sidebar was already part of the code coming from IBM at that  time . The side bar was shipped with Lotus Symphony which was (which is) the fusion of the former Openoffice.org code base with the Lotus framework. IBM didn’t just donate the accessibility framework; at that time the story was that was IBM was essentially committed to contribute to OpenOffice.org regardless of how it translated in reality. Politically it was true, in terms of code it didn’t go well and I won’t be pointing fingers at anyone in that story.

The comment then goes on to explain how big of an integration work it is and points out that while LibreOffice works on its own integration of the sidebar in the code, it is copying the code from IBM and that all this is wasted time. I think we all agree that this integration work is quite important and of course we must appreciate that; but calling what the LibreOffice project does a “copy” seems wrong to me at two levels. First, LibreOffice is not a project that spends its time copying IBM ideas and features: LibreOffice integrates new features coming from people joining its community everyday and is busy scaling up its own processes and infrastructure in order to accomodate the flow of new code and volunteers. Contributors to the LibreOffice projects take good ideas wherever they come from, even when the come from IBM (and why wouldn’t they?) and at this stage it seems important to remind everyone that not only does the Document Foundation have the greatest respect for IBM but we would also love to work more closely with them.   Second, I’d like to remind a very simple truth even at the risk of breaking into open doors: this is Free and Open Source Software. IBM releases code -in this case under the Apache Licence- and the code is made available to anyone who wants to use it, modify it and distribute it. To complain that this or that Free and Open Source Software project is copying a feature amounts to deny the Free and Open Source nature of the code and the whole release process surrounding it.

In this regard, the fact that IBM might have intended to have the Lotus side bar integrated in AOO first makes no difference: you cannot release Free and Open Source licensed software in public and then channel the code to only one implementation, regardless of the license you use. Then comes the argument that it’s all wasted time. It seems to imply that there’s some useless duplication of work on the sidebar done on at least two sides: the LibreOffice project and Apache. I don’t deny duplication, but the waste of time is an interesting comment. When the LibreOffice project was born, its founders explained that their goal was not so much to secede from the OpenOffice.org project but rather to propulse the existing community and project into the “next decade” (cf the text that was called the “Next Decade Manifesto”). With the decision to start the Apache OpenOffice project afresh the situation changed and all of a sudden there were two separate projects. This should not be labeled duplication; the two projects support two different licensing models, different ways of working, different visions of where they could go while sharing a common codebase for the first months of existence . When it comes to Free and OpenSource Software, there seems to be duplication everywhere: over a hundred Linux distribution, at least four front-ends to the bluetooth stack for Linux desktops, two native GTK web browsers running the webkit engine, five Twitter clients… and I could go on with an entire list. Somehow it just works, probably because this duplication is the expression of individual and collective freedoms. The failure or the success of each project falls ultimately on the shoulders of its contributors, and by contributors I mean its community. I guess what it means is that the success of a project is defined by a few complex factors that can then be brought back to whether the community is solid and growing. Code development, quality assurance, and code “duplication” is thus not wasted time provided that the contributors do it for a reason and are happy to do it: it’s how community and ultimately Free/Open Source Software works.

Last but not least, the comment ends up with  a reminder that the hosting of OpenOffice at Apache comes with important costs and that donations there would be welcome. I surely sympathize with that: projects of this size come with with quite an infrastructure to run, maintain and ultimately pay for. It would be a pity to see  the Apache Office project go because of its operational costs running too high, but ultimately I think the Apache Software Foundation has been running its own infrastructure for years in a very effective way and therefore these costs might be subsidized in the end.

Björn MichaelsenSee you at the Hackfest in Hamburg this weekend

With a rebel yell: “more, more, more”
More, more, more.

Rebel Yell, Billy Idol

This weekend the LibreOffice community will meet again in Hamburg for the third Hackfest at this location:

335px-HHHackfest2013here is how it looked last year:

Hackers at Hackfest Hamburg 2012

Hackers on the last Hamburg Hackfest

Like last year, this years Hackfest gets kicked off with a meet and greet at the Schachcafe on Friday 20:00 o’clock local time. Think of it like the “beer event” at FOSDEM, which helps everyone warm up for the event –  except it will not be February and not freezing cold. Looking this picture, it likely wont be much like cold FOSDEM at all:

Schachcafe

All details can be found on the Hackfest 2013 wiki page. Thanks to Lanedo for sponsoring this event and also big thanks to Attraktor.org for hosting us again!


Cor NouwsPhotoAlbum - new feature in LibreOffice 4.1 Impress

Another nice feature in LibreOffice 4.1 (as promised in my previous blog).. Creating a slide show with a series of photo's. This works nice and smoothly
In Impress, choose Insert > Picture > Photo Album. The dialog Create Photo Album opens. Note that when you open the file dialog to Add the photo's, you can select multiple pictures at once! In the dialog Create Photo Album you have choices to add more pictures per slide, fill the slide or keep ratio, set order.. Fine with that, click Insert and see on the Slide sorter what nice result you have in a hand turn! Kudoos to Gergő Mocsi for adding this lovely feature to LibreOffice!
 LibreOffice 4.1 will have it's first release candidate around June 23, and the release at the end of July. See here the full schedule for the main releases and bugfix versions of LibreOffice. The beta version is already available on pre-releases page.
 

Naruhiko OgasawaraUbuntu Magazine Japan 2013 Summer

This post is mainly for readers who can read Japanese, but it is an example how Japanese Ubuntu community is active :)

Some of you may know we Japanese has Ubuntu-specific magazine in Japanese language.  The magazine, "Ubuntu Magazine Japan" (in Japan, we called "うぶまが," pronounced "ubu-maga")'s new issue "2013 Summer" has just published today.
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm-jp.amazon.co.jp/e/cm?t=naruoga-22&amp;o=9&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;asins=404891815X&amp;ref=qf_sp_asin_til&amp;fc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;m=amazon&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;bc1=000000&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;f=ifr" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>

In this issue I've written only 2 pages (introduction of Kodak i2600 scanner), anyway its so nice as usual and I love it.  Must buy!

  • Very cute labeled DVD-ROM (13.04 Japanese Remix bootable, and lots of stuffs)
  • What's new of Raring Ringtail (13.04)
  • LibreOffice 4.0 Perfect guide
  • Gaming platform Steam on Ubuntu!
  • Ubuntu Touch; how to use, and how to develop your software
  • Go with Xubuntu!
  • Good series: Re-introductive guide of command line
  • And so nice two manga!
For LibreOffice people, the LibreOffice guide is really "perfect" guide of 4.0 so you must read (if you can read Japanese).

The publisher, ASCII Media Works (AMW) also provide Kindle version so it is good for people doesn't live in Japan:
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm-jp.amazon.co.jp/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=naruoga-22&amp;o=9&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;asins=B00D8R85MC" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>
In addition, Kindle version is cheaper than paper version (but I still love paper).

And AMW has their own e-book publisher BOOK☆WALKER so you can use.  Here is a Ubuntu Magazine Japan page.  Of course you can try it.

Please enjoy the nice magazine :)


Andras TimarStrong LibreOffice presence at SzSzK2013

Miklos Vajna has blogged about Free Software Conference and Exhibition 2013 already. This annual conference organized by FSF.hu, held in Budapest, Hungary usually has 5-600 visitors. In addition to Miklos’ presentation and workshop there were two more LibreOffice related presentations in the programme. Andras Timar presented the new features of LibreOffice 4.1 with an emphasis on the work of Hungarian contributors. László Németh shared many tips and tricks about desktop publishing and typography in LibreOffice Writer. So in total there were 3 LibreOffice presentations, a workshop and a booth with stickers and LibreLogo manuals.