The government has been forced to make a number of significant changes to Lord Mandelson’s much-criticised Digital Economy Bill. In response to a petition, the Prime Minister has dropped Mandelson’s plans for a controversial ‘three strikes’ rule forcing ISPs to permanently disconnect those repeatedly accused of illegal file sharing by copyright holders.

Amongst a long list of grievances with the proposed bill, critics had pointed out the potential human rights implications of cutting-off households, particularly school children, from the Internet, based on the behaviour of one individual using a shared connection. However, in a statement on the Number 10 website, the government did not rule out forcing ISPs to enforce bandwidth restrictions, download limits and temporary account suspensions onto customers accused of breeching copyright.

As part of the changes to the bill, the government also announced that rights holders will be expected to pay 75% of the cost of dealing with Internet pirates, whilst ISPs will only be required to pay 25% of the cost. The entertainment industry had been lobbying for a more even split.

Perhaps more importantly, the government has also been forced to cut the controversial Clause 17 of the bill, which would have given government ministers an almost free reign to amend UK copyright law in the future. “This would have given the Government the power to make widespread changes to crucial intellectual property rights laws without having to go to Parliament,” according to Paul Gershlick, a leading UK copyright and intellectual property expert and partner Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP.

Meanwhile, Shaddow Chancellor George Osborne has reiterated previous pledges to “create a level playing field for open source IT in government procurement”. The Tories’ new manifesto also promises to publish more information on all government contracts and tendering opportunities, as well as spending by QUANGOs and Local Government, in a bid to “open up government procurement to more SMEs.”

However, if they ever get into power, the Tories will have to take care not to anger United States Trade Representative (USTR). Andres Guadamuz, a law lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, has highlighted how the Internationl Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has recommended Indonesia to be placed on the Special 301 Watch List, the US’s trading ‘naughty step’, for encouraging the use of Open Source Software within government.

“I am baffled by the mindset that believes encouraging public institutions to use legitimate and free open source software solutions ‘does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations’,” Guadamuz commented in a detailed analysis of the IIPA’s recommendations. “It is nice to know where the IIPA stands: Only commercial intellectual property is worthy of protection, everything else is as bad as piracy.”

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Resources:
OpenOffice (version 3 or higher)
BasicAddonBuilder
Sun PDF Import Extension
Professional Template Pack II – English
Writer’s Tools
OpenOffice.org Document Templates

OpenOffice.org Macro Feature
A macro in OpenOffice is a saved sequence of steps or commands which can be called with the click of a button. Macros are very useful in making repetitive tasks a lot more efficient. Say you need to put your signature, address and company logo at the end of a number documents you create using OpenOffice. You can create a macro that does this for you. This way, all you have to do is to call the macro and it will fill in the necessary information. Creating macros might seem rather intimidating at first, but it is quite simple to get started with it.

Record a macro
The simplest way to create a macro is to use OpenOffice’s built-in macro recording tool. You launch the macro recorder, run the steps you want to be recorded in the macro, then stop the recorder. Voilà, your macro is now ready. Let’s look at how to do this. Go to Tools>Macros>Record Macro, then press the sequence of keystrokes you want. At the end of your sequence, click on Stop Recording. In the new window that pops up, give the file a name and save it. Try to come up with apt names for your macros, as weak names will drive you nuts in the future.

Run your saved macro
Once you have saved a macro in OpenOffice, it’s quite simple to run it. Go to Tools>Macros>Run Macro. A window will pop up with a list of all the macros available, the ones from the OpenOffice.org team, as well as the ones created by you. Select the macro you want to execute and hit Run. The macro will execute. Errors, if any, will be displayed in a pop-up notification window.

Extensions
If you create a macro that you want to share with other users of the OpenOffice suite, there are two ways for you to do that. You can either share the code used by the macro, or you can package the macro into an ‘extension’ and then share it via email or put it up for download. The second method is usually the better approach. Let’s look at how to package an OpenOffice macro into an extension.

An OpenOffice extension pretty much consists of the code of an OpenOffice macro and some XML files, all wrapped up into a zip file. To create an extension, first follow the steps shown above and create an OpenOffice macro. Once you have the macro saved in OpenOffice, there are two ways you can proceed. You can either write the necessary XML files manually using a text editor, or you can use the OpenOffice tool, BasicAddonBuilder (BAB), to generate the XML files for you. Let’s look at the second method.

Install the BasicAddonBuilder
Installing the BasicAddonBuilder is quite a straightforward process. – just start here. This is the page for the BasicAddonBuilder OpenOffice extension. On this page, click on the ‘Get it!’ button to begin the installation of BasicAddonBuilder. Once the download is complete, OpenOffice’s extension system will take over the installation. Just follow the steps that it asks you to and you should soon be in business.

Advisor:
Kunal Deo

Resources:
Debian-based Linux distribution: It is recommended that you use a Debian-based Linux system like Ubuntu or Kubuntu for Maemo development. Installation on other distributions is also possible, but you need to fiddle with the set-up script.
Xephyr X11 server: Xephyr is a KDrive-based X server which targets a window on a host X server as its framebuffer. It is used to run Maemo application on the development system. The same X11 server is also used in other projects as well, such as Openmoko. This can be installed using the package manager. On Debian-based systems, you can use the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xephyr

Python-qt4: If you intend to used a Python-based GUI installer for the SDK, which we do in this tutorial, you will need this package as well. Use the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4

Maemo GUI installer Python script: Maemo is not distributed in the form of ready-to-install packages – instead you will need to use an script that will fetch various packages and put things in order for you. There are various versions of this script available, including a Bash shell script, a Python script and a Python GUI script. We will be using the Python GUI script. This script can be downloaded from here.
Storage: Around 3GB of free space.

This is the fourth Linux-based smartphone development we have covered in Linux User & Developer. Check out earlier issues of the magazine for the coverage on Openmoko, Palm Pre and Google Android. This alone proves that Linux is already a big thing for smartphone or embedded development. And everybody is welcome – especially Linux developers, because it is Linux’s heart and soul running on these devices.

Maemo is a software platform based on the Debian Linux distribution, and it comprises the Maemo OS and the SDK. It was originally created by Nokia for that company’s internet tablets. In fact, the first device based on Maemo was the Nokia 770, which shipped in November 2005. Until recently, Maemo was an internet-tablet-only platform, but with the release of Nokia N900 this has changed. The N900 is a very powerful smartphone based on Maemo 5.

Nokia also stated at the CES 2010 event that more devices based on Maemo are in the pipeline. Maemo consists of mostly open source software with a small amount of Nokia’s proprietary code. Nevertheless, rest assured that the N900 is a complete pocketable Debian system. Maemo is built with well-known open source components such as GCC, GTK, GStreamer, Qt, GNOME and Mozilla. Lots of existing open source software has been easily ported over the Maemo platform, such as OpenOffice, Firefox and MPlayer.

1. Running the set-up script
In this step, we will install the Maemo 5.0 SDK using the Python GUI installer script. To start the installer, open a terminal and perform the following command to open the set-up wizard:

$ sudo python maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py

Click Next to continue. Here you will find three options to select from. Select the Custom installation and click Next to continue. After the licence screen, the wizard will prompt you to select the user for which the SDK needs to be installed. Make sure that you select the correct user here. Accept the default settings from the next screen and click Next.

For the final step, Maemo will present you with the summary of selected options – it should look similar to the screenshot on the right. Click Install to start the installation. Installation will take a considerably long time, so you may want to go and make a nice cup of tea in the meantime.

This book covers the subject of creativity and lateral thinking, something which often seems to be largely disregarded nowadays. Many office workers are actively discouraged from any form of creativity, yet innovation is central to the development of our economies.

Some useful management techniques which are otherwise confused by so-called ‘business consultants’ are put into simple words here. The reader does not need to pay someone a large pile of money for consultancy whilst reading the book. Just a kitchen timer and a piece of paper and a pencil is all you require. If you would like to get hold of the official Pomodoro kit, you can buy it online; as well as the pencil and paper, you get a T-shirt. Pomodoro Technique Illustrated helps you to focus on the job in hand using a partially formalised technique or method. If you are one of those people who finds that software development revolves around IRC chat or Twitter or mailing lists and you find that most of the day just flashes by as you type away on your keyboard, this book might be useful for you.
Richard Ibbotson

This article originally appeared in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Here, the users can run virtual instances of servers without the need to directly access the bare metal. The users have administrator privileges inside their instances and can define the firewall rules at will. The number and type of supported operating systems inside an IaaS depends on the provider. IaaS allows the transfer of complete data centres into the cloud. The most popular IaaS around is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Some competitors are GoGrid, Joyent, FlexiScale and Rackspace Cloud. You want an IaaS at home? Try Eucalyptus. It has the same functionality as the popular Amazon cloud services EC2, S3 and EBS. All you need is one or more Linux machines with Xen or KVM.

Platform as a Service (PaaS). A PaaS is a scalable, integrated application runtime (and in many cases) development platform. Most providers support one or two programming languages. The target audience is developers. PaaS takes the level of abstraction further and has less flexibility in contrast to IaaS. But while using a PaaS, you have no administration overheads. Popular PaaS offerings are Google App Engine, Amazon Simple DB, Bungee Connect, Zoho Creator and the Windows Azure Services Platform. Running your own PaaS is possible with AppScale (same functionality than Google App Engine) and 10gen.

Software as a Service (SaaS). Enterprise-quality software (complete applications) is run by a provider and can be consumed as a utility by the users. No software has to be installed locally by the users – just a browser is needed. This advantage includes the main drawback: the user has to trust the provider regarding service availability and privacy issues, because not only the application itself but also the user’s data is stored by the provider. Popular SaaS offerings are Google Docs, Salesforce.com, Gliffy, Clarizen, Zoho, SlideRocket, Adobe Photoshop Express and Apple iWork.com. For running a private SaaS, Sugar and Zimbra are two of the candidates available.

Humans as a Service (HuaaS). Following the principle of crowdsourcing, the human resource can be used for a few pence or for free. Wherever a computer is not very well suited to the task, and time and money is a problem, crowdsourcing can be the solution. The most popular marketplace for HuaaS is the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Remember The Guardian investigating your MPs’ expenses in 2009? This was crowdsourcing/HuaaS too.

These four categories of cloud systems show that there are many different technologies behind the cloud, but all of them use virtualisations and web services and have the potential to radically change IT as we know it.

Christian Baun has been involved in Linux/UNIX and open source since 1994, when he did his first Slackware 2.0 installation

This article originally appeared in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Details:
Price:

Pros: Solid mid-range PC is reliable and comes with SLED 11, a major bonus
Cons: Not a terribly fast computer, or particularly exciting in any way

In an age when Linux has become a powerful platform for development work, graphics processing and video production, it’s a welcome relief to see a mid-range system built for people who may or may not have experience with Linux. The HP Elite 7000 Microtower is quite capable: it has an Intel i7 860 2.8GHz quad-core processor with an 8MB L2 cache and an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card built for Blu-ray movie playback. Meanwhile, with just 3GB of RAM, an 160GB SATA hard disk and little design flare, the Elite 7000 is not exactly a performance rig. The saving grace: the system can come equipped with Novel SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 and is extremely easy to upgrade.

The all-black design screams ‘corporate deployment’ more than any sort of style statement. In fact, other than a silver plate with an HP logo, you might think the Elite 7000 is home-built, and the understated design is likely intentional. HP used a hex locking nut on the back of the PC as if to warn the non-technical that they should not mess with the innards. We did, of course, noticing that the spacious interior is just ripe for upgrades, especially more RAM (up to 8GB) and a larger drive.

However, we still tested the stock version and came away impressed. For the vast majority of computing tasks – using Evolution to check your POP mail, burning a DVD disc using LightScribe (included with this SLED build) and even playing games or watching movies – the Elite 7000 is up to the task. Where we noticed a performance degradation is when we compared Linux-to-Linux between this system and a home-built PC that uses an SSD drive, an Nvidia Quadro CX graphics card and has 6GB of RAM. There was no comparison, of course – the home-built system was snappier even for popping up Firefox, copying files and running simulations with a program like Autodesk Revit Architecture (which normally prefers a workstation PC).

The mid-range nature is what makes the Elite 7000 less than a top-end PC, even if it is a good all-round performer for most computer tasks.
Thankfully, the system is easy to upgrade – which at a good mid-range price is something that makes sense. The Elite 7000 has a few other extras thrown in just to add to the deal. There’s a 6-in-1 one flash card reader located on the front of the device. Our system came equipped with one standard DVD and one Blu-ray drive. The HP Elite uses an ATI 4550 card that should support Blu-ray movie playback, although we could not get the movie Miracle At St Anna to work (HP said SLED 11 systems are normally not equipped with Blu-ray drives).

One of the most important specs on the Elite 7000 is hard to notice, however. Over several weeks, we used SLED 11 on the system for a variety of tasks: email, word processing, gaming and web browsing. We never experienced a crash of any kind. What this means is that the hardware itself is engineered with extra precision – this is no home-built machine. Most importantly, by fine-tuning SLED 11 for the system, HP has accomplished a lofty goal. Sure, other systems by Dell offer a Linux version, but HP has tweaked this install for extreme reliability. Even the SLED 11 recovery disc is well engineered, providing a way to rebuild the system from scratch in an unattended mode in less than 20 minutes.

For the price, the Elite 7000 is a rock-solid system. Several key upgrades would enhance the performance – such as more RAM, or a larger-capacity drive (or a RAID). As it stands, the PC is a reliable Linux box for just about any purpose.

Verdict: 4/5
Rock-solid PC for just about any purpose. Does lack some design flare (on purpose, we think) but is easy to upgrade.
John Brandon

This article originally appeared in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Advisor:
Kunal Deo

Resources:
eBox installer

Linux is an excellent choice for a server operating system, no matter what the size of business. However, it is still not very easy to administrate. Recently many distributions have launched their own interface to configure these server components (like Apache and Samba), but really failed at delivering an easy-to-use interface to configure it. That alone turns off many SMB (small and medium business) folks. eBox is trying to fix this particular issue. eBox (or eBox Platform, to give it its full name) can play multiple roles. It can act as a network gateway, an infrastructure manager, a unified threat manager, an office server, a unified communication server or a combination of any of these. eBox is delivering these functions using already popular open source software with a solid administration interface.

As of the current release of eBox (1.2), eBox ships with the following profiles…
eBox Office: File server, print server and groupware server. eBox Office includes ebox-samba, ebox-printers, ebox-egroupware, ebox-antivirus, ebox-ebackup, ebox-software and ebox-monitor.
eBox Communication: Mail server, chat server and VOIP server. eBox Communication includes ebox-mail, ebox-jabber, ebox-asterisk, ebox-mailfilter, ebox-antivirus, ebox-ebackup, ebox-software and ebox-monitor.
eBox Security: Proxy server, intrusion detection system, firewall system and VPN server. eBox Security includes ebox-firewall, ebox-ids, ebox-squid, ebox-openvpn, ebox-mailfilter, ebox-antivirus, ebox-ebackup, ebox-software and ebox-monitor.
eBox Gateway: Proxy server and firewall system. eBox Gateway includes ebox-network, ebox-squid, ebox-firewall, ebox-trafficshaping, ebox-l7-protocols, ebox-ebackup, ebox-software and ebox-monitor.
eBox Infrastructure: DHCP server, DNS server, web server, and NTP server. eBox Infrastructure includes ebox-network, ebox-dhcp, ebox-dns, ebox-openvpn, ebox-webserver, ebox-ntp, ebox-ebackup, ebox-software and ebox-monitor.

Joomla is a very easy-to-use content management system. There’s also plenty of information on the internet about all aspects of its use. Yet this book is still very welcome, at least for those who’d like to know more about Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 – for grey-haired, experienced PHP developers, it’s superfluous.

Using Joomla gives you guidelines for planning and creating your content, along with some useful information about how to create and use Joomla templates – something that a lot of people never get to grips with. An explanation of components, modules and plug-ins is carefully given so that the reader can begin to understand some infrastructure. In the later part of the book, useful examples are given of how to set up an online store calendar, photo gallery, discussion forum and more. The final section gives some ideas about security precautions to protect your site from attackers.
Written by Ron Severdia and Kenneth Crowder, Using Joomla gives you, in 383 pages, everything you might want to know about your favourite content management system.
Richard Ibbotson

This article originally appeared in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Words by:
Dave Walker

The next version of Ubuntu – codename Lucid Lynx – will be the 10.04 release, and is scheduled to be released and declared stable in April.  As a long-term support version, coupled with increasing popularity, this is undoubtedly the most important Ubuntu release to date.

I was privileged to be invited to the Canonical offices in London recently to preview the image changes and comment on how we might adopt them; offer opinions on how I feel the community would interpret the changes, and offer feedback.  I expected this to be an art and design type meeting, meaning I did have some concerns about how useful I would be since I can’t even attempt a bluff at being artistic.  However, it did turn out to be useful, with lots of fruitful discussions.

For the last 6 years, Ubuntu has traditionally had a theme of brown and earthy colours; which I feel many have come to accept, and perhaps even like.  Over the years we have witnessed the colour being toned down and having less significance in the desktop.  Following some 8 months of work the colour has been dropped from the distribution design, so it was quite a risky move.  The design has attempted to focus and convey Precision, Reliability Collaboration and Freedom.  It will undoubtedly take time for the changes to cascade into all usages.

The new colours have a heavy focus on orange, and aubergine (purple). The colour orange is intended to represent Ubuntu community focus, with aubergine symbolising Canonical commercial interests; with a varying ratio of both for things depending on the type of use.  However, the designers at Canonical have been very careful to keep crucial elements of the previous designs to ensure some of the brand is kept familiar.

I don’t think I have ever fully appreciated the work involved in being an artistic designer.  When I’ve encountered artwork designs previously, there has been an ever-increasing move towards minimalism which, to me, implied that the work and effort involved to create it was equally minimal.  However, viewing the designs and being talked through the process of how they evolved gave me a new found respect for designers.

The changes aren’t simply limited to palette change, but more a whole brand unification and polish.  The whole rework was an effort to help Ubuntu “grow up” to reflect it’s increasing maturity.  It is thought that the current Ubuntu font, named “ubuntu-title”, had an almost childlike appearance and on reflection I think this statement has merit.

The new font, which will be simply called “ubuntu” has been designed with cooperation between Canonical designers and a world class design agency.  At the time I saw the proposed versions the full alphabet wasn’t yet complete, and I became aware of the huge attention to detail that these committed people were working towards.  One thing that particularly caught my eye was the discussion on things such as how the edge of the letter ‘C’ should finish, “Should it be sharp and flush or slightly angled”.  The wider masses would never be aware how much effort had been put into this.