Open Sorcery

Gnome 3.10 is out

2013-09-27T11:52:00.001-07:00

It's official! Gnome 3.10 is out. For the past one week the Gnome announce mailing list was filled with test releases for all sorts of packages within the Gnome ecosystem.
Gnome 3.10 arrives with initial experimental support for the futuristic Wayland, a replacement for the X Window System and over 30,000 other changes. Expect it in an official repo near you soon. More details can be found in the release notes

from the people-apparently-still-care-about-desktops dept.

1,000,000,000 : The VLC project celebrates a billion downloads!

2012-05-14T06:16:00.001-07:00

The Video Lan Project, the open source project behind VLC the uber popular- here in Kenya anyway - media player reached one billion downloads of the app over the weekend. That's huge but the bigger picture is even huger! This statistics may not reflect the total number of VLCs in the wild as the stats counter was only started in February 2005 a couple of versions in. Here's the link to the counter page http://www.videolan.org/vlc/stats/downloads.html From the a-dollar-for-every-download dept.

The Bit-Torrent KIller?

2012-05-14T04:48:00.000-07:00

Two Russian brothers and their friend have founded a company that has dveloped technologyb that will thwart illegal downloads Dmitry Shuvaev,Alexei and Andrei Klimenko's start up Pirate Pay has already attracted $US100,000 from Microsoft’s seed investment fund, and further investment from the Bortnik Fund. It's however unclear exactly how the technology work although it's been hinted that they might be operating a cloud based Denial Of Service attack that specifically targets Bit Torrent. Only time will tell how this puns out. Open Sorcery Daily though isn't exactly holding it's breathe.

Nairobi GNU/Linux User Group holds first meet up.

2012-05-08T04:48:00.001-07:00

The Nairobi GNU/Linux usergroup held it's first met up on Saturday 5th May at KFC Kimathi street. Posted a more detailed account of the meeting on my personal blog. From the lug-of-extraordinary-gentlemen dept.

Foxing the Enterprise: With 10 Firefox takes on the enterprise

2012-01-13T03:59:00.000-08:00

Mozilla, the company behing the FOSS world beating browser Firefox, announced Wednesday that they will be releasing the ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments with Firefox 10. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.

2011-07-30T07:01:00.003-07:00

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2011-07-30T07:01:00.001-07:00

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CentOS 6 is here, and so is Scientific Linux

2011-07-13T02:20:00.001-07:00

The Community Enterprise OS Linux project announced that CentOS 6 ISOs had been released to external mirrors last weekend.

By now most folks have heard about, and probably switched to Scientific Linux, a Linux project with deeper pockets, and some would say better long term prospects, backed by the Fermi Lab @ CERN

A minus for Scientific, and a definite plus for CENTos: Scientific Linux doesn't reportedly guarantee full compatibility with the upstream OS [read Red Hat Linux], CentOS does.

The cent os project seems to have run into trouble lately.

This new release comes 242 days after Red Hat released Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 129 days after the release of @ Scientific Linux 6.0.

Remains to be seen whether CentOS 6 will gain traction in the market,or if Scientific Linux has stolen it's thunder.

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Here Meego Again: Halt the Nokia bashing for a sec folks

2011-06-21T10:50:00.001-07:00

As has been said elsewhere, reports about the death of Meego , spawn of the coupling of the Linux based mobile Oses of Intel [Moblin] and Nokia's Maemo, have been greatly exaggerated peeps.

Today at Nokia's Connection Event in Singapore the company launched their much hinted at first Meego device, the Nokia N9, billed as the first full touch screen swipe phone. Not clear on what that means but it seems Nokia are intent on supporting and shipping out Meego devices after all.
The social networks were abuzz today with the news, with opinion split between those who thought Nokia was having Kalonzo moments [being confused, indecisive] and those who welcomed it.
Good things about the device are being heard from those who have handled it up close.
The phone, which boasts of among other features a 8 Mega pixel camera and Near Field Communications, has no front facing buttons. Instead whenever in an
application, you swipe from the edge of the screen to go back home.
Nokia also talked about a N950 tablet running Meego Harmattan, a success to brilliant Maemo running N900.

Nokia still has, much to my chagrin, plans to ship WP7 devices, a stupid move if you ask me.

How soon before we see the N9 and Meego, in Kenya? Well stayed tuned folks

From the whats-a-half-touch-screen phone department

Photo: Nokia.com

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Mageia 1 released: Fork of popular Mandriva distro announces first stable release.

2011-06-03T08:41:00.001-07:00

From the distro-names-you-should-pronounce-carefully dept.

Mageia, began in September 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux, announced release 1.0 of the distro at around 1pm Nairobi Time Wednesday June 1st.

The new distro [yet to download it ourselves] continues in many of the traditions of Mandriva, a distro that's very popular in Kenya.
For instance Mageia which comes in 2 distinctive installation media DVD ISO and Dual-arch CD ISO and an installable live CD ISO, which
can be used to preview the
distribution and can also be used to install Mageia on your HDD uses the drakx installer. The new distro also employs the all too familiar urpmi as the default dependency resolver
used to install RPM
packages on the system as well as popular
drak tools such as
drakconf for the Mageia control center, the
drak3d tool to to configure 3D
desktop effects (e.g. Compiz)
rpmdrake and the userdrake tool for user administration.

Mageia 1 ships with Linux Kernel 2.6.38, KDE SC 4.6.3,GNOME 2.32, XFCE 4.8, LXDE, various other smaller and lightweight desktop environments such as Openbox,IceWM and
Fluxbox.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 and Calligra are included in the Mageaia repos bringing a full
suite of office applications to the distro as are Firefox 4.0.1 and Google Chromium 11.1. Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.10,
is available in the online
repositories.
Gimp 2.6.11, Inkscape 0.48.1 and Blender 2.49b are bundled with the distro for the creatively inclined.
On the VOIP front QuteCom a SIP softphone which
allows you to make free PC to PC video and voice calls, and
Ekiga,a tool to communicate with video and audio over the internet with support for both SIP and H323 protocol and is compatible.

Anjuta,Eclipse,Netbeans,
KDevelop are the IDEs of choice for the distro.

Version 4.0.6, of the
general-purpose full virtualizer VirtualBox is
available in the Mageia repositories as is WINE 1.3.20, is available
in the repositories.

The packages in Mageia exist in three
different repositories,
depending on what license each
package uses.

The Core repository made up of packages with free-open-source software, that is added by default

The Nonfree repository includes
packages that are free-of-charge
but contain closed-source
software (hence the Nonfree
name); such as nVidia and ATI
graphics cards proprietary drivers, Wi-Fi drivers that is enabled by default

The Tainted repository includes
packages under various licenses,
free and nonfree ones, that may infringe
patents and copyright laws in some
countries in such as
multimedia. Tainted media is added by default
but is completely opt-in.

Mageia is supported
by a not-for-profit organisation,
governed by a body of recognized
and elected contributors, and made
by 100+ people around the world.

Mageia ISOs are available
on the Mageia download page direct (ftp and http) and BitTorrent

Migration options from Mandriva Linux
2010.1 or 2010.2, are also available

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Say Three point Oh: Linux 3.0 is here

2011-05-30T06:06:00.001-07:00

So after 39 major releases in the 2.6 series Linus Tovarlds finally tagged Linux 3.0.0 RC 1 in git.
Linus has contemplated moving away from the 2.6 series for a while now and had initially hinted at moving to 2.8 partly because "I[Linus] am not comfortable counting to 40 anymore " but finally settled on 3.0 to be released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the phenomenal,erm, innovative Free OS.
Here is Linus' original announcement in full

Yay! Let the bikeshed painting
discussions about version numbering
begin (or at least re-start).
I decided to just bite the bullet, and
call the next version 3.0. It
will get released close enough to the
20-year mark, which is excuse
enough for me, although honestly,
the real reason is just that I can
no longe rcomfortably count as high
as 40.
The whole renumbering was
discussed at last years Kernel Summit,
and
there was a plan to take it up this year
too. But let's face it -
what's the point of being in charge if
you can't pick the bike shed
color without holding a referendum
on it? So I'm just going all
alpha-male, and just renumbering it.
You'll like it.
Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does
not actually extend to all the
scripts and Makefile rules, so the
kernel is fighting back, and is
calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We'll have the
usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it
into submission, and get scripts etc
cleaned up, and the final release
should be just "3.0". The -stable team
can use the third number for
their versioning.
So what are the big changes?
NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure,
we have the usual two thirds driver
changes, and a lot of random fixes,
but the point is that 3.0 is
*just* about renumbering, we are
very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a
Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no
special scary new features, nothing at
all like that. We've been doing time-
based releases for many years
now, this is in no way about features.
If you want an excuse for the
renumbering, you really should look
at the time-based one ("20 years")
instead.
So no ABI changes, no API changes,
no magical new features - just
steady plodding progress. In addition
to the driver changes (and the
bulk really is driver updates), we've
had some nice VFS cleanups,
various VM fixes, some nice initial
ARM consolidation (yay!) and in
general this is supposed to be a fairly
normal release cycle. The
merge window was a few days
shorter than usual, but if that ends up
meaning a smaller release and a nice
stable 3.0 release, that is all
good. There's absolutely no reason to
aim for the traditional ".0"
problems that so many projects have.
In fact, I think that in addition to the
shorter merge window, I'm
also considering make this one of my
"Linus is being a difficult
^&^hole" releases, where I really
want to be pretty strict about what
I pull during the stabilization window.
Part of that is that I'm going
to be traveling next week with a slow
atom laptop, so you had better
convince me I *really* want to pull
from you, because that thing
really is not the most impressive piece
of hardware ever built. It
does the "git" workflow quite well, but
let's just say that compiling
the kernel is not quite the user
experience I've gotten used to.
So be nice to me, and send me only
really important fixes. And let's
make sure we really make the next
release not just an all new shiny
number, but a good kernel too.
Ok?
Go forth and test,
Linus

from the paint-the-bikeshed department

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Say Three point Oh: Linux 3.0 is here

2011-05-30T06:04:00.001-07:00

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Lovelock come down : Fedora 15 released

2011-05-24T13:55:00.001-07:00

Fedora 15 was released at 4 pm today Nairobi time.
The latest incarnation of the popular Red Hat sponsored Linux distro known for its reputation as a Bleeding edge distro debuts Gnome 3.0 the new, erm, innovative desktop offering from the Gnome people, KDE 4.6, Mozilla Firefox 4.0, the LibreOffice productivity suite, a fork of Open Office, the Btrfs file system among other featur as well as support for predictive text for Indian languages and -you couldn't guess this one given a thousand tries - support for the rupee sign.
Web devs will no doubt be delighted to find Python 3.2 Maven, Ruby on Rails 3.0.5 and GCC 4.6 in Fedora 15.

from the release dept

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Op/Ed: When Blogger was down. Or hosting a FLOSS News blog on a proprietary platform

2011-05-15T05:06:00.001-07:00

So my chum @eebrah A-list lover of FLOSS, made sure to know that his [fairly non-existent] eyebrows were raised at the rather suspect decision to host open sorcery daily on Blogger,when [incredible -if I may say so myself] open source alternatives exist.

The irony of hosting an open source blog on a proprietary platform was apparently lost on me.

And on a day when Blogger was down, it seems to me for some sort of maintenance or something [dead of the night in San Francisco is unfortunately office hour in Nairobi ] my Nigerian connect[not what you think ] @bigbrovar made me understand that that was the price I had to pay for hosting a blog about open source on a proprietary platform. He went further and helpfully suggested Wordpress.

The fact that if you Google "Open Source linux news kenya" or "Kenyan free software news" today you will get largely irrelevant links is in my estimation a problem.
The value of localized news with unique local insights and perspectives can not be understated.

For years I had bemoaned the lack of local open source news in Kenyan tech reporting in the mainstream media. Complaining it dawned on me would do no good. All media outlets have their target audience. There only way to address no media attention is to create your own media. In this day and age that couldn't be simpler. So I decided to do something about it.

I do not *shock! horror !* own a computer.

My newly acquired Huawei
Ideos Android 2.2 phone had opened up a world of possibilities. I now had always on Internet access [on occassions when I could afford prepaid credit] and publishing tools like the Wordpress and Blogger Droid apps I had recently installed on my phone.
Years of waiting for the perfect tools and set up to land on my laps were over. This had to be my perfect set up. This *was* my perfect set up.I had to do something. Fast. My [rather limited] years of entrepreneurial experience have taught me the value of both being fast, and first. Release early, release often as ESR would say.
Besides it was also a lucrative business opportunity. I had recently had my Ad Sense account approved. And I could publish ads and make a ton of dosh.

Plus it would be a perfect opportunity to hone my writing and editorial skills and build a portfolio . The easiest way to be a writer is to write. And as my sister says the surest sign of laziness there is in a writer is a lack of portfolio.

Only way I knew of easily publishing Google Ads was on a Blogger site. Besides I didn't have much leeway as my phone was and still is my primary means of publishing the site and all my other blogs.

So I set off. My plan was simple. I would focus on stories about a segment of the local FOSS scene I was already comfortably familiar with - university campuses.

Also some FOSS apps have gained acceptance and wide spread use in the Kenyan tech scene. VLC, the media player for example is widely used in Kenya, might be second only to Windows Media Player[ which *curses * comes default ] . Firefox is,as elsewhere in the world, also wildly popular.
Stories about such programs would have a wider appeal than just the intended FOSS audience.

I would give news about custom builds, useful scripts by uni students, reviews and previews of upcoming Linux distro releases, FOSS events and other happenings in the local tech scene of relevance to the .ke FOSS community.

If the idea picked up sufficient buzz and AdSense revenue to purchase a domain and hosting then I would purchase a domain and move to a hosting platform of choice as soon as I had figured out how to publish Google Ads on the chosen platform.

I set about putting my plan to action.

I wrote two posts on a pal's computer.

I transferred the posts on my phone via Bluetooth.

I registered opensorcerydaily on my blogger account [opensorcery.blogspot.com was already taken by some idiot who 's never used it since 2008].

Next I set up a twitter account, for publicizing the blog you know. I had zero budget [that's right zilch] so advertising was out of the question, and besides word of mouth works best.

I cut and paste the article on my Blogger app and published it. [ the identica account came later]

I posted links to the articles to the @open_sorcery twitter and mentioned my pals @fredmanglis @kelzoko and @eebrah to inform em.

And thus open sorcery daily was born.

So here's a sneak peak of operations at Open Sorcery Daily [ which has variously been a seat on a 58 matatu in Nairobi, my former campus dorm room, and of late my room, currently typing this up on my Droid while seated on my bed ].

I get wind of a interesting story usually while going through feeds or via a link tweeted at me by @eebrah. I try to research the story. You know find press releases,sites with material I can reuse without being sued, preferably CC licensed articles. I type up the story,proofread and edit it.

All on my phone.

I then post the article and post a link to @open_sorcery daily's identica and twitter.

So there you have it. I have learnt two things in going about this whole process.

A very loyal and supportive FOSS scene does exist [shout out to the folk @JKUAT LUG and my cousin @icecream for all the love for all the love] They just do not get much mention from .ke tech journas and they lack a central focal point or news outlet. [ read opportunity ]

Secondly, you can chose to sit down on your ass and pontificate all day [@eebrah called hosting Open Sorcery Daily on Blogger "treachery"] or you can chose to support us or better yet go out and do your own thing. Such is the FOSS way.

I am proud of how I went about all this and my only regret is that I did not do it earlier.

Anything I could have done differently? Let me know.

Welcome to the story of building a media empire on an $100 Android smartphone-or how I intend to do it.

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LPI announces new East African Affiliate, LPI - East Africa

2011-05-14T00:36:00.001-07:00

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), recently announced a new affiliate in East Africa.

LPI-East Africa, to be headed by longtime Kenyan FOSS advocate Evans Ikua will promote LPI programs and certifications in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and South Sudan.

Jim Lacey, president and CEO of the
Linux Professional Institute noted a significant growth in LPI Exams in Africa.

Mr. Ikua was the founding chairman of the Linux Professional Association
of Kenya and provides Linux and
Open Source web solutions and training programs through his consulting company, LANet Consulting.

Established as an international non-profit organization in September 1999
by the Linux community, the Linux
Professional Institute is the premier Linux Certification organization worldwide and is globally supported by the IT industry, enterprise customers, community professionals, government entities and the educational community.

Inquiries on LPI-East Africa activities
and programs may be made via email.

from the more-reasons-to-ditch-your-MCSE-dept

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Honeycomb turns Bitter

2011-05-11T00:05:00.001-07:00

A top Google exec announced at the close of this year's Google i/o conference that it will not be releasing the source code of Version 3.0 of it's Android mobile OS.
This as you might imagine has caused quite a furor in the FOSS community. The social networks were abuzz this morning with talk of a possible GPL violation.
Others were of the controversial opinion that since Ice Cream Sandwich the next version of the popular mobile OS would be "open sourced" then there was no cause for worry.
It remains to be seen how events will unfold but a flame war will definitely follow.

From the is-google-still-good depth.

Nairuby / nai.rb, Nairobi Ruby Brigade Announced

2011-05-09T04:10:00.001-07:00

Here's the post, crossposted from nj3ma.wordpress.com announcing the recent formation of the Nairobi Ruby Brigade :

So finally got round to creating the
Nairobi Ruby Brigade. We are starting
out as a Google Group and mailing
list. Sure more stuff is going to follow.
I was totally spoilt for a choice of
names for the group seeing as Nairobi
and Ruby gave me endless wordplay
opportunities. Finally settled on
nairuby for the group email address
and Nai.rb for the group name.
The Nairobi Ruby Brigade is essentially
a user group for Ruby and Ruby on
Rails enthusiasts, developers and even
watchers /followers in Nairobi.
Hoping to get the group going as a
place where to keep apace with the
pulse of the local Ruby/RoR scene.
Folks are invited to join and announce
projects,ask and answer questions
and post Ruby/RoR web dev jobs and
events etc.
So here’s the link click on it and get
busy http://groups.google.com/
group/nairuby

From the having-verbal-fun-with-programming-language-names dept

openSUSE 11.3 local build announced

2011-05-09T02:17:00.001-07:00

From the customs dept

Anthony over at the JKUAT Linux Users Group has announced the availability of his custom build of OpenSuse 11.3 christened openSUSE
11.3 SB Rough Diamond.

More details about the Custom build are available here jkuatlinux.blogspot.com/2011/03/opensuse-113-sb-rough-diamond.html

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Jkuat Linux User Group

2011-05-09T02:09:00.001-07:00

From the where-is-the-local-linux-scene dept

In my sojourns on the blogosphere I happened to stumble upon an excellent local Linux resource. The JKUAT Linux Users Group blog. They seem to have a good thing going.
Here is the link to their blog: http://jkuatlinux.blogspot.com

Status Net 1.0 is coming

2011-04-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago the author of this article attempted to log in to their status net site and was informed that it was down for maintenance.
I was however offered an "exclusive" invite to be among the first to check out the latest production release of the Open Source Microblogging software.
A few design changes were also noted on the status net website including a bold new orange theme.
The good folk at Status Net have promised the author that Status Net 1.0 will be "awesome". We await with bated breathe.

From the who-needs-twitter dept

New VLC out

2011-04-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

The developer team of everyone and their little sister's favorite media player VLC has announced the release of VLC 1.1.8, a minor release of the 1.1.x branch. Small new features, plenty of bug fixes, updated translations and solutions to security issues also made this release.

Notable improvements include an updated look on Mac, a new Dirac encoder, new VP8/WebM encoder, and numerous fixes in codecs, demuxers, interface, and subtitle auto detection, protocols and platform integration.

Source and Windows and MacOSX builds are currently available.

From the i-care-about-my-movies-too-much department

Awesome.sh Script automates video file Conversion to .flv

2011-04-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

Local Linux wizard and Software Engineering student Ibrahim Ngeno aka Eebrah The Hustla has just announced the release of a shell script that automates conversion of flv video files to webm. The script is easily converted to handling any format ffmpeg can handle.
Ngeno was implementing some GUI features even as he emailed our news room. The GUI features will however sadly be available for Gnome only.
The script is available via email upon request. Get in touch with him at twitter.com/eebrah or identi.ca/eebrah

From the screw-flash dept

GNOME 3.0 released.

2011-04-11T07:32:00.000-07:00

On April 7th after two years of development the Gnome projected announced the release of Gnome 3.0.
GNOME 3.0 is a major milestone in the history of the GNOME Project. The release introduces an exciting new desktop which has been designed for today's users and which is suited to a range of modern computing devices. GNOME's developer technologies have been substantially improved for 3.0. Modernized and streamlined, they will enable developers to provide better user experiences with less time and effort. And GNOME 3.0 comes with the same GNOME applications that users know and trust, many of which have received significant enhancements.
GNOME 3.0 follows the project's predictable release cycle and comes six months after the last GNOME release, version 2.32. It is the culmination of three years' planning and development and is the project's first major release in nine years.
3.0 is the beginning of a new journey for GNOME. The 3.x release series will continue with the project's predictable six-month development cycles, and promises to build on the trend of innovation seen in 3.0, delivering significant enhancements to the GNOME user and developer experiences.
The full release notes are available here http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/

Welcome

2011-03-24T03:27:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the foremost source of Open Source news in Kenya.
We will be updating on locally relevant opensource news and projects with slight bias towards those on the GPL and mobile side of things.
Keep it here for your daily pickings of. Linux,Android, BSD news and such.