The inscription perdiod is about to end at July 1st, and we would not like anyone to end outside because of this. So if you’re doubting on starting to work on the eyeOS Toolkit, there isn’t a better moment than now. Inscription is totally free and we want to encourage anyone that may be interested in inscribing.

As we announced, the time to submit the developed apps will start on August 1st and will end on August 25th.

Finally, we have already been answering doubts on different places, but there is a question which has been repeated by some different people and we would like to explain: it’s OK to use third party add-ons (libraries, scripts, applets…) as long as all the sources are included in the package, and the uncompressed resulting app is not larger than 100KB.

You can read the bases here and inscribe yourself in this simple form.

The first “thank you!” of this post comes for Marcelo d’Elia Branco, CEO of FISL and the Free Software leader in Brasil. He invited us, and it’s the second time eyeOS is on Brasil this year (first was on January for the Campus Party Brasil) because of him. The second one comes for Priscila and Tobias for supporting us so so much in everything inside FISL and being the best Porto Alegre guides out there. When something worries you in FISL just look for Priscila and be sure she can fix it.

The third thank is a bit special. Is for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brasil. As Free Software activists, we thank him for coming to FISL, that was amazing and it’s not always possible to have the president of a country where a Free Software event is being held getting directly involucrated with it. And he didn’t came alone, but with some ministers and people from his government. But as the eyeOS people, we thank him for being in a private reception where people from Redhat, FSF, Linux International, Java, Openoffice, Debian and we from eyeOS’ were with him and had the oppotunity to meet him to talk about Freedom, Free Software and the different projects visions.

About our speech, we must say that after being talking in different places about eyeOS and Cloud Computing for more than three years now, this was the first time that the theatre had a buffer overflow and was not just totally full, but there was some people outside trying to hear the speech, even being three more great talks on the same time in FISL. That was incredible. Thanks to all of you for coming, and to Enrique Verdes for introducing the eyeOS talk and helping us a lot with portuguese.

Finally, about the videos we’ve being publishing this days, we have seen Stallman explaining us that he does not believes on the “cloud computing” term but the concept is acceptable when you control the server and the software is Free. Marcelo just after Richard told us that he sees eyeOS as the alternative to cloud services, and Maddog left us amazed after explaining that he’s thinking on eyeOS for his new projects. We have also talked to great people such as Juan Tomás, former president of Hispalinux, even not having a video yet.

But there is still one last video, and this is really special, since it’s from someone who’s not directly related in Free Software but he’s in Freedom in Internet. When we hear about him is usually because he’s sued by giant companies from different countris, while he keeps defending Freedom in Internet (some people call this just piracy). He’s Peter Sunde, founder of The Pirate Bay, but what’s more important, one of the nicest enterpeneurs you can find out there. Not because what he did, but because after doing what he has done (Bit torrent means +-80% of the whole Internet traffic and Pirate Bay has +-50% of that, so make your numbers), he considers himself as someone totally normal, doing something totally normal. This is what he told us about eyeOS:

Thanks a lot. Muito obrigado! (and see all you again in FISL 11 if not before).

This video has been recorded in FISL 10, the Free Software International Forum, this year dedicated to the Freedom in Internet.
Thanks, Jon!

Today we talked with them about Software as a Service, Cloud Computing and the eyeOS Project. It’s great to see how two of the most important people on Free Software are worried about Cloud Computing as big companies are trying to present. This, and Marcelo’s comments on eyeOS must encourage every eyeOS member to continue fighting.

Cloud Computing will be one of the most important topics for next year. It will be a long fight where we’ll be defending eyeOS, the Free Software alternative to those services where the user needs to send the data to third parties, and there will be amazing new projects competing directly with almost any eyeOS application. But for sure we’ll be there with one of the most solid products. And together, we’ll build the Free Software reference on Cloud Computing desktops and apps, where the user can host eyeOS on his own server easily.

The eyeOS Project is also here and we’ll be talking about Freedom, Free Software and Cloud Computing today. It’s a great opportunity to stop for a moment and see what’s going on in the Cloud Computing market. Every day new Cloud services are appearing, most of them with complicated EULA’s and TOS’ that we must accept in order to use them. One of the few ways of fixing this is with Free Software, having the control over both the software and the data which is inside. We’re exactly there, creating the Free Software Cloud Computing desktop as an alternative to dozens of “free” services where the only price to pay is our data.

For those of you being here, you’re invited to our presentation today at 11am. See you there!

eyeDesigner 0.9 can be donwloaded here and can be installed in eyeOS 1.8.5.1 (released yesterday) and higher.

eyeDesigner is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported – which can be read here – and is free, Open Source, for everyone who wants to use it for non commercial purposes. The source is also opened and will be soon included in the eyeOS SVN server.

You can also use eyeDesigner from the Free eyeOS Server.

For those new in eyeOS, we have been finalists for Best Project in 2007 and Most Likely to Change the World in 2008. Being there is always thanks to the eyeOS community who voted for eyeOS in the awards. And ending May 29th, this year is your turn again to put eyeOS in the finalists list (it takes 2 minutes)!

You can nominate eyeOS following this link:

As Lars started in the eyeOS Forums, we’re nominating eyeOS as Best Project and Most Likely to Change the Way you do Everything.

Thanks!

If you’re currently using eyeOS 1.6 you have 2 options to upgrade:

• 1.8.0.4: Current stable version, no more features will be added but bug fixes are guaranteed until 2009/06/07 and security fixes until 2010/01/07!
• 1.8.5.0: The current “cutting edge” version, which is also what you can see in eyeos.info. This version will receive new features each month (starting with 1.8.6 in a  few weeks).

You can download the updater for:

• Updater for 1.8.0.4
• Updater for 1.8.5.0

Stay tuned for the next announcements about the new eyeOS versions!

This version means a “stop, think and continue” to our Roadmap, and fixes lots of small and big gaps in eyeOS that, even not being bugs, were annoying for the end users, such as missing features, non-ordered or non-designed places in the desktop and base apps, etc.

eyeOS 1.8.5 includes also an updated default theme, which has been better organized and updates the default icon set, as usual, using Oxygen as a base.

What’s new on eyeOS 1.8.5?

You can download and install or update your current eyeOS platform to the new eyeOS 1.8.5 from the Downloads page. Remember that you just need a server with Apache and PHP to run eyeOS without office support, and OpenOffice.org plus a macro installation to be able to work with Office files from your eyeOS. Instructions are included in the package.

If you use eyeOS from the Free Public Server, just log into your account and you’ll see a window asking you if you want to switch to the new theme or keep the old one.

This has been a special version and we would like to thank you to everybody involved in any way to this release: Jordi Ferrer, Pau Peris, Estefania Merdarde, Julia Garcia, Lars Knickrehm, Daniel Sousa, Matthew Powell, François Bocquet, Hunter Perrin and all of you who have helped to make this a reality. Enjoy the new version!

The eyeOS presentation summary (which can also be read on the event’s website) is:

Usually when we hear about Cloud Computing we imagine a few big companies offering Cloud solutions. However, there is a privacy concern in sending personal and professional documents to some third party servers that grows as quick as the Cloud concept gets expanded over the media. Looking for possible solutions, one way to bring this concept of Cloud Computing back to some type of ownership is through smaller in-house clouds that are linked together instead of one bigger Cloud Computing provider where control of data is undefined. Like Linux appeared to offer a worldwide accepted and developed alternative to the closed source Operating Systems, in our scenario, eyeOS, a Free Software project started in 2005 creates the Cloud Operating System, which can be easily hosted from almost any web server.

This is a great opportunity to show the work that we all together have been doing during more than 3,5 years. Thanks to a great community, we have now more than 30 languages. And this is quite a success: eyeOS has clearly an important position here, and we must continue working until eyeOS is known as a different way of doing Cloud Computing: That way that doesn’t mean to give up our privacy.

See you in New York!

eyeOS 1.8.0.4 fixes remaining problems and two infinite loops.

We recommend every eyeOS user to update to the latest eyeOS release, even if none of the problems are critical.

We have more work to do (no doubt!), but whether you are a new user or a developer we have something for all. You can even find some info about eyeOS history and links to articles about our eyeOS.

On our user side, you can find how to setup your eyeOS system with all the works like office support, a list of bundled applications and what they do and HOWTOs as well. You can even participate in the future of eyeOS with our wish-list and much more!

For all the developers and designers you will find things like: Learning how to get and build your eyeOS development environment, the Developers Reference Index, Examples, Code Style Guide, Suggested Tools, Themeing and much more.

We invite all to come experience and participate in our eyeOS Wiki!

There will be changes in almost all the base applications, but probably one of the most noticeable changes will be the update of our default theme, which has been there with soft restyles since eyeOS 1.0. The new theme will follow our current scheme (that will be completely updated on the amazing, new from scratch, eyeOS 2.0 desktop). We’re glad to show you the new desktop which will be introduced in eyeOS 1.8.5:

We have already put a TO-DO in the eyeOS wiki where you can see the 1.8.5 Roadmap. The timeline for eyeOS 1.8.5 goes from Feubrary 23rd to March 9th for programming and from March 9th to March 23rd for testing. An online server will be put as usual for those who want to help reporting bugs.