Archives par mot-clé : Non-Libre

Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, GNU/Linux

New Launchpad release out, news blog online

2 commentaires

This morning I was really excited to see the Launchpad 1.1.6 milestone announcement! Launchpad is a collection of services that assist in software development. Ubuntu uses it to manage its specifications, bugs, meetings, events and other assorted things. the Launchpad HowTo describes how this is done.

Among the many details of bugs and new development in this announcement, a few are of particular interest to any Ubuntu LoCo teams using Launchpad to manage their community and keep track of participation:

  • Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
  • Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
  • Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only. – as a team administrator, visit any project’s page (like Ubuntu’s, then go to the Answers tab, and choose  » Set answers Contact » from the left menu. Previously you also received notices in English. If you don’t select a preferred language, it will automatically be set to your browser language preferences.

This last feature alone is very important for local teams that wish to have their members keep track of the help they provide to local communities in their native language. I also think it will be a good way to keep answers to common support question out of the mailing lists – sometimes a few technical questions can generate a *lot* of email traffic. An added bonus, you loco team members will get precious karma for every participation.

There were also two nice changes to improve privacy of participants in Answers and the bug trackers:

  • Email addresses inside the Answer and Bug Trackers are now obfuscatedto anonymous (not logged in) users – e.g. Google.
  • Quoted emails and standard signature lines are now stripped from emailed responses to Answer Tracker questions and also bug reports.

There are many more improvements and new features, the full announcement is in the Launchpad-users mailing list archives.

Additionally, there is now a Launchpad News blog now available at http://news.launchpad.net/ – it’s great to have another channel with regular updates and insight directly from the users and developers behind Launchpad.

Now, to make this a perfect « Launchpad fans » day, it would have been lovely to see an update about making Launchpad free and open source under the GPL or another licence… 🙂

 
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, GNU/Linux

Regarding patents and Ubuntu

4 commentaires

Almost two moths ago I remember reading that Canonical signed a License Agreement with Open Invention Network, but I can’t remember seeing much mentions of that – or any commentary. Earlier today I found some interesting questions and discussion in this blog post, however I’d be interested in revisiting that announcement with the information we have today, in particular the recent Microsoft deals and FUD around those. Well, dear lazy web, you know what I mean by I would be interested in… 🙂

The Open Invention Network site has interesting links about their licensing, the patents they own, and other details.

 
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, GNU/Linux

A few notes about Dell and Ubuntu support

Un commentaire

Well, it looks like it’s finally happened, you can now “Shop for Ubuntu” as Dell has put it.

Here are a few links that may help anyone interested get accurate and complete information:

In case you missed it in the list above, I have started a new thread where you can ask me questions directly or just start new discussions on related subjects. I’d rather not close comments here and handle questions there for everyone to see, let’s see what happens.

I hope this helps a bit and if you have other information I’ll be glad to edit my post.

 
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, GNU/Linux

Free those YouTube videos

16 commentaires

Visit http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/, read a bit (includes instructions for Windows users). Download the python script and also install ffmpeg2theora (See #2 at my Drupal Video Guide).

Then:

  1. Visit your favorite YouTube video
  2. Copy the URL to the clipboard
  3. In command line: 
    magicfab@suzy:~$ python youtube-dl.py http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcuF7S3r6gM
Retrieving video webpage... done.
Extracting video URL parameters... done.
Video data found at http://lax-v11.lax.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=PcuF7S3r6gM
Retrieving video data... 1897k of 1897k done.
Video data saved to PcuF7S3r6gM.flv
magicfab@suzy:~$
  4. Convert it (careful, those are TWO dashes before the optimize option): 
    magicfab@suzy:~$ ffmpeg2theora PcuF7S3r6gM.flv ––optimize
Input #0, flv, from 'PcuF7S3r6gM.flv':
  Duration: 00:00:47.3, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono
  Stream #0.1: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320x262, 25.00 fps(r)
  Resize: 320x262
      0:00:47.33 audio: 36kbps video: 305kbps
magicfab@suzy:~$
  5. An .ogg corresponding file will be created in your current directory.
  6. Profit ?

update: youtube-dl has been packaged since Edgy. Install it using the standard Synaptic package manager or through apt-get in command line, by searching for the youtube-dl package.

usage: youtube-dl [options] video_url
 
Ubuntu, GNU/Linux

VMWare server pour Ubuntu 7.04 disponible dans le d

14 commentaires

Depuis ce matin VMWare a rendu disponible VMWare server dans le dépôt « Commercial » de Canonical. Merci à mon collègue Étienne Goyer qui a fait la révision des packages pour le tuyau, malgré que nous travaillons à 2 mètres de distance je n’en savais rien. VMware propose des produits de virtualisation qui… bof, je vous suggère d’aller voir l’entrée Wikipedia de VMWare pour en savoir plus.

En chercheant sur ubuntu-fr.org je suis tombé sur cet exemple d’utilisation de VMWare server, j’ai donc mise à jour l’information sur l’installation qui s’y trouvait. En gros:

  1. Allez chercher un numéro de série d’essai en vous enregistreant sur le site de VMWare
  2. Ajoutez le dépôt « commercial » à vos dépôt Ubuntu – consultez les informations sur les dépôts pour les détails. Cherchez le package « vmware-server »:

  3. Installez le package – n’oubliez pas d’avoir le numéro de série d’essai en main. Lisez attentivement la licence, il s’agît d’un logiciel non-libre dont les conditions d’utilisations sont importantes à connaître:

  4. Démarrer la console d’accès en allant à l’option Applications > System Tools > VMWare Server Console dans les menus:

  5. Amusez-vous 🙂

En option, téléchargez une des images « appliance » de machines virtuelles existantes.