Older blog entries for mattl (starting at number 690)

Other uses for your USB member card

There was a discussion on our member forums that suggested you couldn't change the structure of your USB member card. Here's a guide on doing just that.

First, insert your USB member card into your computer — for this demonstration, I'm using Trisquel GNU/Linux (which comes on the most recent cards) but any of the distributions on our list will work.

Once inserted, you should see two new drives pop up or appear on the desktop.

One will be called 'casper-rw' and one will be called 'liveusb'. In this example, we're going to wipe the card and use it as a typical USB memory stick, where it can be loaded with another distribution or used to store files.

To start the process of wiping the card, we first need to erase both of these virtual drives, or partitions from the USB drive. For this, I'm going to use a graphical partition editor called gparted.

Because gparted should be run by an administrator, I'm going to run it with the gksudo program, which will prompt me for my computer's administrator password and then run the program as the adminstrator user.

Once loaded, gparted will show you all of the partitions on the USB drive. Be sure to select the correct drive from the list at the top-right of the screen. In general, the USB stick will be approximately 900, 1800 or 3700MB in size, depending on when you joined as an associate member.

Next, you'll need to 'unmount' these drives from your computer, so we can remove them — this stops other programs from writing files to the drive while we erase it.

To do this, simply right-click on both the 'casper-rw' and 'liveusb' partitions, and choose 'Unmount' from the menu.

Once unmounted, the partitions can be deleted.

Once they have both been deleted you will see a large area of unused space on the drive. You can click the 'New' button to make a new partition in this space.

Choose the kind of file system you want carefully: if the drive needs to be used on Windows and Mac computers, choose FAT32. If you are only using it on GNU/Linux, then ext2, ext3 and ext4 are all good choices.

Finally, click the apply button to make all the changes to your card. When completed, your card is ready for you to install new distributions onto it, or use it to copy files.

Send us your feedback on this article to campaigns@fsf.org.

Syndicated 2012-04-09 18:37:31 from Free Software Foundation

GNU spotlight with Karl Berry (March 2012)

This month we welcome Michael Talbot-Wilson as the new maintainer of GNU Sather, and Imed Ben Heni as a new co-maintainer of GNU kopi. We also welcome Alexandre Oliva as the maintainer of linux-libre, the longstanding basis for the kernel component of most entirely-free GNU/Linux systems http://www.gnu.org/distros/, newly dubbed as an official GNU package.

We also welcome Jose Luis Garcia Pallero as the new maintainer of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). Jose would very much appreciate additional volunteers! Please contact him through the usual GSL lists.

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list. Nearly all GNU software is available from ftp.gnu.org, or preferably one of its mirrors. You can use the URL ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

Several GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. There's also a general page on how to help GNU, and information on how to submit new packages to GNU.

As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:47:27 from Free Software Foundation

Free Software Supporter, Issue 48, March 2012

Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.

Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter.

Multilingual? Send translations of the Supporter to campaigns@fsf.org.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • LibrePlanet 2012
  • 2011 Free Software Awards announced
  • Happy Document Freedom Day!
  • Happy Birthday GCC!
  • Free Technology Academy 2012 courses
  • Reports from the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forum
  • A passage to India
  • Restricted Boot Webcomic Contest
  • Brazilian patent office software patent consultation
  • "The problem with software patents? They don't scale..."
  • GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
  • Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
  • Take action with the FSF!

LibrePlanet 2012

Thanks to everyone who came to our LibrePlanet 2012 conference. We'll be publishing recordings, slides and further information in the coming weeks.

2011 Free Software Awards announced

Each year at LibrePlanet, two awards are given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software to an individual who has made a great contribution to free software, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society.

This year, Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to free software in the past 20 years.

GNU Health, a free software project that works with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged, won the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

Happy Document Freedom Day!

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation that is celebrated on the last Wednesday of every March since 2008, and which is organized and funded by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

We proposed several ways to celebrate that day!

Happy Birthday GCC!

On March 22th, the GCC development team celebrated the 25th anniversary of the GNU Compiler Collection which was first released in 1987.

Happy birthday, GCC!

Free Technology Academy 2012 courses

The Free Technology Academy is a global community and network of academic and social organizations active in the fields of Free Software, Standards and Hardware.

The FTA expects to run two course modules for users and systems administrators who want to get started with GNU/Linux systems. A discount on Free Technology Academy courses is available for FSF associate members.

Reports from the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forum

FSF's compliance engineer Brett Smith went to Melbourne, Australia to advocate for software freedom at the latest round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

He came back with good news: technology industry groups are now more vocally expressing their concerns and explicitly positioning themselves opposite big copyright companies.

A passage to India

During January and February, Richard Stallman was in India -- giving speeches about free software in Kochi, Angamaly, Kanpur, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Kolkata, Guwahati, Chennai, Tiruchengode, Coimbatore, and Hyderabad.

Thanks to all the people who attended and sent us some great photos from the events, we've published a gallery of images:

And if you went to any of these events, please visit the appropriate form linked from the gallery and give us your contact information, so we can tell you the next time RMS is coming to town.

Restricted Boot Webcomic Comic

At the end of February asked you make a webcomic to help us raise awareness and put pressure on Microsoft and computer makers about the Restricted Boot issue. We've received a bunch of submissions and we'll be judging them in the next week or two...

Brazilian patent office software patent consultation

Brazil's patent office has launched a consultation about granting software patents. The patent office's page about the consultation is here:

Our End Software Patents campaign has more information in English.

"The problem with software patents? They don't scale"

Timothy B. Lee and Christina Mulligan have published a good article at Ars Technica:

LibrePlanet featured resource: Document Freedom Day 2012

Every month on LibrePlanet, we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use your help.

For this month, we are highlighting Document Freedom Day 2012, which provides information about activism supporting OpenDocument and other free formats. You are invited to adopt, spread and improve this important resource.

Do you have a suggestion for next month's featured resource? Let us know at campaigns@fsf.org.

GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

New releases from various GNU projects this month:

  • bzr-2.5.0
  • ccrtp-2.0.3
  • classpath-0.99
  • coreutils-8.16
  • dico-2.2
  • freeipmi-1.1.3
  • gcc-4.4.7
  • gcc-4.6.3
  • gcc-4.7.0
  • gcide-0.51
  • glibc-2.15
  • global-6.2.2
  • gnuchess-6.0.2
  • gnuhealth-1.4.4
  • gnupg-2.0.19
  • gnushogi-1.4.0
  • gnutls-2.12.18
  • gnutls-3.0.17
  • grep-2.11
  • help2man-1.40.7
  • libtasn1-2.12
  • linux-libre-3.3-gnu
  • parallel-20120322
  • parted-3.1
  • shishi-1.0.1
  • xboard-4.6.0
  • zile-2.4.7

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month we welcome Michael Talbot-Wilson as the new maintainer of GNU Sather, and Imed Ben Heni as a new co-maintainer of GNU kopi. We also welcome Alexandre Oliva as the maintainer of linux-libre, the longstanding basis for the kernel component of most entirely-free GNU/Linux systems http://www.gnu.org/distros/, newly dubbed as an official GNU package.

We also welcome Jose Luis Garcia Pallero as the new maintainer of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). Jose would very much appreciate additional volunteers! Please contact him through the usual GSL lists.

Several other GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to GNU, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events

Take action with the FSF

Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at http://www.fsf.org/join. If you're already a member, you can help refer new members (and earn some rewards) by adding a line with your member number to your email signature like:

I'm an FSF member -- Help us support software freedom! http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=2442

The FSF is also always looking for volunteers (http://www.fsf.org/volunteer). From rabble-rousing to hacking, from issue coordination to envelope stuffing -- there's something here for everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaign section (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents, DRM, free software adoption, OpenDocument, RIAA and more.

#

The Free Software Supporter is edited by FSF volunteer Osama Khalid.

Copyright © 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:40:05 from Free Software Foundation

Free Software Supporter

The Free Software Supporter will keep you up-to-date each month on news from the free software movement. It is edited by FSF volunteer and member Osama Khalid. If you have suggestions for news items that should be included, please send them to us at campaigns@fsf.org.

Back issues

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:38:05 from Free Software Foundation

28 Mar 2012 (updated 2 Apr 2012 at 17:09 UTC) »

2011 Free Software Awards announced

The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Yukihiro Matsumoto and Richard Stallman.

This year, it was given to Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), the creator of the Ruby programming language. Matz has worked on GNU, Ruby, and other free software for over 20 years. He accepted the award in person and spoke at the conference on his early experiences with free software, especially the influence of GNU Emacs on Ruby.

Yukihiro Matsumoto joins a distinguished list of previous winners:

  • 2010 Rob Savoye
  • 2009 John Gilmore
  • 2008 Wietse Venema
  • 2007 Harald Welte
  • 2006 Ted Ts'o
  • 2005 Andrew Tridgell
  • 2004 Theo de Raadt
  • 2003 Alan Cox
  • 2002 Lawrence Lessig
  • 2001 Guido van Rossum
  • 2000 Brian Paul
  • 1999 Miguel de Icaza
  • 1998 Larry Wall

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity.

Luis Falcon and Richard Stallman.

This year, the award went to GNU Health, a free software project that works with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged. GNU Health has been adopted as the Health and Hospital Information System of choice by the United Nations University. Luis Falcon, the president of GNU Solidario (the organization behind GNU Health), was present to accept the award on behalf of the project.

GNU Health joins an impressive list of previous winners:

  • 2010 Tor
  • 2009 Internet Archive
  • 2008 Creative Commons
  • 2007 Groklaw
  • 2006 Sahana Disaster Management System
  • 2005 Wikipedia

This year's award committee was: Suresh Ramasubramanian, Peter H. Salus, Wietse Venema, Raj Mathur, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Oberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden, Harald Welte, and Rob Savoye.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Media Contacts

John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org

High resolution press photos

Photos under CC BY 3.0 Attribution by Jason X Self.

#

Syndicated 2012-03-28 22:23:50 (Updated 2012-04-02 17:09:11) from Free Software Foundation

Happy Document Freedom Day!

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation that is celebrated on the last Wednesday of every March since 2008, and which is organized and funded by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

If you'd like to join us and others around in the world in celebrating DFD we have a few suggestions for you:

Promote the OpenDocument format (ODF)
Learn about OpenDocument format (ODF) and why we must reject proprietary formats.
Display a Document Freedom Day banner
Consider putting a banner (or other artwork) on your blog or website for a few days.
Reject email attachments in proprietary formats!
If somebody emails you a proprietary formatted document (such as files created by Microsoft Office or Apple iWork), politely reject these files and request that the person send you a file in a free document format.
Install LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org and free software extensions
If you have already installed LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org on your own computer, consider helping a family, friend, or co-worker to install it on their own computer. Then, once you have done that, check out the LibrePlanet group that is maintaining a list of Free Extensions for OpenOffice.org & LibreOffice!
ODF 1.2 is a major milestone
Lastly, congratulations are in order to the Open Document Format Technical Committee for their achievement of having ODF Version 1.2 accepted as an OASIS standard on March 17th of this year. The latest version of ODF is a major milestone which not only incorporates suggested improvements from the public, but also adds important features such as spreadsheet formula specification (based on OpenFormula), RDF-based metadata, and several accessibility-related improvements.

Syndicated 2012-03-28 19:39:26 from Free Software Foundation

Happy Birthday GCC!

GCC was first released in 1987, and was one of the first components identified by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman in his September 27th, 1983, message to the net.unix-wizards group on Usenet.

To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

Today we celebrate twenty-five years of GNU and the GNU Compiler Collection with an announcement by the GCC release managers:

When Richard Stallman announced the first public release of GCC in 1987, few could have imagined the broad impact that it has had. It has prototyped many language features that later were adopted as part of their respective standards -- everything from "long long" type to transactional memory. It deployed an architecture-neutral automatic vectorization facility, OpenMP, and Polyhedral loop nest optimization. It has provided the toolchain infrastructure for the GNU/Linux ecosystem used everywhere from Google and Facebook to financial markets and stock exchanges. We salute and thank the hundreds of developers who have contributed over the years to make GCC one of the most long-lasting and successful free software projects in the history of this industry.

As a special present we have prepared the release of GCC 4.7.0 which continues the series of free software high-quality industry-standard compilers.

GCC 4.7.0 is a major release, containing substantial new functionality not available in GCC 4.6.x or previous GCC releases.

GCC 4.7 features support for software transactional memory on selected architectures. The C++ compiler supports a bigger subset of the new ISO C++11 standard such as support for atomics and the C++11 memory model, non-static data member initializers, user-defined literals, alias-declarations, delegating constructors, explicit override and extended friend syntax. The C compiler adds support for more features from the new ISO C11 standard. GCC now supports version 3.1 of the OpenMP specification for C, C++ and Fortran.

The link-time optimization (LTO) framework has seen improvements with regards to scalability, stability and resource needs. Inlining and interprocedural constant propagation have been improved.

GCC 4.7 now supports various new GNU extensions to the DWARF debugging information format, like entry value and call site information, a typed DWARF stack and a more compact macro representation.

Extending the widest support for hardware architectures in the industry, GCC 4.7 gains support for Adapteva's Epiphany processor, National Semiconductor's CR16, and TI's C6X as well as Tilera's TILE-Gx and TILEPro families of processors. The x86 family support has been extended by the Intel Haswell and AMD Piledriver architectures. ARM has gained support for the Cortex-A7 family.

GCC 4.7 can be downloaded from ftp.gnu.org.

Syndicated 2012-03-22 15:59:19 from Free Software Foundation

Free Technology Academy 2012 courses

The Free Technology Academy expects to run two course modules for users and systems administrators who want to get started with GNU/Linux systems. A discount on Free Technology Academy courses is available for FSF associate members.

  • Basic GNU/Linux — this module covers the basics of the Free Software philosophy while teaching you how to use and modify GNU/Linux to suit your needs and how to find your way in this new world.
  • GNU/Linux — this module focuses on the administration of GNU/Linux systems. Participants will learn how to install, configure and optimise a GNU/Linux operating system and the most common services.

All FTA courses are completed online, and work with free software systems. Find out more on these courses and how to enroll.

Syndicated 2012-03-12 20:33:51 from Free Software Foundation

FSF associate membership

Join with over 3,000 active members in 48 countries, representing a diverse membership of computer users, artists, software engineers, hackers, students, and activists.

When you donate as an associate member, you are part of an informed society working together to make a better world: respectful of individual freedom, social solidarity, personal privacy, and democracy — built on free software.

The Free Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so your member donation is tax-deductible in the US.

“I've long been a supporter of the ideas of the FSF and the whole free software movement. Today, I wanted to make a tangible contribution to the FSF, as well as openly declaring my support for the key advocate and defender of software freedom.”

— Cathal McGinley, joined 2007, member #5886

Why donate as an associate member?

  • As a software developer, free software lets you build and improve on the work of others, as part of a social community — built on the principles of sharing.
  • As an artist, you can do things with free software that proprietary software does not allow. All free software allows you to use it for any purpose.
  • As a user, free software removes you from the power struggle of proprietary software, where you are able to help yourself and are not dependent on a single developer or company to help you.
  • As a student, you can study and modify the software you use, learning from and enhancing the tools that you use for education.

Syndicated 2012-03-06 16:52:09 from Free Software Foundation

Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom

Ways to help. See a complete list of free GNU/Linux distributions that could use your help. To learn more about what makes for a free GNU/Linux distribution, see our Guidelines for Free System Distributions. You can also help by working to move other popular distributions that don't currently meet the criteria toward being fully free.

Syndicated 2012-03-02 20:51:51 from Free Software Foundation

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