Planet FSFE

Mac OSX 10.5.4 and SmartCard readers

PC/SC implementation in 10.5.4 is quite buggy. I wasn't able to use the fsfe smartcard with a SCR 531 Usb reader. Installing this update linked here fixed the problem.

Now the card works as expected with macgnupg.

Göteborg Fellowship meeting 2008-08-15

Eight people were present at the meeting, which took place in Slottskogen and lasted for about three hours. The weather was nice enough to have a simple barbequeue.

Among the many discussion topics were:

- Usage of free software in non-core parts of businesses.

- BSA's crusade on unlicenced proprietary software as a golden opportunity for free software.

- How to increase visibility and knowledge of free software for non-technical users.

Some time was also devoted to talking about FSCONS, both in terms of practical information and of long term strategies. Two of the fellows present at the meeting volunteered to help out at the conference.

Akademy 2008 rocked

I was at Akademy 2008 to speak on a panel and (less formally) to wander around annoying hackers with silly questions.

I spent a good deal of time harassing Armijn in the USB plugfest room by picking up random sticks and asking "what's this one for?" The answers ranged from Bluetooth to InfraRed to DVB, and appearently quite a few of these devices work on GNU/Linux. However, I am heartbroken to report the DVB sticks refused to play ball. Sighs, so much for watching the Olympics on my laptop.

Speaking of devices, Nokia gave away 100 internet tablets to KDE developers. I saw groups playing with them in every corner of the conference. My attention was caught by a report that some enterprising chap had got Plasma working on the 400mz CPU. I tracked him down in the Plasma BoF room and drilled him regarding stability and speed; it's looking good.

I want to see more 100% Free Software devices in the mobile space. OpenMoko has blazed a trail in proving the viability of the Four Freedoms in this sphere; now it's time to get onto 500 million devices. I believe KDE 4 may provide one platform to accomplish this.

Talking about vision, on our panel Aaron spoke eloquently about the future of KDE. I was impressed by the direction of the KDE e.V. board and by the sheer scale of the sustained innovation happening across the project. Knut from Trolltech also said some pretty deep things about social innovation and the place of Free Software. Great chap, and he's mad about creme brulee. Plus points in every direction.

Towards the end of my adventure, Adriaan drank strange Dutch gin out of paper cups with me. We discovered that the stuff melts the binding of the cups, leading to a slightly woody and vaguely gummy experience. Excellent. Thanks to Armijn from providing the spirit for testing and to Mr KDE Solaris (tm) for being a drinking ~~victim~~ buddy.

What a conference.

Erstes Fellowship-Treffen in Stuttgart!

Am Freitag, den 22. August wird um 19:00 Uhr das erste Fellowship Treffen in Stuttgart stattfinden. Veranstaltungsort wird das Unithekle/Unitop an der Universität Stuttgart (Campus Vaihingen) sein. Einen genauen Lageplan findet ihr hier.

Das Fellowship-Treffen soll uns die Möglichkeit geben sich in gemütlicher Runde kennen zu lernen. Bei Interesse kann man sich dann überlegen, wie ein regelmäßiges Fellowship-Treffen aussehen könnte.

Eingeladen sind neben unseren Fellows alle, die sich für Freie Software und die Arbeit der FSFE interessieren.

Ich freue mich darauf möglichst viele Fellows und Freie Software Interessierte aus der Region nächsten Freitag kennen zu lernen!

Freedom in a near Future

Today the computing experience is changing. A new class of focused devices is emerging; rather than general purpose computers these are appliances.

Consoles are assigned to play video games.
Subnotebooks/Netbooks: small low power devices for basic communication task (see Asus EeePC)
Smartphones that can play music and movies

These appliances can be linked together other though wireless to share digital information.

We can see the example of this with Apple's “digital hub [for a digital life]” appliance (see Iphone, Ipod, MacBook Air, Imac...)

If we have a look at the PC sector we can observe more specific solutions for what people need.

These multiple devices are expected to work out of the box and to communicate together. In the context of such devices we need to ask how and why does freedom remain important.

Users :

Most users of appliances don't think about the software and hardware in their devices. They “just want to read their emails everywhere”. A typical user won't use software for philosophical reason but will just want to have a simple, useful and fast solution for a lifestyle requirement.

Vendors:

The situation for vendors is different. The licensing of free software does offer some reduced initial adoption costs, but their benefits also come from the freedoms offered: they can use cutting edge technologies without depending on other parties for permission or access.

They have the possibility to get help from many free software developers.

As free software is very versatile, it can easily be adapted to different hardware. The “wintel” era, where power-consumptive applications were written to work on more and more powerful machines, is now ended. Now the hardware isn't more and more powerful, but more and more specialized.

Free Software also offers benefit for a market where consumers possess solutions from different brands, because of the interoperability between the OSes and between the hardware. Interoperability makes possible for different devices to communicate together.

This interoperability is missing with proprietary software, which work in an almost closed environment.

Products of Free Software companies must get more than interoperability, they have to get substitutability . That means that companies must give consumers the confidence to stay as well as the freedom to leave their products. IT-companies will must offer import but also export tools and guarantee that no customers' data will be lost. It will be possible because we will be in an “open standard world”.

Free Software as a paradigm offers a better overall market solution.

How must Free Software adapt to the new situation ?

This changing IT-market clearly is an opportunity for Free Software. It allows collaboration, interoperability and flexibility through freedom.

Proofs : free software's versatility allows them to get easily installed on almost every kind of machine, from smartphones to servers via consoles and netbooks. That means that the consumers transparently will use the same programs and keep their habits wherever they are.

Free Software do need more marketing to inform the public of its value. Free Software projects have also to convince computer constructors to trust them and work hand in hand with them.

The competition between IT-companies will be situated there. In that market, the most competitive company will be the most innovative and the closest to the needs of the users.

Hello World !

...simply a part of our daily "normal" conversations on Jabber with the other team-members

La Braderie de Lille

The so-called "Braderie de Lille" (Lille's flea market) is a big outside-event which has taken place every year since the 12th century during the first week-end of September (this year 6th-7th September). chtinux, a Linux User Group which is installed around there, has proposed to the Fellowship to take part in the Braderie. The FSFE, and especially the Fellowship's stand, will get much visibility, since millions of people of numerous nations take a walk on Lille's streets. Come to discover this beautiful city and to eat some Braderie's culinary specialities like clams ! And above all, come in order to support the Fellowship ! Fellowship's stand will be situated on Place du Vieux Marché aux chevaux. If you want more information about this event please send an email to Benjamin: morant@fsfeurope.org

Japanese PDFs part 2: XeTeX

(Last month's article: Using LaTeX to make PDF documents with Japanese characters)

I've found a better TeX tool for making Japanese PDFs: XeTeX. Below are first the technical advantages, and then an analysis of community and sustainability.

XeTeX is a version of Tex that has been modified to use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding internally. It is also configured to work with modern font tools such as FreeType and fontconfig. With XeTeX, the minimal example from my last article becomes:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{Sazanami Mincho}

\begin{document}

\section{What I learned today}
I can write this 私はキランです in Japanese.

\end{document}

This is converted to a PDF with the command line tool xelatex. XeTeX has been part of the very common TeX Live bundle since TeX-Live-2007. So if LaTeX is available for your GNU/Linux distro, I'm sure TeX Live is too, and thus XeTeX. (TeX-Live-2008 will be released soon.)

(For a more complex example, see jlesson002.tex, and the output jlesson002.pdf.)

One improvement in this example is that I wrote the file in the very common UTF-8 encoding. This means I don't have to tell my applications to use the JP-EUC format that LaTeX+CJK would have required, and it means I'm less likely to have compatibility problems with other text processing tools. (This article was actually supposed to be about converting Japanese TeX to plain text, but an application's lack of support for JP-EUC encoding led me to research UTF-8 versions of TeX.)

A second improvement is that I could use the standard "article" document class. When using CJK, you can only use document classes that have been specifically written to work with CJK. There is a CJK-enabled equivalent for "article", called "scrartcl", but for some others classes, there's no equivalent that works with CJK.

Another improvement is that the font is specified in a much more readable way ("Sazanami Mincho"), and if I want to use another font, I can use this fontconfig command at the shell to find all fonts on my system that include Japanese characters:

fc-list :lang=ja

On my system, this finds six fonts. The differences between Gothic and Mincho are roughly equivalent to sans-serif and serif fonts in Western scripts.

It's hard to find a list of free Japanese fonts. It seems that many Japanese font developers have invented their own licences. Two free fonts available are Kochi and Sazanami, of which some say the latter is slightly better, but I can't see any difference. There is also a font called "UmePlus", which seems to be free, but is missing from some distributions (such as Debian) because the licence is somewhat unclear (but it looks fine to me). When I say "free", I mean it in the free software sense, e.g. that everyone can use, copy, modify, and redistribute (modified or unmodified).

Note: I set the default font to a Japanese font because my documents are wholly/mostly in Japanese. If you just wanted to add some Japanese to a mostly English document, XeTeX is still a good option, but I won't go into how to do that (it involves defining a Japanese environment and beginning the environment, entering Japanese, then ending the environment).

A last, minor technical improvement is output file size. For a one-line test file, pdflatex made a file of 19.6kb, and xelatex made one of only 7.5kb. For a more complex 1-page file (jlesson002.tex), the XeTeX output was 15.1kb, and when I converted it to LaTeX-CJK, pdflatex made a file of 65.2kb.

What about community support and sustainability?

Is it safe to move from the old reliable LaTeX+CJK package to this new XeTeX thing? Will XeTeX still have a developer community in the future? Will developers of other TeX tools take care to ensure their packages work with XeTex? What do Japanese TeX users use?

My searches suggest that Japanese TeX users are using a mix of tools. Some use pTeX, which is a version of TeX modified specifically to work with Japanese. Others use LaTeX+CJK. But there seems to be consensus that these are tools of the past and that Unicode is the future. So change is coming.

Japanese top Tex expert Haruhiko Okumura said in April 2007: "Since pTeX for Unicode is now being developed and XeTeX is acquiring pTeX-like versatility, next year I'll be using either the new pTeX or XeTeX."

The pTeX for Unicode project he's referring to is uptex. It exists, but seems to be still in alpha (early testing) stage. It isn't available in the Debian archives, but someone has made Debian uptex packages. (I haven't tested them.)

If Mr. Okumura has now adopted upTeX or XeTeX, I bet he chose XeTeX.

Next, I got really scientific. I put a few combinations of words into search engines, each time including "2008", a Japanese word, and either "uptex" or "xetex". Each time, XeTeX won by miles. So I guess Japanese people are not currently using uptex. I think XeTeX is winning the battle for Unicode TeX in Japan.

XeTeX being accepted into the TeX Live bundle is also a strong endorsement that XeTeX's future is safe, and the mainainer of LaTeX-CJK is discussing if it and XeTeX can be merged.

The only bad sign I saw about XeTeX is that the maintainer has recently resigned his job, but, he says this shouldn't affect his ability to maintain XeTeX.

Ok, so that's this month's TeX wisdom from a newbie :-) Hopefully next month's article will be about generating plain text files from the same Japanese TeX source files used for generating PDFs. Final note: I'm pretty sure all these tips work for Chinese, Korean, and other foreign characters, but I haven't tried that yet.

For more info and links about computers, free software, and Japanese, see my Learning Japanese page.

UPDATE: I just found Dave Crossland's summary of the recent 4-day TeX Users Group conference: day 1 day 2, day 3, and day 4. There are also videos of the event

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Woo yay!

My membership has been activated! I was looking forward to this. So now, its done. I've ordered a shiny tiny cardreader to access the card, too.
Current activities around the FSF involve:

GSOC'08-Project Filesystem Virtualization for Pythons Standard Library
Several not yet released OSS-Projects yeah, i know, release early and often
Hardcore evangelism ;)
Working for a cool FSFE-friendly employer

Oh, and i'll probably be visiting the FrOScon'08 next week. Drop me a note, if you intend to go there, too. Maybe we could drink a beer together :)

Links: translation, BSOD, Orwell, releases

The Chinese Translation Server Error shop
Microsoft Windows crashes with BSOD during Olympic opening ceremony
George Orwell's 1938 diaries being serialised as a blog
July's GNU releases, by Henrik Sandklef

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

New GNU releases July 2008

This is a compilation of the GNU software releases as announced during July 2008 on the mailing list:
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

GNU IceCat 3.0.1-g1 / 2008-07-27
GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Zile 2.2.60 / 2008-07-27
GNU Zile, which is a lightweight Emacs clone.
http://www.gnu.org/software/
zile/

GNU IceCat 3-g1 / 2008-07-23
GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

GNU Source Installer 2.5 / 2008-07-21
GNU Source Installer is an effort to leverage the GNU installation policies to offer easier installation from source code and easy tracking, safe removal and upgrade of installed source packages.
http://www.gnu.org/software/sourceinstall/sourceinstall.html

GNU Source-highlight 2.10 / 2008-07-17
This program, given a source file, produces a document with syntax highlighting.
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite

Aeneas 1.2 / 2008-07-15
Aeneas is a Monte Carlo simulator which is able to simulate particles on 3D tetrahedra meshes.
http://www.gnu.org/software/aeneas/

Archimedes 0.8.0 / 2008-07-15
Archimedes is a 2D semiconductor devices simulator based on MC and hydrodynamical methods/models.
http://www.gnu.org/software/archimedes

GNU Sovix / 2008-07-03
Sovix is the PHP-based, extensible, customizable, semantic website revision system.
http://www.gnu.org/software/sovix/

GNU Mifluz 0.24.0 / 2008-07-07
Mifluz provides a C++ library to build and query a full text inverted index
http://www.gnu.org/software/miflu
z/

GNU Cgicc 3.2.7 / 2008-07-07
GNU cgicc is an ANSI C++ compliant class library that greatly simplifies the creation of CGI applications for the World Wide Web.
http://www.gnu.org/software/cgicc/

glpk 4.29 / 2007-08-28
GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) is intended for solving large-scale linear programming (LP), mixed integer linear programming (MIP), and other related problems.
http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html

GNUsound 0.7.5 / 2008-07-06
GNUsound is a multitrack sound editor for GNOME
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnusound/

GNU gv 3.6.5 / 2008-07-05
GNU gv allows to view and navigate through PostScript and PDF documents on an X display by providing a graphical user interface for the Ghostscript interpreter.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gv/

Guile-Gnome-Platform 2.16.1 / 2008-07-03
Guile-gnome-platform is a binding between Guile Scheme and the Gnome stack of libraries.
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile-gnome/

GNU CLISP 2.46 / 2008-07-02
ANSI Common Lisp is a high-level, general-purpose programming language.
http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/

Libidn 1.9 / 2008-07-01
Libidn is a fully documented implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, used for internationalized domain names.
http://josefsson.org/libidn/

GNU SASL 0.2.27 / 2008-07-01
GNU SASL is a modern C library that implement the standard network security protocol Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL).
http://josefsson.org/gsasl/

If you have any comments or questions regarding this compilation, contact Henrik Sandklef

"Tragedy of the anticommons" reading

Something useful from Slashdot for a change:

The New Yorker has a short article on how restrictive handling of patents (in this case) stifles innovation and social welfare. If you like things more scientific, there's an "experimental investigation of anticommons dilemma", showing what happens when everyone insists on monopolising their little idea.

And there's also a new book down this road that looks interesting: Michael Heller, "The Gridlock Economy".

FSFE meeting tonight in Brussels, Thurs 7th

Sorry for this short notice, but since I've just been added to the planet.grep.be blog aggregation, I decided it's worth a quick mention.

Tonight's meeting is a small, informal one at 20:00 in Café Walvis, 209 Antoine Dansaertstraat. We hope to soon launch larger meetings which will be held on Sunday afternoons every 3 months. Tonight's meetings will help set the details for that.

There's not much of a fixed agenda. We'll mostly chat about whatever the people there are interested in.

We'll also being trying the quarterly model in Ireland, starting with a joint-meeting in September on Software Freedom Day (organised by Ubuntu Ireland). Monthly pub meetings have already been working in Dublin since late 2003 (organised by IFSO on the 3rd Tuesday of each month).

Anyone interested in free software is welcome, as always. It's not limited to Fellows of FSFE.

If anyone needs details on where we are, you can email me (ciaran at fsfe dot org) or phone me on +32 477 36 44 19

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

enigmail, openpgp card and ubuntu hardy

After upgrading to hardy Thunderbird/Enigmail stopped working together with my FSFE Card.

It took me quite a while, to notice that I was missing the pinentry program.

  apt-get install pinentry-gtk2

solved the problem.

EDIT:

gnupg-agent seems also to be necessary, so

  apt-get install gnupgp-agent

and enable "use-agent" in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf and restart your X-session.

Links: FaceBook, Snooping, Consultation, Theora, Treacherous

Logged in or out, Facebook is watching you. (discussed on Slashdot)
A campaign site against "Deep Packet Inspection" - snooping by your ISP.
An EC consultation about European Interoperability Framework (EIF) - they've previously discussed removing their support for open standards and free software, so we should comment on the importance of these things.
Firefox 3.1 looks likely to include Ogg Theora support, which pleases WikiMedia since they use it as their default format.
MS Vista Sp1 won't install if you're dual-booting another operating system - it seems Microsoft has decided to use its monopoly to bully people away from trying alternatives.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

PhoneME for Jalimo - continued

We all love it: Screenshot time!

This is PhoneME running on an N800 with the Chinook/Maemo 4.0/OS 2008 distribution. Since the differences between Maemo's Chinook and Diablo distribution releases are minimal you should be able to use the same packages on both. More on that later.

And here we have the same app (= jalimo-swt-example) running on OpenMoko's Freerunner.

Needless to say that startup and runtime performance of PhoneME simply rock: The small SWT-based UI appears within 4 to 5 seconds on both devices.

If you have any of the two devices (or an N810) you can now install the JVM through Jalimo's repositories. Get them while they are hot. ;-)

PhoneME Advanced Foundation (with JIT) at Jalimo

This was a big pile of work but now it is a nice achievement for Jalimo: The most complicated issues have been sorted out and we can now build Sun's PhoneME Advanced (Foundation profile) with the JIT compiler enabled for all our little ARM devices (And not only we can do this but everyone because the recipes are in the repository).

The first device for which I could build the runtime was the BeagleBoard. You can see the full log of the first bits of CVM-goodness on that device here. What is important to note is that the JIT compiler is enabled:

CVM_JIT=true

When compiling the source with the JIT the build gets a bit more complicated: Some Java programs will be compiled and run on certain sources. What is nice that these helper programs actually run on a GNU Classpath-powered VM. See, this code is still does usefull things for us. :-)

Buglabs recently did a comparison of Cacao, JamVM and PhoneME Advanced (interpreted only) on ARM systems. Surprisingly (or not :-) ) JamVM does a very good job!

While we are at it: JamVM seems to be the only (free!) Java virtual machine that can run on the AVR32 architecture. The port is not yet included in the upstream repository but is nevertheless quite interesting: The guys doing the port are making use of the Java hardware acceleration (whose specification can be obtained freely).

Finally the other day I wrote down everything about the Java support in OpenEmbedded to the shiny new OE wiki. I hope that with this information people will quickly be able to customize their OE-based distribution. Furthermore the pages describe the quite complex bootstrap process and each of the packages that belongs to it.

Next stop: OpenJDK ;-)

A word of warning...

...which probably comes too late for most or all of you. This is pretty much how it happened to me.

Summary of copyright goings-on

Over at netzpolitik.org, Markus Beckedahl has done something very helpful: He has summarised current activity around copyright law in Europe and Germany, in a single blog post (in German, as usual).

Even though I obviously follow these topics, I find it hard to keep up to speed with everything that's going on. So thanks Markus!

How about making this a monthly activity? ;-)

fellowship meeting, Zürich 18/07/08