OggCamp 2011 attracted 200-300 people, and the FSFE booth was successfully run by myself and Chris Woolfrey. We talked to approximately 60 people, handed out approximately 120 leaflets, received one donation, and sold five t-shirts. FSFE was generally well received and I felt that the booth was a great success.… Read the rest
UK PDF Readers Sprint
On Saturday 13th August Free Software activists came to FSFE’s PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester and found 59 previously unreported adverts for proprietary PDF readers, all of them on UK Council websites. Printing and signing of letters to the institutions began, and nearly half of them were prepared before the end of the day.… Read the rest
Canon GNU/Linux printer support: progress?
This weekend is the UK PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester, and part of the day will be spent sending letters to public institutions requesting that they remove adverts for non-Free PDF software. In anticipation of this task I purchased a printer this week, a Canon IP4850, expensive at around 65 EUR, but I was reassured by the cheap price of ink.… Read the rest
Free Software Computer Aided Design (CAD): a summary
Computer Aided Design software is critically important to a variety of industries and professions. It’s also notorious for being poorly catered for by Free Software applications. Here’s a brief summary of the current situation.
The .DWG issue
The standard
DWG (“drawing”) is currently the industry standard file format for CAD: it is also a proprietary file format.… Read the rest
USB Wifi for the SheevaPlug freedombox
After a few hours searching for a USB wifi adapter to purchase for my Debian Squeeze based eSATA SheevaPlug last weekend, I settled on one from Amazon.
Despite the availability of numerous adapters claiming to be compatible with various versions of GNU/Linux (or ‘Ubuntu x.xx… Read the rest