http://jlp.holodeck1.com/blog/
2005-12-26
Holidays
2005-12-18
LibJingle - interface to Google Talk opens up
When Google released their own instant messaging and internet telephony client, Google Talk, they promised that it will be open for all to connect with. The first step in this direction was using an open and free protocol for instant messaging, that is Jabber, or XMPP as the standard is called.
Now they finally released other parts of Google Talk, most importantly the telephony part of it. All components are collected in a library called libjingle and the code is released under a BSD-like licence. This means that open source and commercial software can use it freely.
What can I say. I can't wait until the telephony part gets its way into clients like Kopete and GAIM. It will also be interesting to see how Skype reacts on this. Oh, and thanks to TechCrunch for the news.
2005-12-09
Back from the dead
As you may have noticed, I haven't posted anything to my blog ever since August. This is over 3 months without any post! Some of regular readers of my blog have sent me an e-mail asking what is going on. A lot of people also wanted to know where is the next, third, part of my KDE 3.5 Previews. So I hope this entry will answer all your questions. I'll also try to tell you about important things that happened in my life during the long absence.
KDE 3.5 Previews: After publishing the second part I was ill for a couple of weeks and I was unable to work on the third part. After getting well again I had to study for my final maths exams a lot and I also wasn't in the mood for writing anything. In addition, KDE 3.5 release was approaching very fast and I had (and still have) a lot of translation work to do. Even more then for version of 3.4 as other Slovenian translators didn't have time and I was basically left alone to do the work. So I have to apologise to everyone waiting for more KDE 3.5 previews. If there is enough interest I can still try my best to write the third part. But no promises.
Laptop: Thanks to the people at Linux Users Group of Slovenia (LUGOS) I now have a new (and my first) notebook. It's a very nice HP Compaq nx6125 with AMD Turion 64 processor, 512 MiB of memory, 60 GiB hard drive and 15 inch 1024x768 LCD panel. It is already running Gentoo Linux and I have dedicated one partition for testing purposes. Currently this partition is occupied by a beta version of Pingo Linux 4.2 (a Slovenian Linux distribution). It's great to have a laptop like this. Now I will be able to translate more and it also proves extremely useful for university work and learning C++/Qt/KDE programming. I plan to write an article about running Linux on this laptop. When I have more time off course.
Blog comments: Some time ago I had to disable comments on this blog because of blog spam. It looks like that people here at Blogger.com have finally come to their senses and added an image test verification before anyone can post a comment. So I have enabled this test and re-enabled the comments. Now you can start commenting again and let's hope that spam doesn't come back any more.
Apartment: If you remember I was looking for a new apartment in Ljubljana back in July. I was lucky to find a very cheap place that is only about 5 minutes away from my faculty (if you walk). So I can sleep longer in the morning and I can go back to the apartment when we have free hours during lectures. Another bonus is that I don't have to buy monthly tickets for the city bus. The only thing I really miss here is the internet connection.
Health: During the time since my last post to the blog I also got one of my wisdom teeth pulled out. The operation itself was quite long but painless. But after anaesthetics stopped working it was very painful for a couple of days.
That's about it. I hope I don't die on you again like this and that I will be able to post to the blog at least once a week. In the meantime be sure to get Firefox 1.5 and KDE 3.5 that were released about a week ago. Take care and thanks to all of you for reading my blog.
2005-08-27
Telemach - Cheaper and much faster cable internet
I've been with my current cable internet service provider UPC Telemach for a long time and it has had its share of ups and downs. As of late the upload speed (256 kb/s) was getting too slow for me and I was seriously considering switching to ADSL which, in addition to faster packages, also had quite a bit lower prices.
But yesterday evening my friend Davorin told me a really great news. Starting with 1st September Telemach is going to lower their prices and speed up their new packages considerably. For example, we were paying about 37,56 per month for 1024 kb/s download and 256 kb/s upload speed. The new, much faster, 5120/768 package costs only a bit more, about 41,96 , and you also get 20 MiB of free web hosting space. This space doesn't matter so much to me as I have my own Linux powered server here. But much higher transfer rates, especiallyly upload, will sure come in handy. I only hope they properly set up reverse DNS lookup. They don't have it now and this prevents me to connect to some servers.
What can I say. We're staying with Telemach and upgrading our package to the fastest one. I wonder how ADSL competition will answer as now they have lower speeds and higher prices. But in any case this can be only good for development of broadband internet in Slovenia and good for the people.
2005-08-24
Google Talk based on Jabber
There were speculations for a long time that Google will release free instant messaging (IM) client of their own. It appears that rumors have become reality. They have just released a beta version of Google Talk. And what I find the best about it is that they smartly decided to use a free and open IM standard called XMPP, which is known to most of you as Jabber. This means that you will be free to use any Jabber client you like the most (for example Kopete, GAIM, Psi, Miranda IM and many more) with their service. And if you have GMail (or some other Google account) you can already do so. Check out these instructions. Moreover, you are also free to use any existing public Jabber server with Google Talk or even set up one yourself. The new client is also conveniently integrated with your GMail e-mail account. You can also actually talk with your buddies like you can do using the popular Skype. Google also promised to provide fully documented support for video conferencing in the future.
2005-08-12
JLP's KDE 3.5 Previews - Part 2
Introduction to part 2
It looks like the first part of my KDE 3.5 previews was extremely popular. Much more than I could ever anticipated. I even got Slashdotted. Anyway, here is the second part of the look into the KDE's near future. Enjoy the tour!
More about Konqueror
Let me continue with Konqueror. Search bar (comes with kdeaddons package) now has the possibility to select the desired search engine from a dropdown menu similar to the one in Firefox. To select which engines are available in the menu you simply put a check mark before its name in the Web Shortcuts settings dialog.
During the past two weeks a new del.icio.us bookmarks panel made into KDE 3.5. del.icio.us is a special online social bookmarks managing system and now you can do many of the tasks directly from within Konqueror. If you would like to use it, first make sure you have Navigation Panel open (enable it under Window menu or press F9). Then right click on an empty spot under existing tabs and select the new panel from Add New submenu.
File properties dialog got a new Preview tab, which I don't find as handy as the preview in the tooltip you get when you hold the mouse over some file.
KSysGuard
KSysGuard is a very nice and quite powerfull system monitoring utility. Process table used to take quite a long time to start up but now loads a lot faster (almost instantly). It also has a new search bar at the top so you can quickly filter out the desired processes. The Kill Process dialog now shows you the PIDs and names of the processes you are about to terminate.
Smooth Blend
While Plastik remains the default a new window decoration theme has been added to kdeartwork package. It's called Smooth Blend and what I like about it is that you can set the titlebar hight, frame width and button size. This is how it looks by default:
SuperKaramba
Another piece of software that got included into the official KDE package (kdeutils) is SuperKaramba. Those of you who like eyecandy probably know it already. It puts some really nice looking widgets (themes) on the desktop. Widgets can show various information like your local weather, system information and music you are currently playing.
I've discovered some problems while using it. It happens frequently that when you download a theme using the integrated Get New Stuff system the theme doesn't even get installed and doesn't show in the configuration window. Sometimes you also get several entries. One is named correctly and others are just names of the different languages in which the same theme you just downloaded is available in. This is mostly the problem of theme packaging. But normal users probably don't know this and will get confused and they will just think SuperKaramba is buggy and not polished enough. So it would be great if developers and theme authors could work together to solve this problem.
KCalc
KDE calculator has improved display showing current angle mode and base. I guess the statusbar where the same information is duplicated can now be removed or used for some other info. A few new constants were added and some corrected. Arbitrary precision using GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library is under development.
End of part 2
This concludes the second part of KDE 3.5 previews. More words and pictures will come again in about two weeks. Until then you can also take a look at Artwork for KDE 3.5 forum at KDE-Artists.org where people from all around the world contribute to the looks of the next KDE version. The main theme is going to be a wave. And don't forget about aKademy 2005 in Málaga, Spain.
Translations and derivative works
Hebrew by Uri Sharf
Slovenian by Jure Repinc
2005-08-02
[SLO] 1. Linux info dan v Sevnici
Ste naveličani Windowsov, virusov, črvov in dragih licenc? Potem je mogoče že srajni čas, da poskusite nekaj varnejšega, novega, drugačnega in povrhu vsega še brezplačnega. Pridružite se nam 12. avgusta 2005 na osnovni šoli Sava Kladnika v Sevnici, kjer boste lahko preizkusili operacijski sistem Linux in o njem izvedeli vse, kar vas bo zanimalo. Na vas bo čakalo 15 računalnikov in dva mentorja. Vstop je prost, za domov pa boste prejeli tudi brezplačno zgoščenko s prostim operacijskim sistemom Linux. Za dodatne informacije se obrnite na Martina Herwega.
2005-08-01
TUX Magazine - Issue 5 - August 2005
Issue 5 of TUX Magazine is out. In August 2005 edition you can read these topics:
- P2P
- Drawing Upon the Community
- An Evolution of Linux Distributions
- Letters
- Q&A with Mango Parfait
- Suited Up
- How to Use the OpenOffice.org Calc Spreadsheet, Part II
- TUX Explains
- Guarddog Firewall Configuration
- Introduction to Quanta
- Dancing with Windows
- A Matter of Choice (or Selections, That Is)
- Reviews
- Linspire Is Filled with Linspiration
- Gadget Guy: Snap Snap!
- digiKam
- Impress
- Planner
- XChat
The download is available from magazine's home page, using ED2K links or BitTorrent.
64-bit 7-Zip 2.25 beta for Windows XP x64
7-Zip is a very nice free and open source utility for working with compressed files (archives). I just got an e-mail from its authors that version 3.25 beta is now available and that it is also available as a 64-bit binary for Windows XP x64. So, if you have AMD Athlon 64 (or some other AMD64 compatible processor) and 64-bit Windows, you can download 64-bit 7-Zip from its home page.
2005-07-31
Photos from nature
I have finally convinced my sister to write on her blog. It has been almost a year now since her last post. And since my friend Boris started to publish his photos, I suggested the same to my sister. Under all the pressure she bulged and uploaded some of her photos of nature to Flickr. Check out her blog entry for links to the photos. I hope she continues to post on her blog and upload photos.
2005-07-29
2nd Red Hat Summer Camp in Bohinj
Let me remind you there is less then a month until the beginning of the 2nd international Linux training camp, which starts on 20th and ends on 27th August here in Bohinj, Slovenia. Last year's Red Hat Summer Camp was a huge success. For this year Red Hat and Housing prepared a program with 4 different tracks to choose from: Pingo Linux (for beginners and people new to Linux), RH300 with RH302 (get certified for RHCE), RH133 (Enterprise Linux System Administration) and Lab track (MySQL, PHP, firewall). In addition to learning about Linux, each track includes sport activities (adrenalin park, canyoning, rafting...). I hope you come and visit us here in beautiful Triglav National Park.
2005-07-27
Slashdotted and spammed
A few hours ago a news entry linking to my KDE 3.5 Previews article was published on Slashdot.org. And immediately my blog started to receive A LOT of visitors form all over the world. If I had my blog hosted on my own server on a poor cable link the Slashdot effect would bring it down in no time. I've never imagined that one of my articles would cause this.
But with good there also come some bad and irritating things. Some stupid spammer started to fill comments here, and some of the text was even racist. If he has something intelligent to say (which I highly doubt) he should set up his own blog. I think this coward is very sick and should get himself some professional help. Thanks to this ill person I had to disable all the commenting on this blog. Sorry for this! And after this incident I finally see how poorly Blogger.com service is prepared to fight against spam. I hope they improve this very soon or else they will loose their users to competition.
2005-07-26
JLP's KDE 3.5 Previews - Part 1
Introduction
Every year, during the summer holidays, I regularly download the source code of the new version of KDE desktop that is in the works and compile and test it. If any bugs are found I report them and from time to time I also make some feature suggestions. When the feature and message freeze comes into effect I also start helping with translation into Slovenian language. This year is no exception, in most parts. One of the differences is that now I'm testing on two computers: 32-bit Athlon 1200 MHz (with Mandriva Linux 2006 beta installed and GCC 4.0.1) and a much faster 64-bit Athlon 64 3000+ (Gentoo Linux and GCC 3.4.4). It is always good to have things tested on as many platforms as possible. Another change is that this year I've decided to post previews of and experiences with development version of KDE on this blog. I'll try to put up as many screenshots as possible so that everyone can see what is coming in the future.
General
Stability of this prebeta version is very good. I rarely encountered crashes or freezes. Speed is also about the same as with current stable version 3.4.1. The default font sizes have been reduced to 10 points, which makes a little bit more room on the screen. This is how the default desktop looks like:
As you can see there is not much change since the previous versions. Even the version on the wallpaper is still the old one. You can expect to see more innovations in KDE 4. But there are some more or less hidden differences and some of them I'll show you next.
Kicker
The first thing I noticed was that the new tooltips, first introduced in KDE 3.4 (only for buttons), are now also used for minipager, taskbar buttons and clock. I think it would be a good idea to also use them for system tray icons.
There are now three different appearances for Kicker that you can choose from: Elegant (the default), Classic and For Transparency.
Minipager has received many improvements. It can show icons of applications, background can now show desktop wallpaper or it can be transparent. You can even drag and drop windows from one desktop to another.
Another improvement for kicker is Add Applet dialog. The inspiration probably came from GNOME desktop and it replaces the current context menu based method. It makes it quite a bit easier to find the right applet.
Storage Media Notification
Next new feature in 3.5 is storage media notification. This is something users of the current Windows desktop already have and some Linux distributions, like Mandriva, implemented their own version, mostly just as simple autorun. KDE will now also show a special dialog of possible actions when some media is inserted. I hope authors of KDE applications will soon start to add actions for their program. On the other hand it is simple to add, edit or remove actions yourself.
home:/
KIOSlaves are a special feature of KDE that make it simple to work with files and folders over different protocols. You probably know some of them very well, like file, http or ftp. A new one has recently been added: home. When you open location home:/ in Konqueror you can now see all home folders of the users belonging to the same group as you do.
Konqueror
One of the main complaints about Konqueror was that there were some menu options that just don't make sense in file managing mode and should only be shown in web browsing mode (and vice versa). The work is being done to correct this.
Konqueror now supports AdBlock content filtering. You can add simple filters by, for example, right clicking on an image and selecting to block it.
There are a lot of other behind the scenes improvements to various parts of Konqueror. And now that Apple provided access to their improvements to KHTML and KJS, KDE developers can and did backport them into Konqueror.
End of Part 1
Well, this is it for the first part. I hope you like it. I'll take a look at other applications and new developments in following articles. Expect the next one in an about two weeks. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Translations and derivative works
Hebrew by Uri Sharf
Slovenian by Jure Repinc
2005-07-21
Blog now under Creative Commons License
As of now all the articles on this blog are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. This license is similar to the GPL license for free software and lets you remix, tweak, and build upon my work even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit me and license your new creations under the identical terms. If you are also an author there are a lot of different Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Pick one and let other people clearly know (by marking your work by the famous CC mark) how they can use your work and share it on.
2005-07-20
James Montgomery Doohan died
While reading Wil Wheaton's blog I found out that today, on the anniversary of the first Moon landing, James Montgomery Doohan died at the age of 85. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease. If you are a Star Trek fan you sure know him as the funny chief engineer Scotty from the starship Enterprise from The Original Series. As he would say: "Scotty to Heaven... One to beam up.". May he rest in peace!
My first patch for KDE
A few hours ago my first patch for KDE has been committed to KDE SVN. It is nothing big, just a fix for a compilation problem for Juk (a very nice music player and tag editor) when Akode is not installed on the system. But it is a start and I hope to learn enough C++ and Qt soon to be more helpful. Until then I'll continue to do my best with translation into Slovenian, testing and bug reporting. Oh and by the way, I was following these instructions on how to send patches to KDE.
Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 | ED2K
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 | ED2K
2005-07-18
Looking for a new room in Ljubljana again
Yesterday evening my roommate Vito informed me that in the next semester his girlfriend is finally moving in to live with him. This unfortunately means that there is no free bed for me left in the apartment and I will have to join my sister in a search for a new room in Ljubljana. I hope we find something that is close to our faculties and that is reasonably priced. The task is not easy and good luck plays quite an important role in this. Anyways, I had a great time in this apartment. The best place I've had in Ljubljana so far. Thanks to all roommates for this and sorry for any inconveniences I've cased. I must also say goodbye to our neighbor students on the upper floor. Take care and have a great time! All of you in the house. Oh and if anyone reading this knows of any cool place for two or three students, be sure to drop me a note.
2005-07-17
Free Software Magazine - Issue 5 - June 2005
Issue 5 of Free Software Magazine is finally here. Articles for June 2005 are:
- Editorial
- The internet's plague: spam
- Starters
- Linux in a Windows World by Roderick Smith
- From Bash to Z Shell by Oliver Kiddle, Jerry Peek and Peter Stephenson
- Focus
- The leap from virtual host to virtual machine
- Xen, the virtual machine monitor
- Linux-VServer
- Tech World
- Haskell
- Newsflash!
- Web site blocking techniques
- Who's behind that web site?
- Word World
- The future of computing: is free software ready?
- Free software 2.0
- On the "Creative Commons": a critique of the commons without commonalty
Download from home page, using ED2K links or using BitTorrent.
2005-07-16
MyOSS Magazine
While we are all waiting for the next issue of Free Software Magazine I would like to tell you about another free magazine I have come across a few days ago. It is called MyOSS Magazine, where MyOSS stands for Malaysian Open Source Software. And no, it is not written in Malaysian, it is in English so everyone can read it. To find out more about the magazine be sure to check out its mission and social contract. If you already have some FOSS article ready or are thinking about writing one you are more then welcome to contribute to the magazine and community. Besides downloading MyOSS from its home page you can also use ED2K links. Oh and a big thanks to people behind MyOSS for a link to my blog in one of their articles on the home page.
2005-07-15
Goodbye OS/2 Warp, welcome Linux
Just a few minutes ago I found out that after about 20 years of existence IBM is going to stop marketing (now) and selling (on December 23, 2005) their OS/2 operating system. OS/2 Warp 4 was the first operating system we had on our very first computer. I still remember all the countless hours I spent playing the excellent game Galactic Civilizations. As far as I remember OS/2 was a great operating system. Completely 32 bit, very stable and powerful. Much better than Windows 95 we had to buy later. Well OS/2 is gone now and IBM are recommending that their customers migrate to Linux now. They have even prepared a special OS/2 to Linux Client Transition guide.
2005-07-14
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5
Right after updating the best web browser Mozilla foundation has also released a new version of my favorite e-mail client (additionally it is also a very nice client for news groups (usenet) and a great RSS/Atom feed reader) Thunderbird. Version 1.0.5 has improved stability and a couple of fixed potential security problems. Download here. You can also get the new Thunderbird using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
2005-07-13
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5
A new version of one of the best web browsers, Firefox, is out. Version 1.0.5 is bringing you some stability fixes and plugs a couple of potential security holes. So update as soon as possible. Download here. You can also get the new Firefox using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.
Oh and by the way. Firefox has recently just passed the 70 000 000 downloads mark and is also on the 4th place of the most frequently downloaded apps on Download.com during the past 10 years. Extremely impressive for such a young application.
2005-07-08
New Google extensions for Firefox
The extremely popular web browser Firefox already has many easy to use modern features by default. And there are a lot of additional extensions that make Firefox even better. Google released three extensions of their own yesterday:
- Google Toolbar: among other things it brings spellchecking, automatic fill out for forms and translation
- Google Send to Phone: enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone (unfortunately limited to US numbers only)
- Google Suggest: completes your search terms as you type them into the search box located to the right of the address bar
If you are still using some old and insecure browser like Internet Explorer be sure to check out Firefox and extensions for it.
2005-07-07
BitTorrent support coming into browsers
BitTorrent has become a very popular technology for downloading files. Almost all GNU/Linux distributions can be downloaded this way and more authors are deciding to release their creations using BitTorrent every day. If you want to download using BitTorrent now you need a special client, like the original one or one of the more advanced ones like Azureus. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could use BitTorrent directly from your browser? This would make it as easy to use as it is downloading files over HTTP or FTP.
Good news everyone! It's happening as I write this. They just released first beta version of Opera 8.02 (download from FTP) which already includes simple support for BitTorrent downloads. There is also BitTorrent support in the works for Firefox browser (as part of the Google Summer of Code project). Unfortunately it will not be ready for integration into version 1.1. Until version 2.0 comes out we will have to use an extension to get the support. It is not going to be as powerful as Azureus, but it will bring BitTorrent closer to the average user and make it much easier to use.
2005-07-06
Software patents rejected
In the morning members of the European parliament voted on a very important issue for every computer user. They were deciding on the future of the software patent directive. As all of you should know by now, it would legalize almost unlimited patentability of software, if accepted. This would only be good for big multinational companies and extremely damaging for everyone else (medium and small size companies, free and opensource software community and all the people who use computer software).
Fortunately the fight for our rights was successful. Members of European parliament clearly rejected the software patents directive in its current form by a large margin (648 votes against 14). This means that the directive must be rewritten from scratch. And this time we have to make sure it will be written properly and benefit all the people.
Sources:
- FFII - European Parliament says No to software patents
- BBC - Software patent bill thrown out
- Reuters - EU assembly throws out bill to harmonize patents
- RTE - EU vote over software patents
- IHT - Patent law is rejected in Europe
2005-07-04
Trying Ubuntu Linux (not yet)
Ubuntu Linux is getting very popular among users of the free operating system. I've read some very positive reviews and heard only good things about it. After visiting DistroWatch.com I could see that second beta (or Colony 2 as they call it) of version 5.10 is out and I decided to download it and try it out.
First I tried to download it using BitTorrent but the download was extremely slow. So I just decided to use the normal download and the ISO image of LiveCD for AMD64 was down in less than an hour. Before burning it I have let it share over BitTorrent for about one day.
I finally rebooted my computer yesterday evening to boot into Ubuntu and check it out. But unfortunately I didn't get far. After some booting activity I was "welcomed" by a blank black screen with a blinking character _ in the lower left corner of the screen. As it is expected from a good open source community member I have immediately reported a bug about this. During the night another person with the same problem reported his computer configuration and I guess it is some problem with nVidia graphics driver failing to load.
First exploration of Ubuntu didn't even start. It looks like I'll have to wait for Colony 3 (or maybe even final version). Unless there is some workaround.
2005-07-03
Mozilla Application Suite continues as SeaMonkey
In March I have reported that the development will stop on Mozilla Application Suite and shift to individual applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu and so on). But a lot of people and some developers like the suite so much that they have decided to continue working on it. And so the SeaMonkey Project was born. This wouldn't be possible if Mozilla was not free software and open source. When some company decides to stop working on some proprietary and closed source application, well there is nothing you can do and application is dead.
You can read the official announcement here:
SeaMonkey Project Continues Internet Suite
2005-07-01
How software patents endanger free and open source software
There is a nice article at Groklaw that has a couple of quotes from Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and other well known people from the free software and open source world. They tell how software patents are dangerous to them and other small and medium sized companies. And some people, with substantial help from mega-corporations, try very hard to hide this danger from us.
Let me remind you that voting on software patents directive is on 6th of July when European Parliament will have the last chance to prevent disaster from happening. And we, the people, have the last chance to tell them why software patents are so damaging to all of us. We have to convince members of European parliament to vote for Buzek-Rocard-Duff amendments!
TUX Magazine - Issue 4 - July 2005
Issue 4 (July 2005) of TUX Magazine is out. If you are new to Linux or are still considering switching to it, this is the perfect free magazine to read. Topics in this issue are:
- P2P
- Easy Does It
- How to Make Linux Perfect for the Desktop
- Letters
- Q&A with Mango Parfait
- Home Plate
- Let a Tomboy Manage Your Notes
- Suited Up
- Getting Started with OpenOffice.org Calc
- TUX Explains
- Introduction to Linux Security, Part I
- Scrapbooks and Albums
- Windows-to-Linux Migration with Qt
- Reviews
- Libranet 3.0
- Gadget Guy: Products with Drive
- Guarddog
- Liferea
- tsclient
- streamtuner
- The Last Word
- Why Piracy Hurts Open Source
Free download is available from official page, using ED2K links or BitTorrent.
Norway goes open source
While reading blogs around the internet I've stumbled upon an entry titled Norway to Kick Microsoft Out? on UMMO Letters. There is a link to an article Norway goes open source in which you can read that...
The Norwegian Minister of Modernisation, Morten Andreas Meyer, has promised that his government will stop using proprietary software and transfer to open source.
If you read the news article you can also see that he understands how important are open and free document formats (like OASIS OpenDocument) and that closed proprietary formats have no place in communication between citizens and government. Too bad our Slovenian government doesn't understand all of this.
