• Find out more about Software Freedom International and SFD.
• Read about how Software Freedom underpins your human rights from our former President, Pia Waugh
• Also find out more about Free Software.

We thank all Debian developers, package maintainers, translators, web site collaborators, sysadmins (yeahh), and evangelists (yeahh)!

Debian is a complete free software solution for home and business alike, the source of many other GNU/Linux distribuitions.

Thank you Debian!

Alexei Vladishev's Zabbix Creator Course 2011 at Porto Alegre

Alexei Vladishev, creator of Zabbix monitoring tool, CEO of Zabbix SIA, was a keynote speaker at FISL 12, held at Porto Alegre, June 29th through  July 2nd 2011, and extended his stay the following week, giving 2 courses: Zabbix Certified Specialist and Zabbix for Large Environments, and I took both. It’s something else learning from the developer himself. And Alexei is good in passing on his knowledge. One thing that caught my attention is Alexei’s commitment to keeping it FOSS, and not rely on non-free software, and depend the least on other software.

Larry Wall (and wife Gloria), creator of Perl language, speaker at II São Paulo Perl Workshop, on May, 7th 2011.

I had the opportunity to participate of the II São Paulo Perl Workshop. It was a unique occasion to meet key people of Free Software and Perl gurus, Larry Wall, brian d foy and Brad Fitzpatrick. On the brazillian team of speakers were Alexei “Russo” Znamensky, Rodrigo Campos, André Garcia, Thiago Rondon, Vagner Diniz e Eden Cardim.

Brad started the event, presenting his project Camlistore, a layered storage for local/cloud C.A.S. objects. Brian presented Perl’s development infrastructure surrounding CPAN, revigorating for all current and future contributors.

Larry made a brilliant and humored presentation comprehending Perl’s history, philosophy and culture, passing through Perl 6 basics and current status. Larry is a gifted human being, not only technically skilled, but has a witty and humored personality, a keen eye on human aspects of technology. He is someone not scared nor distant of people. And a unexpected bonus, at least for me, Larry’s wife, Gloria! She is an extrovert and happy person, sure a good match for Mr. Larry. Some “Perl’s First Lady”.

Larry Wall, signing and stamping atender's credentials during II São Paulo Perl Workshop, on May, 7th 2011

A grand finale was awaiting us, when Larry picked his autograph hungry fan’s kit, 2 stamps for enhenced autograph experience, one a “Programming Perl“‘s camel and the other with Perl’s motte “There’s More Than One Way to Do It!“. Got camel?

More pictures of the event by wallace_reis;

Congratulations São Paulo Perl Mongers!

Brian d foy, founder of PerlMongers, maintainer of CPAN, author of Perl books, speaker at II São Paulo Perl Workshop.

Brad Fitzpatrick, Creator of LiveJounal, Danga Interactive, speaker at II São Paulo Perl Workshop, May, 7th 2011. Some face Joner!

Map to  “Hotels near Congonhas Airport and II São Paulo Perl Workshop Event” (Espaço AMB) on Google Maps.

QRCode com link para o mapa:

Em 7 de maio será realizado o II São Paulo Perl Workshop, um evento organizado pelo São Paulo Perl Mongers, e a edição 2011, terá nada menos que o criador do Perl, Larry Wall, braian d foy, editor de The Perl Review, criador do Perl Mongers, organização de grupos de usuários Perl, Brad Fitzoatrick, fundador da empresa Danga, com importantes projetos como livejournal.com, memcached, gearman e mogilefs, trabalha no Google e apresentará o camilstore, um sistema de armazenamento voltado para web.

I have setup some GNU/Linux dedicated servers, and being a sysadmin, it has always been a repetitive straight forward task. But to the average goodwill game server admin wannabe, Unix syntax and structure are not routine.

So we set up to create a tool to help us have a smoother faster install, and maybe help others out there.

And as a result, here is the announcement of this simple but hopefully useful tool:

“The Injustos Battlefield Clan is happy to announce the first release of its project InjusTools: ‘InjusTools_Install_BF1942′, a free GPLed shell script to help setting up a Battlefield 1942 GNU/Linux dedicated server, downloading, installing and configuring the server itself, latest patches, most popular mods, and a remote server manager daemon.

Basic security measures are taken, so that the server manager and BF1942 itself can be run as an ordinary user, with write access restricted to logging.

Just download it at any GNU/Linux server, and execute it as any shell script logged in as ‘root’ administrator.

Get help and support at our InjusTools Project website at http://injustools.sourceforge.net/.”

This tool will be used to develop a new and generic installation tool, and soon you will receive more good news.

According to a press release from TDF, “Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand “LibreOffice” has been chosen for the software going forward.”

The initiative is being conducted by former members and colaborators of OpenOffice.org, and so far has been suported by important FOSS/Industry players (FSF, OASIS, Red Hat, Canonical, Novel, etc.).

A beta release of LibreOffice supporting several plataforms is already availiable for download.

Oracle, which acquired Sun, and hence StarOffice/OpenOffice brands, has been taking uncertain actions in relation to its support for FOSS assets inherited from Sun, such as the OpenSolaris project.

On August 16th of 1993, Ian Murdock made a news announcement at Usenet about the creation of “Debian Linux Distribution” (later evolved to “Debian Project”). The Debian Project was reponsible not only for the creation of a great GNU/Linux software distribution, but also for the creation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines – DFSG (used by Open Source Initiative to create the “The Open Source Definition“), and the Debian Social Contract where it stablishes de principles of a FOSS community, including de DFSG itself.

Take some time and show your appreciation too at the Thanks.Debian.net.

Read the original news announcement “New release under development; suggestions requested“.

Read more about Debian History.

Jon ‘maddog’ Hall has just released a series of videos promoting “Project Cauã“.

This project aims at, among other things, reducing Digital Divide and unemployment, all in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way.

The first 6 videos have both English and Portuguese captions are are being released through the official channel at Youtube.

Here is a playlist of these and other maddog’s videos which I contributed by translating subtitles from English to Portuguese:

See the video. Assita ao vídeo.

Hey, choose different language captions on the options selector at the right button.