Software Freedom Day 2009 was held at the Melbourne PC User Group rooms at Chadstone shopping centre on 19th September 09. Organised by Brianna Laugher, President of WikiMedia Australia, and Donna Benjamin, President of Linux Users’ Victoria, the event aimed to showcase the numerous free and open source software and hardware tools available for use.

The day saw numerous presentations, including;

• Wen Lin presented on how to use alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu on your netbook, and how to use Clonezilla for backup up and restoring your system
• Ben Sturmfels presented on the basic freedoms that open source software embodies
• Simon Hobbs provided an overview of using Drupal for building websites
• Minh Nguyen presented on programming with Python
• Daniel Jitnah presented on how to make the move to open source

During the day Andy Gelme, who’s heavily into open hardware and is involved with the Community Connected Hackerspace in Melbourne gave an hour and a half workshop on Arduinos, where we all got to program an Arduino. This was much easier than I had anticipated, as it only required a bsic knowledge of electronics, and some experience in C.

I ran two workshops during the day on WordPress;

• Introduction to WordPress
• Advanced WordPress

A very big thank you to Multimedia Victoria, who generously supported the event, allowing hundreds of Open CDs containing free and open source software to be produced and distrubted.

Donna Benjamin is President of Linux Users’ Victoria and is quite influential in the open source community. Her talk at StixCampNewstead was on the open source product ‘Inkscape‘ – which provides a free alternative to programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Fireworks.

Most people at the presentation had had some exposure to Inkscape which made Donna’s presentation all the more interesting. She demonstrated a number of the features of Inkscape including:

• Bezier curves
• Stroke and fill options

Inkscape produces scalable vector graphics – as opposed to the raster images produced by the likes of Photoshop. This makes it quite a useful tool for large format printing, such as for banners. It can also be scripted, for instance by taking XML input and using it to have dynamic text represented in an image.

Inkscape provides very fine grained controlled over stroke and fill options – I was very impressed by the stroke options available. Often in graphics programs the stroke options go to a minimum of .5pt for stroke – but Inkscape can go much finer which is useful for line art based designs.

The creation above is my first attempt at using Inkscape (keep in mind I’m fluent with Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) and generally it is very easy to use. The interfaces are a little foreign at first, but then any graphics application that’s reasonably mature usually is. The only real difficulty I had was that it does not output PNG natively – it has to first be converted to a raster image. When importing between Inkscape and GIMP, there were also some parts of the image that were not correctly converted.

The Bonnie Babes Foundation website, email and shared calendaring has recently been developed using free and open source software. That is, each of the software tools is completely and absolutely FREE! My time on the project (around 100 hours all up) was also donated, so the only costs incurred by the Foundation were for web hosting ($15 per month at Servers Australia).  So, how did it all come together?

Email

Bonnie Babes were previously using a POP-based solution using the organisation’s primary email contact address. This meant that if five separate people on five separate computers each sent mail, no one else could see what had been sent. This was migrated to an IMAP-based solution using Thunderbird.

The old POP email was moved to the IMAP folders. The biggest hassle here was that there was around 80 times more email to migrate to IMAP than I had budgeted for during the analysis phase. Luckily, Servers Australia came to the party and gave us some breathing space with an extra half a gig (NOTE: Big thanks Jared!). There was one machine that would crash every time I tried to import the mail from Outlook into Thunderbird, so as a workaround we first imported the mail from Outlook into Outlook Express, and from Outlook Express into Thunderbird. This finally worked (just be careful if you have to do this, as it imports ALL accounts from Outlook Express).

The staff at the organisation were used to using Outlook rather than Thunderbird, however they seemed to adapt fairly quickly. The only glitches we found were that the formatting in Thunderbird is a little different to Outlook – so ‘Paste without formatting’ was used as a workaround.

Filters have been set up on one computer rather than different computers having different filters applied.

Shared calendar

One of the requirements of the organisation was to have a shared calendar so that appointments, events and to do lists could be shared among multiple staff. An Exchange server was out of budget, so I settled for Sunbird. With Sunbird, it can be set up so that a remote calendar can be used. An .ics file was set up for this purpose on the web server, however it was made available under the FTP root rather than the web server root for security reasons.

The calendar is then accessed via a standard FTP URL such as:

ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.org.au/path/to.ics

Website

The website has been created using WordPress, with a number of plugins. Chief among them are cForms, for building user editable contact forms and the eShop plugin for online commerce. I had originally planned to use the WP e-Commerce plugin for the Online Shop component, however this plugin seems to be full of bugs and I had no end of trouble installing it.

One very useful plugin that deserves a mention is pageMash - used for ordering pages within WordPress. I’m surprised that this functionality hasn’t been made better yet – as the developers state, it’s still a little ‘janky’. Hopefully this will get a look in for the 2.8 release of WordPress.

One of the very nifty things I learned about WordPress during this exercise is that there is an .ics calendar available of upcoming releases – very handy (and very quickly put into Sunbird!)

Of course, the website validates as XHMTL transitional and CSS 3 valid (a very big thanks to Jason King for picking up that the theme version 1.0 wasn’t compliant).

Google tools

The web presence also makes use of a number of freely-available tools by Google, including;

• Google Adwords (facilitated by Google Grants)
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster tools

Being a geek, it is no surprise that my monitor (an Acer X223W) is bigger than my (Teac analogue) television. It therefore made sense that rather than upgrading my TV with a set top box, to investigate what’s on the market to receive HDTV on the computer.

The weapon of choice was a Gadget Geek USB HDTV tuner, purchased from Dick Smith for under $AUD 100. Not bad. Under Windows XP, it installed quickly and easily. The unit came with a mobile antenna and Blaze HD TV software, and on the first scan for channels, it found absolutely, yep you guessed it, nothing. So, out came the coax cable, and I plugged the USB HDTV tuner into the outlet in the wall (straight from the antenna – it was previously hooked into my stereo to receive FM radio). The coax cable only fared slightly better – receiving only the digital SBS channels. Just to be absolutely sure, I repeated the process on the other two coax outlets (yep, small unit and three phone lines and three coax outlets. I <3 my house. It will be even better when it’s CAT 6 wired). At most, I could receive 10% signal strength for one other digital channel.

Not to be deterred, I booted into my other operating system (Fedora Core 9) to see whether MythTV would fare any better. MythTV was a nightmare to install – it is not for Linux newbies. After spending four hours resolving dependencies in yum, I finally got the software to install… only to find that there are no Linux drivers for the USB HDTV tuner. Bummer.

Conclusion: I need a new antenna that can pick up HDTV signals. Well, it beats socks as an Xmas pressie

Further to this post, the presentation I gave at Software Freedom Day in Melbourne is now available. It is a brief presentation, as most of it was demonstrating WordPress and Alice. Unfortunately I had a few hiccups on the day, and it was only with the much appreciated assistance of Ben Balbo and others that the presentation could go ahead. You see, Sakai runs on a Tomcat installation and I had it set up ready to go, but had to reboot, then had Java issues so I couldn’t get it to work. The other hampering factor was that external internet access was not available, and most of my demo used online websites. Never mind, there’s always next year.

It was great to see so many presenters and participants, however numbers were down compared to last year. The Hub, while being a great venue, is a little bit out of the way for most – not as central as the Town Hall.

Free and open source tools in education (Powerpoint, 107kb)

Links for the tools referenced are given below;

• WordPress
• Alice
• Sakai
• Moodle

Questions and comments are warmly welcomed.

Deakin Uni was approached by Bonnie Babes a couple of months ago to assist with their web presence, which was quite dated. I’ve been working on a redesign using free and open source software. The key features are;

• An easily updateable website using the WordPress personal publishing system
• A custom theme for WordPress based on Bonnie Babes’ organisational colours
• A number of freely available WordPress plugins including WP e-Commerce, SEO Tools, ShareThis and pageMash

It wasn’t all plain sailing however. The hosting platform (which is freely provided with thanks to Apex Hosting in Melbourne) is based on Windows and IIS. My use of WordPress has centred on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) based platform, and I’ve certainly not used PHP much under IIS. The fact that this platform is in use has limited a number of the features of WordPress, so much so that it is likely that the site will be moved to an alternative hosting arrangement. They include;

• Inability to use nice permalinks: Because IIS has no inbuilt mod_rewrite (one of the Apache modules that most hosting providers have installed), the pretty permalinks don’t work in IIS without a lot of kludging. While it is possible to get them to work using mod_rewrite alternatives for IIS, most hosting providers don’t have these installed by default – and they’re unlikely to install on request. WordPress have obviously come across difficulties with IIS and permalinks before – hence this article.
• Inability to use cURL libraries: The cURL libraries in PHP are incredibly useful. They are also used by the WP e-Commerce plugin (which I was aiming to use to facilitate an online shop) as part of the checkout functionality. It wasn’t until I got to testing the checkout that PHP threw a fatal error
• Inability to have WordPress in one directory, and make your blog another: This is related to the permalink issue, largely due to the fact that IIS does not support mod_rewrite or .htaccess without third party tools
• Difficulty making certain files and directories writable: On a Linux system, you can easily use filesystem permissions to make a file or directory (to Linux they are the same thing) writable. Writable files and directories are used all throughout WordPress, for things like;

• Sitemap generation
• Storing of uploaded media such as images, word documents and pdfs
• The ability to edit CSS and other design elements through the administration interface

So, where to from here? It’s likely that we’ll go with another hosting provider who provides a LAMP architecture..

Peter Baker and Donna Benjamin (with only a little bit of help from me I have to admit) have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the preparations for Software Freedom Day in Melbourne. We have a great venue this year – The Hub at Docklands – and have an array (no pun intended) of great speakers lined up, including;

• Tyson Clugg – Melbourne Wireless
• Dale Clapperton – Electronic Frontiers Australia
• Kat Clancy  – Deakin University
• Brianna Laugher – Wikimedia Australia
• Gerry White – Internet Society of Australia

I’m actually quite excited by what is in store on Saturday – with most of the Pub Standards / Linux Users of Victoria people in attendance. There is just so much value in FOSS that non profits, community organisations and educational institutions can benefit from.

As part of moving the technical maturity of both Anam Cara House Geelong and Bonnie Babes forward, I was investigating was free and / or open source software tools were available for volunteer and donor management. After a quick look around SourceForge and trying a couple of these out (eg iVolunteer), the best one available appears to be CiviCRM. This has a number of features including;

• integration with both Drupal and Joomla
• the ability to create groups within the contact database (for instance some donors are also volunteers, some volunteers are also members of the board of management)
• the ability to integrate online paymen with CiviCRM so that online donations are tracked
• event management – including the tracking of which contacts have participated or attended which events
• relationship tracking  – including recording relationships between contacts (such as mother, brother etc)

There is also a live online demo of CiviCRM that is very useful for providing organisations with an overview, or in depth exploration of functionality – suitable for requirements elicitation.

The software also seems to have a lot of support and a mature development team behind it – which augers well for future improvement of CiviCRM.

Registrations are now open for Software Freedom Day, which will be held on 20 September 2008.

So, what is Software Freedom Day (from the website);

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

Not sure on details for the Melbourne event, when more is known I will post further.