• Walked to the conference, abortive customer call; gave my talk:
• Caught up with Markus over lunch, talked with various customers and users, poked at a bug with Thomas.

Thursday, 28th September 2017 will be a special day – not only is it the seventh birthday of The Document Foundation, but we will also be running an “Ask me (us) Anything” session on Reddit – specifically, the /r/linux subreddit.

Team and board members from The Document Foundation will be on hand to answer questions and point people in the right directions.…

Read more: Coming up on 28th September: Reddit “Ask us Anything” (and a birthday)

Yesterday, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that the opportunity to apply for LibreOffice certification for migrations and training is now available to FSF Associate Members. In 2015, TDF began offering LibreOffice certification to certify “individuals actively promoting LibreOffice deployments, thanks to their competence in specific areas” including development and L3 support, migrations to LibreOffice, and LibreOffice training.…

Read more: LibreOffice Certification is now available to FSF Members

• Up unfeasibly early, coach to Stansted for an early flight to Nuremburg for the ownCloud conference. Poked at slides. Arrived, good to catch up with lots of people, out for dinner with Holger, Thomas, Michael & some CERN guys in the evening.

Not been much active there, but mammut.space is down since days (weeks?) without any sign of life. So I revived my @erAck@mastodon.technology account (https://mastodon.technology/@erAck).

---

LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:

• libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents.

…

Read more: Document Liberation Project: New releases

• Mail chew; chat with Eloy; lunch; partner call; built slides for monthly mgmt meeting. Admin, chased invoices; built ESC agenda.
• Dinner; out to H's organ practice; did a bit of hackery while it happened on unit testing, walked home and put babes to bed variously.

• Practice with babes; mail chew, installed ownCloud X for demos. Lunch with J. poked at online unit testing some more. Consultancy call.
• Into Cambridge with a 4K screen to seek out some memory issue; caught up with Tracie.

• Picked up H. NCC in the morning; dropped her and Elize to Katie's to setup a surprise party for a friend Home for Pizza; Julie over in the afternoon, slept a little; out to NCC AGM in the evening. Bed.

If a member of the LibreOffice extensions and templates website submitted a new project for publication it was added to the review list. But there is currently no notification of the reviewer about this new entry on the list. Thus the reviewer had to log in to the site constantly to check if there is a new project on the list.

To make the life of the reviewer a bit easier I added a notification by email in case someone submitted a new project for publication. I did this for both Plone addons which drive the LibreOffice extensions and templates site. The site itself runs on Plone 5, a powerful Content Management System.

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.…

Read more: Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

LibreOffice’s development community has been growing steadily for seven years, thanks to the great enthusiasm demonstrated by several core members. They have mentored an entirely new generation of LibreOffice developers, also thanks to Hackfests and other face-to-face meeting opportunities such as FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference.

After seven years is now the right time to start thinking about the new generation of Hackfests.…

Read more: Call to Action: Hackfests “The New Generation”

Being an open source project is one of the pillars of LibreOffice. Understanding the people who not only build and maintain but also use LibreOffice is important to anyone concerned about the sustainability of open source. So we asked the community what aspects are important and present the results now.…

The post What Open Source Means to LibreOffice Users appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Firebird Project announces the first Alpha release of Firebird 4.0, the next major version of the Firebird relational database, which is now available for testing.

New version 5.11.0.0 of ADO.NET provider for Firebird is ready for download. This release is about .NET Standard 2.0. Now the .NET Standard 2.0, with all the new APIs supported, version is available. Another new feature is support for passing key over the wire for encrypted databases (you need to have server side plugin for this feature, i.e. this from IBPhoenix). New connection string property

Mark Rotteveel published a guide and example program using Firebird 3 Embedded with Jaybird 3. The sample you can find it on https://github.com/mrotteveel/jaybird-embedded-example.

While I got OpenGL transitions working under Gtk3 at the end of last year basically matching the Gtk2/Generic OpenGL quality the transition into and out of the OpenGL sequence wasn't very satisfying. And with access to HiDPI it was clearly even worse with an unscaled image momentarily appearing before the correct one.

So here's the before and after of the improvements that landed on upstream master today. Just screen-recordings with built in ctrl+shift+alt+t under gnome3 and positioned side by side and clipped roughly together in pitivi

The 3rd day should have started with a Debian sprint and then a LibreOffice one, taking advantage I’m still attending, as that’s my last day. But plans don’t always work out and we started 2 hours later. When everybody arrive we got everyone together for a short daily meeting (scrum style). The people were divided to 3 teams for translating:  Debian Installer, LibreOffice and Gnome. For each team we did a short list of what left and with what to start. And in the end – how does what so there will be no toe stepping. I was really proud with this and felt it was time well spent.

The current translation percentage for Albanian in LibreOffice is 60%. So my recommendation to the team is translate master only and do not touch the help translation. My plans ahead would be to improve the translation as much as possible for LibreOffice 6.0 and near the branching point (Set to November 20th by the release schedule) decide if it’s doable for the 6.0 life time or to set the goal at 6.1. In the 2nd case, we might try to backport translation back to 6.0.

For the translation itself, I’ve mentioned to the team about KeyID language pack and referred them to the nightly builds. These tools should help with keeping the translation quality high.

For the Debian team, after deciding who works on what, I’ve asked Silva to do review for the others, as doing it myself started to take more and more of my time. It’s also good that the reviewer know the target language and not like me, can catch more the syntax only mistakes. Another point, as she’s available more easily to the team while I’m leaving soon, so I hope this role of reviewer will stay as part of the team.

With the time left I mostly worked on my own tasks, which were packaging the Albanian dictionary, resulting in https://packages.debian.org/sid/myspell-sq and making sure the dictionary is also part of LibreOffice resulting in https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/41906/ . When it is accepted, I want to upload it to the LibreOffice repository so all users can download and use the dictionary.

During the voyage home (ferry, bus, plain and train), I mailed Sergio Durigan Junior, my NM applicant, with a set of questions. My first action as an AM (:

Overall FOSScamp results for Albanian translation were very close to the goal I set (100%):

• Albanian (sq) level1 – 99%
• Albanian (sq) level2 – 25% (the rest is pending at #874497)
• Albanian (sq) level3 – 100%

That’s the result of work by Silva Arapi, Eva Vranici, Redon Skikuli, Anisa Kuci and Nafie Shehu.

Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice

Einer der Schwerpunkte in der LibreOffice-Community ist die Weitergabe von Wissen. Im Rahmen von zahlreichen Initiativen wie Workshops, Bug Hunting Sessions, Vorträgen und Hackfesten arbeiten wir gemeinsam daran, nicht nur das Programm zu verbessern, sondern vor allem auch das Wissen um den Aufbau, die Struktur und die Programmierung von LibreOffice weiterzugeben, um mehr Menschen die Mitwirkung an der Entwicklung zu ermöglichen.

Mein Kollege Björn Michaelsen hat jetzt einen neuen Vorschlag eingebracht, wie wir diesen Gedanken noch effektiver voranbringen können.

Die grobe Idee hat er bereits in einer E-Mail auf unserer öffentlichen Vorstandsliste skizziert. Vereinfacht gesagt geht es darum, dass wir das Wissen, das wir bislang vor allem oft „remote“ genutzt haben, jetzt direkt vor Ort an die Hackfeste holen und gemeinsam und live mit erfahrenen Programmierern an LibreOffice arbeiten.

Das Ganze ist derzeit eine grobe Idee, die gemeinsam mit der Community diskutiert und entwickelt werden soll. Dazu ist für

Sonntag, den 17. September 2017
um 16:30 Uhr

eine öffentliche Telefonkonferenz in englischer Sprache geplant, zu der wir alle Interessenten – ob alte Hasen oder neue Mitwirkende – ganz herzlich zum Mitdiskutieren und Mitdenken einladen wollen!

Die Telefonnummern zur Einwahl findet ihr in unserem Wiki, die Raumnummer ist die 21 24 86. Das Ganze richtet sich ausdrücklich auch an Nicht-Entwickler, die ihre Ideen und Vorschläge mit uns teilen wollen.

Wir freuen uns auf euch!

The morning stated by taking the bus to Kini beach. After some to enjoy the water (which were still cold in the morning), we sat for talking about the local Debian community and how can we help it grow. The main topic was localization (l10n), but we soon started to check other options. I reminded them that l10n isn’t only translation and we also talked about dictionaries for spell checking, fonts and local software which might be relevant (e.g. hdate for the Jewish/Hebrew calendar or Jcal for the Jalali calendar). For example it seems that regular Latin fonts are missing two Albanian characters.

We also talked about how to use Open Labs to better work together with two hats – member of the local FOSS community and also as members of various open source projects (not forgetting open content / data ones projects as well). So people can cooperate both on the local level, the international level or to mix (using the other’s project international resources). In short: connections, connections, connections.

Another aspect I tried to push the guys toward is cooperating with local companies about open source, whether it’s the local market, the municipal and general government. Such cooperation can take many forms, sponsoring events / giving resources (computers, physical space or employee’s time) and of course creating more jobs for open source people, which in turn will support more people doing open source for longer period.

One of the guys thought  benefit the local community will benefit from a mirror server, but that also requires to see the network topology of Albania to make sure it makes sense to invest in one (resources and effort).

We continued to how it would be best to contribute to open source, mostly that Debian, although great isn’t always the best target, and they should always try to work with the relevant upstream. It’s better to translate gnome upstream then sending the Debian maintainer the translation to be included in the package. That shortcut can work if there’s something urgent like a really problematic typo or something what unless done before the release would require a long long wait (e.g. the next Debian release). I gave an example that for important RTL bugs in LibreOffice I’ve asked Rene Engelhard to include the patch instead of waiting for the next release and its inclusion in Debian.

When I started the conversation I mentioned that we have 33% females out of the 12 participants. And that’s considered good comparing to other computer/technical events, especially open source. To my surprise the guys told me that in the Open Labs hackerspace the situation is the opposite, they have more female members than male (14 female to 12 male). Also in their last OSCAL event they had 220 women and 100 men. I think there’s grounds to learn what happens there, as the gals do something damn right over there. Maybe Outreachy rules for Albania should be different (:

Later that day I did another session with Redon Skikuli to be more practical, so I started to search on an Albanian dictionary for spell checking, found an old one and asked Redon to check the current status with the guy. And also check info about such technical stuff with Social Sciences and Albanological Section of the Academy of Sciences of Albania, who is officially the regulator for Albanian.

In parallel I started to check how to include the dictionary in LibreOffice, and asked Rene Engelhard to enable Albanian language pack in Debian (as upstream already provide one). Checking the dictionaries I’ve took the opportunity to update the Hebrew. It took me a little longer as I needed to get rust off my LibreOffice repositories (dictionaries is a different repository) and also the gerrit setup. But in the end: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/41864/

With the talks toady and the starting to combine both Debian and LibreOffice work today (although much of it was talking) – I felt like I’m the right person on the right place. I’m happy to be here and contribute to two projects in parallel (:

Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice

Reports of my assimilation are greatly exaggerated.

— Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: First Contact

(This is a repost from the discussion on the board-discuss@documentfoundation.org discussion — including all typos and misspellings — for more visibility.)

Hi all,

I recently had a look at a variety of challenges the LibreOffice community is facing wrt Hackfests and especially also tenders:

Status Quo
==========

– due to a set of reasons based in the size of the project, the scope and selection of tender topics, the rules of properly running an NGO and the distibution of skilsets and available time in the BoD it is a lot harder to oversee the tenders for TDF than it would be for a for-profit organization.

– also, for historic reasons mostly, these tasks have been limited to the BoD mostly, while as an open disttributed and tranmsparent community we should not needlessly concentrate this work: rather the challenges and solutions should be shared as widely as possible in the community (and beyond).

– the waterfall modelled tenders have no iterative approach. Because of this they also tend to be mostly quite small, leading to significant overhead at both TDF and for the business implementing the tender.

– contracting out tender in bulk in a blackbox fashion naturally limits the ressources spend on documentation of discovered challenges. It thereby also needlessly limits the educational output to the community. There is such output, but it clearly could be better.

– beyond that we reduced doing Hackfests ~2 years ago, limiting the exchange of knowledge they provide.

– Unlike in the good old days, we dont have urgent infrastructual problems and the like to solve that would rally developers around topics. So motivation for certified devs to attend has shrunk. And those that do attend usually use the facetime for syncing on various issues, while the actual work on the code is somewhat limited. Even more when there is an emergency at the (professional) developers employer (Unfortunately, there often is.)

Suggested new format
====================

So everyone hip in the last decade would see the words “waterfall”, “non-iterative”, “controlling overhead” would scream “get agile” from the top of their lungs. In general that might solve the practical problems, but as agile is essentially a way to move the customer in close enough to create the trust and bond allowing the overhead to go away, that is exactly what we need to watch out for and avoid: the foundation should not bind itself too close to any single commercial provider of services in its core operations.

But maybe revitalizing Hackfests are an opportunity here. Here is a suggested new format:

– TDF selects a small of the tenderable topics (6 man days)

– TDF selects a “product owner” for the topic (could be an TDF employee or a qualified and motivated TDF member)

– TDF hires 2 certified developers from LibreOffices companies for 3 days each

– TDF offers 2 days “development training” to its members, but also to the general community: ideally we select four people for this.

– All are invited to a two day Hackfest.

– Hired consultants are expect to pair program with one of the volunteers on each day, with the hired person not distracted by other business and doing the main effort with the paired volunteer focusing on learning.

– On each day, one of the hired developers works on the projector of the room, allowing other partcipants to the Hackfest to observe and learn.

– Closing the day, each paired team will give a 5-15 minutes lightning talk on their progress and challenges over the day. This presentation should be done by the paired volunteer to the best of their ability and recorded e.g. by TDF staff for publication.

– Rest of the extra booked day should be used for a 1-hour prep Hangouts, follow ups and overtime.

– Selected paired volunteers should ideally be 50% certified or uncertified developers and at least 25% volunteers active in non-development areas (e.g. documentation, l10n …).

– Beyond this, it will be a “normal” Hackfest allowing others to mix an mingle.

What this might solve (hopefully)
=================================
– Controlling and the need to proof due diligence going away as it is performed right in the open and self-documented, reducing the vast redtape needed to set up and run tenders in the first place

– the involving the broader community is much more involved in this major aspect of the foundations work

– the community gets a much better transparency on the real cost and challenges
of development

– we approach a more iterative/agile approach without being hit by the challenges this usually implies for an NGO

– we provide clear and visible progress and effort on education for the community and the general public

– we might help onboarding of new developers and make LibreOffice more interesting for contribution

– if this works on this 4-6 man day scale, we might consider extending it (e.g. a three developer week[1] with prep is already a 21 man day project)

There has already been some internal feedback from a smaller circle I shared this with first: There was some concern (one pointing out this new format isnt free of challenges[1], one asking for bigger steps as this proposal was considered to small/iterative[2]), but beyond that the feedback was generally quite positive.

As such, Im looking for people who would like to join in and help giving this new format a try: The starting point would be organizing a broad, welcoming and well-organized Hackfest at a location easily reachable for many in the community: Thus at well-connected place in europe. It should also have local people on the ground, who are enthusiastic to make this a success.

If you are interested in helping with this, either as:

– someone on the ground helping to organize the Hackfest

– someone who wants to pair program with a hired certified developer at a Hackfest

– someone who is just interested in joining the Hackfest in general

– someone who helps fleshing out the details of this idea

feel free to contact me. I will try to set up a team of people interested in getting this off the ground. As noted above, if this proves to be successful, this might be the start of something excited and big bringing this community and project to a new level!

Another (final) note: This list is currently unfortunately less used than it should be to provide information on the proceedings of the foundation. The Board is mindful of that and tries to change this. This is a start. Feel free to share this message to those in the community who might have missed it as they are not (yet) subscribed to board-discuss@.

Best,

Bjoern

[1] But neither is the status quo — in many more ways.
[2] note that the two kinds of criticism pointed in exactly opposite directions

If you are interested in this effort, feel free to:

• contribute to the wikipage created about the first next generation Hackfest
• take part in the conference call for organizing it

UPDATE: Time and date for the call are set: Sunday 2017-09-03 14:30 UTC, Talkyoo room 21 24 86 #. Please join!

At the beginning of the new year, the Tilburg University organizes the Tilburg Orientation Program (TOP) presenting all kind of interesting and cool stuff for the new students. So at August 22, a nice and sunny day, there was a huge event in a park with lots of plays and booths and music and beer. And: three people from the Dutch LibreOffice team were there! We had a nice booth and prepared both flyers and small cards. Especially the cards were handsome to reach out to people: "want a free card for free software" is a short and appealing message. Thus we handed out a six to seven hundred of the cards. Of course we had good talks too: dozens of individuals and groups wanted more information. And there are people that know and use open source. Or were just in need for a good office-suite for their new bought Mac book ;) It's always interesting to see how people react. For example if you tell that Microsoft doesn't really loves students, when they offer software very cheap, but that they just want to make you very well used to it, so that they can charge high prices when you've finished your study.. And compare that to LibreOffice: free always, at school, home, office. And of course free choice for donations or paid support if desired! Was fun to hear some of the students call the way Microsoft does this "the drugs dealer method" ;) Anyways: Pieter Kristensen, Freek de Kruijf and me had great fun with the people and the music and showing LibreOffice. To be continued next years, as far as I'm concerned.. :) Not the least since universities are an excellent place to support the importance of ODF as sustainable and durable document standard.

I worked further on the small pc with an wireless access point and added a wordpress instance. I exported the work, I already did on my notebook and imported it into the database on the small pc. I configured wordpress to point to the imported database. I copied also the wordpress theme over and installed a missing event calendar plugin. There is only one missing point. I had to copy the content from the uploads directory too. That’s on my todo.

I announced my work on automatically updating builds and the support for Linux daily builds a while ago. The plan has always been to get this feature ready for Windows release builds in time for the 6.0 release. We are by now about halfway through the feature development cycle for the release and I’m finally able to announce the accomplishment of the next milestone: automatically updating daily Windows builds.

You can fetch the daily builds from the @38-updater build directory. The builds are currently produced on my TDF-owned Windows 7 build bot and will normally be updated during the European night. Currently the builds are en-US only but I plan to add additional languages and a few more disabled features over time.

Note that the archives contain one extra level of directories compared to Linux archives with long directory names which can cause problems with the Windows path length limit. If your build does not start, move the installation up in the directory hierarchy and shorten the directory names.

Limitations

After many comments related to my last blog post about the automatic updater were by people not reading the limitations and plans (or missing plans) of our Linux updater builds (we don’t plan to provide updater enabled release builds on Linux!!) I’m going to list them first this time.

The support that has been finished by now is limited to daily builds that are “installed” in user writeable locations. This is not yet a complete updater for our release builds and is mainly for the QA team and power users that want to test the current daily master builds.

We can not yet update builds installed through MSI and can not handle the user account control which will be necessary for correctly installed LibreOffice. However, similar to the automatically updating Linux builds, this is one step on the way to automatically updating Windows release builds.

Implementation

Many parts of the original blog post about the updater are also true for the Windows updater code. The biggest change is the switch from a two step update, first downloading and creating an updated copy and later replacing the installation with the updated copy, to a one step update, first downloading and later applying the update in place. This change was necessary as Windows prevents modifying files that are already open. Additionally, this makes it significantly easier to implement a secure updater for MSI/MSP installations.

One small additional feature managed to creep into the code while I was waiting for builds to finish. I managed to enable the updater executable GUI so that we can now show a dialog with a progress bar while the update is running. The GUI is already working on Windows and I’m close to finishing the work on the Linux version.

Apart from these two larger changes, I was mostly fixing the Windows integration. This includes handling windows paths, integrating the updater with the windows crypto system, and making sure that my tooling handles the special cases of our Windows updates. For anyone interested in the details I try to tag all commits with the updater prefix.

Future

As I mentioned in the beginning the overall goal is still an automatic updater for our 6.0 release builds. On the way to this goal I still have two big milestones:

1. Generation of MSP updates and infrastructure to apply them through our MAR file based updater. The Mozilla developers were once working on integrating MSI support into their updater code as part of moz#231062 but abandoned that work.
2. Integration of the updater service to allow installing in the normal Program Files directory and integration with the UAC. Most of the code is already there and already built as part of the updater builds but the integration into our (horrible Perl mess of) packaging and installer code is still missing.

If I manage to finish these two milestones by mid of November in time for the feature freeze and the release engineering team and ESC are satisfied we will have automatically updating builds in time for the LibreOffice 6.0 release. By using the current updater builds and reporting any problems to me, you can help making sure that this will become reality.

As always additional help is welcome. Just ping me (moggi) on IRC (#libreoffice-dev channel on Freenode) and talk to me how you can help. We also always have tasks that don’t require any C++ skills and I’m currently looking especially for interested developers with python and django skills (The whole server side of the automatic updater as well as a large part of the crash reporter is written in python with django). If you know another programming language and want to help with LibreOffice please contact us on IRC or on our developer mailing list (libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org).

 

 

These awesome three months of summer spent developing for LibreOffice under Google Summer of Code, have filled me with great zeal and zest. A plethora of important additions was made to the software bundle under the project titled “Usability of Special Characters”, and these new features will be made available in the version 6.0 of LibreOffice (Release Notes for 6.0). Here is a glimpse of what the users will be receiving in the new update.

Note: Please zoom-in the web page or open the GIF’s in the new tab if the character grid is not correctly visible.

 

‣ Search functionality via generic code point name

Glyph name properties have been introduced to LibreOffice using the API provided by International Components for Unicode (ICU). The program identifies glyphs according to their names provided by ICU and then, the search results are displayed. There’s a display label which is dedicated to glyph’s Unicode name.

‣ Inter-font dynamic glyph search

As simple as it could be made, a user can now type the name of the glyph and scroll between fonts until the desired results are shown.

‣ Recently Used Characters and Favorite Characters

‣ Toolbar Dropdown control for Quick Access!

In pursuance of providing quick access to the above Recent and Favorite character list, a toolbar dropdown control has been developed. It is supposed to replace the current toolbar button which opens the special character dialog in the currently circulated LibreOffice 5.3.

The GIF below is an example of how easy a user can find the desired symbols and can pin it for quick access in future.

‣ Context-menu and Mouse click controls for easier interaction

Link to the major patch submissions:

‣ Glyph View and Recent Characters Control in Special Characters dialog https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=710a39414569995bd5a8631a948c939dc73bcef9

‣ Favourites feature in Special characters https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=f9efee1f87262b0088c249b2c306fb53ca729b53

‣ Special Characters Toolbar Dropdown Control https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=800ac37021e3f8859a52c5eebca261a5d3bc5a11

‣ Unicode Character Names Integration using ICU https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=43d65d1ab81a278e1352f64def9ca63b9e7dfab9

‣ Search feature for Special Characters https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=e74be9ad773c7769c5d8765bb2ac234967e420ec

I was mentored by Samuel Mehrbrodt, Heiko Tietze, and Thorsten Behrens in GSoC 2017. I would like to give my regards to the LibreOffice community which helped me through the deadlocks I faced during the project. It has been an awesome two-year journey with LibreOffice, and I hope it will remain the same in future and the open-source technologies will flourish with their full potential and thrive to its zenith.

I upgradet my notebook to openSuSE Leap 42.3 with zypper dup and everything went well. It took only a relatively short time in comparison with an upgrade of MS Windows and I had not to restart my box several times.

The upgrade needed only some edits to the software repositories that I used for the notebook. Nearly all of them needed only a change of the version number in the URL Form 42.2 to 42.3. The LibreOffice Factory repository (needed especially for building) needed a different tweek. There is no sub-repo for 42.3 yet. This I had to change to the sub-repo ‚openSUSE_Factory‘ instead. That was all I had to do before I run the zypper dup command.

Really easy to update the Linux distribution. And I had not to reedit my user configuration etc. Everything works AS before.

I added a new wireless network card to a small pc and updated it to the current OpenSuSE Leap 42.3 Linux. I want to use this box for showing people some free software at work. They should also be able to connect their devices via wireless net to the small pc and get their hands dirty by trying out the free software and e.g. edit some files or sites.

Because the wireless network card didn’t support the master mode I need a program that fix this problem. I found the program hostap, that I could install easily. I made some changes to the hostapd.conf file, e.g. set a proper name for the SSID and activated encryption with WPA2.

I had also to configure a DHCP-server and a DNS-server (and to install the appropriate packages for this services). I also made the ssh service available through the firewall. Thus I could reach the small pc via ssh login now. Finished for today.

I used the dry wheather and went out for another run. It went better than eine days ago, but it seemed I bot a bit rusty this season. Will try a third one in some days to get the full round weithin an acceptable time slot.

Being an open source product is one of the pillars of LibreOffice. Technically, that means the source code is available with a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.…

The post Survey: What aspects are important to you? appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Dear Asian LibreOffice folks,

The Call for Proposals of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo has been opened since several days ago (I'm sorry for later notice here).

In this event, the committee will also have a sub-event named "LibreOffice mini-conference 2017 Tokyo."  This may consist several LibreOffice talks which would be grouped.

So, please consider to submit talks about LibreOffice in that CfP.  Following topics are welcome (just examples, you could add some more):

• LibreOffice core development
• LibreOffice extensions development
• Document templates creation
• Migrations to LibreOffice
• Translating of UI / Help / documents / announcements
• QA (globally or locally)

I spent some day in Taipei now.  It is last night (sadly) of my Taipei trip so I would like to remain some note my Taipei days here.

TL; DR: I love this trip in Taipei.  I promise that I'll visit here again soon.

Sunday: COSCUP

I enjoyed some talks (about Rust, openSUSE, and desktops), although I couldn't completely understand Chinese.  Most interested talk to me was about TALOS project.  I think that saving a language from extinction is one of the most meaningful usages of FLOSS, and it relates the next decade manifesto of The Document Foundation.

Of course, I talked several people who already I met, or new to me.  It was an awesome time.

In my previous post Forward Secrecy Encryption for Apache, I’ve described an Apache SSLCipherSuite setup to support forward secrecy which allowed TLS 1.0 and up, avoided SSLv2 but included SSLv3.

With the new PODDLE attack (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption), SSLv3 (and earlier versions) should generally be avoided. Which means the cipher configurations discussed previously need to be updated.

I’ll first recap the configuration requirements:

• Use Perfect Forward Secrecy where possible.
• Prefer known strong ciphers.
• Avoid RC4, CRIME, BREACH and POODLE attacks.
• Support browsing down to Windows XP.
• Enable HSTS as a bonus.

The Windows XP point is a bit tricky, since IE6 as shipped with XP originally only supports SSLv3, but later service packs brought IE8 which at least supports TLS 1.0 with 3DES.

Here’s the updated configuration:

SSLEngine On
SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
# Prefer PFS, allow TLS, avoid SSL, for IE8 on XP still allow 3DES
SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+AESGCM EECDH EDH+AESGCM EDH+aRSA HIGH !MEDIUM !LOW !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !RC4 !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"
# Prevent CRIME/BREACH compression attacks
SSLCompression Off
# Commit to HTTPS only traffic for at least 180 days
Header add Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000"

Last but not least, I have to recommend www.ssllabs.com again, which is a great resource to test SSL/TLS setups. In the ssllabs, the above configuration yields an A-rating for testbit.eu.

UPDATE: The above configuration also secures HTTPS connections against the FREAK (CVE-2015-0204) attack, as can be tested with the following snippet:

openssl s_client -connect testbit.eu:443 -cipher EXPORT

Connection attempts to secure sites should result in a handshake failure.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation provides a webserver configuration generator that almost guarantees an A+ rating on ssllabs: Generate Mozilla Security Recommended Web Server Configuration Files.

You can load any .NET code in FbNetExternalEngine also as Proof Of Concept you can also load Firebird Embedded inside that in server (Firebird inside Firebird in DotNet External Engine).

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With the release of LibreOffice 5.4.0 today, I’m most happy to announce support for OpenPGP / GnuPG keys when signing ODF documents in LibreOffice under Linux. This is great if you already use GPG/PGP for email with your peers, as it ensures authenticity of your ODF documents regardless of the mode of transport or storage.

For any ODF document, simply navigate to File->Digital signatures in LibreOffice, and the certificate selection dialog will transparently list all suitable signing keys on your system, including those from Kleopatra, KGpg, GPA or Enigmail – that perhaps you’re using already for secure email.

Pick a GPG key, and LibreOffice will delegate all password entry and GPG crypto to tried-and-true system components (the LibreOffice process won’t even see you passphrase):

We also made signature status much more visible – before, signed documents only had a tiny icon down in the status bar (both for valid, as well as for broken or untrusted signatures – not ideal for noticing). LibreOffice there follows the trend set by browsers, to make security features (and broken trust) much more obvious. Your validly signed document will now show up like this:

Work is ongoing on adding support for Windows (and perhaps other platforms) as well – as of today, LibreOffice 5.4 supports this feature only under Linux. Furthermore, we also plan to provide GPG-based encryption of ODF documents (currently, document encryption is based on individual passwords), stay tuned!

This work was generously sponsored by the German federal office for information security (BSI), and of course builds on top of great software like GnuPG – many thanks!

Filed under: LibreOffice Tagged: crypto, gnupg, libreoffice

A beta version of a 64bit Firebird 3.0.3 for MacOSX is now available as a download for those of you who might be interested in trying it. http://www.ibphoenix.com/download/firebird/30

Of the series of precious places to hack on LibreOffice.