Category Posts: Open Source

Nearly 2 weeks ago, we had our first ZOL Startup Challenge final where 3 talented winners were chosen from a very strong field. Since then the dust has settled and a number of people have made comments on the Challenge and process. I thought I’d give some thoughts as the idea originator, main sponsor and one of the four judges.

I recently wanted to move a database from one computer to another. Fortunately I found a welcome guide at linuxjournal.com. Moving the files is not really difficult, you can use FTP. Moving the database is a bit more challenging however.

Since I started working with the internet back in 2001, I have used open source software to create. Indeed, back then open source software was the only opportunity to create online for a lot of people. I was in a Zimbabwean city called Gweru, and software piracy then was not as rampant as it the case now.

We spent the better part of today at the Startup Challenge interacting with tech startups and watching them demo. It was an exciting day, filled with a lot of great ideas presented by some of the most interesting Zimbabweans in tech. It’s not easy to explain how it feels to be amoung such amazing people and watch them passionately talk about their startups.

On 7 July, Kenya became the first Africa country to launch the Open Data initiative. Kenya will make some government data available online through a platform called Socrata, which allows users to view different data at national, county and constituency levels. Users can manipulate the views of the data in various ways and can even create maps from it.

Two weeks ago, I posted an article on how to connect to the internet using mobile broadband (the dongles) in this Ubuntu How-to series of articles. The article solicited some great comments from readers with some comments providing alternative methods.

A few months ago a friend lend me his laptop and I did what I always do; partitioned it and installed the latest Ubuntu operating system. It was a pretty old machine so the built in wireless card was no good. So I decided to do a little shopping and I was captivated by the Intex usb wireless adapter: it is cheap (about $14 in most shops) and portable (no larger than a flash disk). The downside, as I later discovered the hard way, is that this adapter requires a little tweaking to work with Ubuntu.

I have said elsewhere in the series that the Ubuntu experience is not complete unless you have internet; good internet I mean. In addition, I provided a guide to choosing your ISP. In this article I will provide you with a guide to connecting to the internet using mobile broadband (the dongles) but before doing so I must expressly say three things:

One of the good things about the good old Firefox 3 was that when in Ubuntu flash videos were downloaded to the /tmp directory. All you had to do was wait for the buffering to complete, minimize the Firefox window, got to the /tmp directory and copy and paste the video into the folder of your choosing. Playing the video is easy enough; vlc plays pretty much any format from .mp4 to .flv.

In my previous article I mentioned the fact that Ubuntu is not much fun without the Internet. It has been my experience that not all Internet Service Providers (ISP) are the same and that there are some caveats for a Zimbabwean Ubuntu user/administrator when it comes to either choosing an ISP or administering his system especially in the matter of upgrades and downloads and indeed sometimes this is critical if your system will get connected to the internet at all.

The first thing anyone ever notices after installing Ubuntu is that they cannot play mp3s, .avi/.vob/.mpeg/ or any of their videos unless you are one of those freaks that happened to have .ogg media files in your music collection. With this discovery comes shock, anger and finally frustration.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, released a new version of the popular open source operating system last week.

This latest version, named ‘Natty Narwhal’, comes with some changes including a move from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice as the default office suite and a new desktop environment called Unity which, until now, was only used on the Netbook edition. The Ubuntu netbook edition itself has been merged with the desktop edition.

Of the new electronic classifieds platforms to emerge in Zimbabwe’s during the past few years, Dipleague and classifieds.co.zw stand out and have achieved relative success to Zimbabwean internet users.

It’s common knowledge in Zimbabwe that to get some meaningful response for a classifieds advert you cannot afford to ignore the 2 platforms. And unlike traditional newspaper classifieds posting adverts on these platforms is free.

As I went through the various articles and tweets this on year’s first IDLELO conference, I couldn’t help wonder about Zimbabwe’s standing on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I generally find FOSS issues interesting and intriguing. I’m quite fascinated by basic concepts of humanity at work.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) 2009 global software piracy study released this month showed a global piracy rate rise to 43% from 41% in 2008. BSA says this means that “for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold in 2009, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software also made its way into the market” globally.