LXDE FOUNDATION

The LXDE Foundation is a registered non-profit organization that supports the development of the LXDE project and represents the LXDE community in legal and financial matters.

The LXDE Foundation works for the goals of LXDE and its global community to create a faster, lightweight and more energy efficient desktop environment, especially for low spec computers that connect easily with applications in local clouds like freifunk and global clouds like the Internet. The LXDE Foundation is acting as the point of contact for the LXDE project.

“The Association’s purpose is the promotion and distribution of free desktop software in terms of free software, and the program package ‘Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, LXDE’ in particular, to promote the free exchange of knowledge and equality of opportunity in accessing software as well as education, science and research.” (Oct. 24, 2008, Articles of LXDE Foundation)

The LXDE Foundation supports the development of LXDE by distributing the desktop environment and by securing funding and hardware. The LXDE Foundation e.V. is a non-profit legal entity representing the LXDE Project. In October 2008 the LXDE Foundation e.V. was registered as an association under German law. The “e.V.” stands for “eingetragener Verein” which means “registered non-profit association”. LXDE is an extremely faster and more energy saving desktop environment. It was started by Hong Jen Yee in 2005 with the development of the first component PCMan File Manager.

Soon an international community joined development. On October 24, 2008 a group of contributors, supporters and developers met at the c-base in Berlin to found the LXDE Foundation. Members of the foundation currently include contributors from Taiwan, Germany, France, Spain, the US, China, Turkey, Korea, Afghanistan, Uganda, Ghana, Poland, India, Greece and Italy.

 

 

THE WIRELESS COMMONS MANIFESTO

We have formed the Wireless Commons because a global wireless network is within our grasp. We will work to define and achieve a wireless commons built using open spectrum, and able to connect people everywhere. We believe there is value to an independent and global network which is open to the public. We will break down commercial, technical, social and political barriers to the commons. The wireless commons bridges one of the few remaining gaps in universal communication without interference from middlemen and meddlers.

Humanity is on the verge of a turning point because the Internet has transformed the way humans relate with one another. All communication can be traced to a human relationship, whether it’s lovers exchanging instant messages or teenagers sharing music. The Internet has given us the ability to communicate faster and more cheaply than ever before in history.

The Internet’s value increases exponentially with the number of people who are able to participate. In today’s world, communication can take place without the use of antiquated telecommunications networks. The organizations that control these networks are limping anachronisms that are constrained by the expense and physical necessity of using wires to build their networks. Because of this, they cannot serve the great mass of people who stand to benefit from a wireless commons. Their interests diverge from ours, and their control over the network strangles our ability to communicate.

Low-cost wireless networking equipment which can operate in unlicensed bands of the spectrum has started another revolution. Suddenly, ordinary people have the means to create a network independent of any physical constraint except distance. Wireless can travel through walls, across property boundaries and through a community. Many communities have formed worldwide to help organize these networks. They are forming the basis for the removal of the traditional telecommunication networks as an intermediary in human communication.

The challenge facing community networks is the one limiting factor of wireless communication: distance. The relationships that can be formed across a community wireless network are limited by their physical reach. Typically these networks are growing to the size of a city, and growth beyond that point requires coordination and a strategic vision for community wireless networks as a whole. Without this coordination, it is hard to see how the worldwide community of wireless networking groups will ever merge their systems and create a true alternative to existing telecommunication networks.

There are many barriers to the creation of a global network. So far, the focus has been on identifying the technical barriers and developing methods to overcome them. But technical problems are the least of our worries, the business, political and social issues are the real challenges facing community networks. Hardware and software vendors need to understand the business rationale for implementing our technical solutions. Politicians need to understand our requirements for universal access to open spectrum. The public needs to understand that the network exists and how to get access. Unless these problems are identified and addressed, the community wireless movement will never have influence beyond a local level.

Most importantly, the network needs to be accessible to all and provisioned by everyone who can provide. By adding enough providers to the network, we can bridge the physical gaps imposed by the range of our equipment. The network is a finite resource which is owned and used by the public, and as such it needs to be nurtured by the public. This, by its very nature, is a commons.

Becoming a part of the commons means being more than a consumer. By signing your name below, you become an active participant in a network that is far more than the sum of its users. You will strive to solve the social, political and technical challenges we face. You will provide the resources your community consumes by co-operating with total strangers to build the network that we all dream of.

faq! What is ninux.org?

What is ninux.org? ninux.org is a wireless community network: a network of computers connected without wires, created by a community of geeks, radio amateurs and fans in Rome. What you mean? Think about deploying a telephone line from your house to your neighbour. Now imagine that your neighbour would do the same with his neighbour, until the process covers a full neighbourhood or a city. And now imagine, thanks to these cables, to have the opportunity to freely speak with the people of the whole city, using a community network. Now imagine, in addition to speaking for free, to be able to share pictures and movies using your PC. At last, imagine to get rid of all the cables (hence removing any need to hide these cables somewhere) and use the radiowaves. In particular we use the 802.11 technology, also known as Wi-Fi. Currently on the market there are several models of Access Points (or Wireless Routers) that use 802.11 technology, which also enable you to load a Linux Firmware onto it to realize this kind of networks at a reasonable price. Interesting huh? Where did this idea comes from? Wireless Community Networks have been around for many years in several parts of the world. At the beginning we took inspiration from Seattle Wireless but now we have a conception of a wireless network community very close to the one of Freifunk. Here and here you can find a list of free networks all over the World. Some of them are inspired by the WirelessCommonsManifesto, the same that inspired our ninux.org manifesto. When will ninux.org reach me, so that you can give me an Internet connection? The aim of ninux.org is the creation of an urban intranet for experimental purposes only, so no Internet. Can I help? Sure! You can contribute in many ways. You may want to subscribe to our mailing lists, or if you are in Italy you can come to our meetings, or help by editing this wiki (please read WikiEditingGuidelines), partecipate to Events, or help in the translation of Wireless Networking in the Developing World. See also “Can I create a network node?” Do you have a forum? No. The majority of us prefers the MailingLists + [[|wiki]] approach, i.e. no forum. But you can find the Web archive of the mailing list here or use the rss feed. Can I create a network node? Unfortunately in Italy, unlike the rest of the World, the law doesn’t seem to allow to freely create 802.11 (Wi-Fi) radio links on public spaces. The legislative situation is very unclear (at least for us!), but it seems that a radio-amateur license is requiered (which involves costs, and the passing of a written exam), or a wi-fi license (which costs money as well, and must be “updated” every time a change is made to a node). But the 2.4GHz frequency should be free and open to everybody, like bluetooth, that operates on the same spectrum of Wi-Fi, but without the need of licenses or fees. Getting back to the question, we cannot tell you to create a network node. But what is a “network node”? A network node may be defined as the Hardware and software required to interconnect to other nodes in a network. How do I create a network node? There are many ways to do it. Read the HowToInEnglish and the Hardware pages. Usually a node is made of an antenna with an Access Point, powered through PowerOverEthernet. You can also find information in the WNDW book. What is the topology of the network? Which routing protocols are you using? Ninux.org Is a mesh network based on the OLSR routing protocol. You can find the OLSRTopology here. What does “ninux” mean? The name comes from Nino, the founder of the project, but for many of us the meaning is No Internet, Network Under eXperiment.

Freifunk Google Summer of Code Project LXNM (Lightweight Network Manager)

Fred Chien from Taiwan has published some results on the LXDE blog about his current work for the LXNetworkManager and some screenshots are presented here.

10 valuable Twitter utilities for business users

One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.

But the real kicker was the fact that Twitter released an open API for developers. That allowed programmers to extend Twitter in lots of different directions and experiment with different tools and utilities to improve Twitter.

In 2007, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told ReadWriteWeb, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.

ASUS is preparing a low-cost touchscreen ebook

This serves as a follow-up to a previous article: CourseSmart, Kindle DX and e-textbooks.

ASUS popularized the netbook phenomenon with its Eee PC, after OLPC had created the category. Now, the company wants to do the same thing with ebook readers, a category that Amazon and Sony have pioneered and turned into a niche market in recent years.

Manually Uninstalling Oracle 10g From Windows

Oracle’s installation utility has a nasty habit of leaving a lot of items behind. I wrote this up to document what I’ve found you need to do to uninstall Oracle 10g manually. This is specific to 10g and Windows XP. Removing 9i is very similar if I remember right, but who’s using 9i anymore?

The first thing you should do, is go ahead and run the installation tool to do an uninstall. It probably will leave some things behind, but it’s worth running. Then go through this list and remove anything it missed. This list is detailed enough though, that I believe even if you did not run the uninstallation tool, this would fully uninstall Oracle.

The most commonly missed item is to make sure you remove everything from the GAC because the uninstaller doesn’t appear to. I get to that later, but if you wanted to know the largest source of uninstallation problems, it’s libraries remaining in the GAC.

Ways to get the most out of Bing

Using Google to search for everything is so ingrained into our computer-user personas, it’s hard to imagine using anything else. Even so, Bing does offer a lot of features that make it a worthy addition to your Internet browsing toolkit, once you learn more about what the site has to offer. Here are 10 things you should know about using Bing.

Directory: 100 technology experts on Twitter

One the most important — and most difficult — things to do when you first start using Twitter is to develop a good list of people to follow. You can check your friends’ lists of followers, watch for interesting people that come up in @replies, and look for personalities and brands who promote their Twitter addresses. But, it can take several months to build up a good list. For technology professionals, I’m going to give you a big head start.

Below is a list of 100 technology experts who are active on Twitter. This list is dominated by tech media professionals and pundits but also includes some CEOs, CTOs, and developers who are worth listening to.

Still, even if you choose to follow everyone on my list, I’d encourage you to regularly cull the list of people you follow. If someone regularly posts useless information or lots of stuff you don’t care about, unfollow the person. That’s what I do. I keep the list of people I follow to about 100-200 and I often add new people while regularly weeding out my list of people who aren’t providing anything interesting or useful.

I wish there was an easy way for you to simply push a button and add all 100 people on this list to your “following” list on Twitter. Unfortunately, there’s not. So you will need to go to the Twitter profile of each person you’re interested in Following. This is something that Twitter needs to improve. It needs a group or list feature so that people can set up lists like this and users can then follow the entire list with a single click. It should function the same way OPML files function for lists of RSS feeds.

10 cool things you can do with a USB flash drive

Transporting your data is probably the most common use for a USB flash drive. But there’s a world of other things you can do with these handy pocket-size drives. Here are 10 ways you can use that USB flash drive to do more than just move data.