andreasma at Free Software and other topics
I worked on the first bits for a new Plone development environment. I’ll use this to create a new website for the ODFAuthors team. The new site should run on Plone 5.1 or later. Maybe it is possible to upgrade the site to a Plone version that runs on Python 3.
I read already on a blog of a Plone developer that Core-Plone is already ported to Python 3, but that there are a big bunch of tests that are not yet ported and need some love (and work time).
The perception of an organization most often differs between people who are members of the inner circle and the public (public area of the organization). As a member of the inner circle oneself may have a belief about this view from 10 thousend feet hight, but that’s often only an idea. So am I.
If you are inside the inner circle you get a lot of messages, take place in discussions and had to decide on some topics. You share the impression that the leading body of your organization is always busy and take action for the organizations good.
I left the inner circle (due to no further candidacy) some month ago and got a different view now. I got – like others in the (organization) public – only little or no information about the work of the bodies of the organization (not even about the next meeting time etc. of the leading body). This opens my eyes and I’m able to comphrehend the view of other project members much better now. Thus I’m very happy that I took the decision to not stand for a candidacy again. It’s always good to change your view, thus you could understand the other position (view).
The Plone developers work hard to port the CMS to Python 3 before the support for Python 2 ends. This will be in about 1 and a half year from now. LibreOffice made this step a longer time ago and comes currently with Python 3.5.4. Thus the LibreOffice Python programming environment and connection will get updates and security fixes after the end of 2019 too.
If you use another office suite with Python support you should take a closer look into the supported / delivered version. If it is not Python 3 yet have an eye on alternatives in time.
I researched a bit about Learn Managment Systems (LMS) and came across a system named Ilias. This LMS is used by some institutions, e.g. the Fachhochule für Verwaltung Nordrhein-Westfalen (a university of applied science in North Rhine Westfalia). I currently got an user account at their LMS and could do some work in a user space. The LMS and their instance seemed to have a lot of features. The development of the Ilias LMS seemed to be very active. They publish regularly minor releases.
But I was also curious about the admin site of the Ilias LMS and thus I took the time to install an instance on my notebook. I used the current version 5.3.5 and copied all files to a webcontent directory of the Apache webserver. Once I pointed my browser to that directory I got a webpage with the check of the installation requirements. I installed the missing ones and set the necessary permissions. Then I followed the next steps of the Ilias installation. I got an issue with the database installation, because the setting for ‚max_allowed_packet‘ didn’t suit the needs of Ilias. I fixed that on the command line of MariaDB. I logged into MariaDB with admin rights and typed on the command line: ‚SET Global max_allowed_packet = [new value];‘. Then everything went fine and the database was created and populated.
Once I finished the further steps of the installation, I got an adminstrator account. I could log into this account with the standard password and replace this with my own one. I created a new user and configured its settings, e.g. the language setting. I took a short look at the available tools of the LMS, especially those for the learn managment. Ilias came with an impressive set of such tools by default. I’ll examine this tools and will look for additional plugins next time.
I worked with a small team on a WordPress website project for some month. We finished the site during the last weeks and decided to replace the old website with this new WordPress site today. Because the new website lives in a subdirectory of the webspace I had to make some edits inside the WordPress admin backend (e.g. changing some general URLs) and fix some hard coded links. This took some effort but in the end I managed to get the site live.
This project is technically done yet. I’m looking forward to some further projects using FOSS software to support the work of this organization of volunteers.
I worked on a notebook of colleague with a broken hard disk during the weekend. I removed the old disk and added a solid state drive to it. I installed also operating system to the new disk and in addition she got some free software on it, particularly the new LibreOffice 6.
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 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.