Cisco is Opening Their H.264 Codec for Free

Cisco has just announced that they will release their H.264 codec for public and it will be open-sourced so that it will boost WebRTC deployment in many other products, such as Firefox who have also responded by making an announcement that they will support it as soon as possible.

Cisco will release a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet and this enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. This will surely boster WebRTC implementation in Firefox and hopefully Google Chrome will follow soon enough.

I love it when big organization realize that by opening technology will surely give them more benefits instead of disadvantages.

Go Open Source ......

Upgrading Slackware Machine

Few days ago, i perform my biggest upgrade ever on one of the server running Slackware. It was running Slackware 12.2 and since it will be EOL'ed by Patrick on December 2013, with two months left, i think it's time to move on. I decided to upgrade to Slackware 14.0, and i'm using slackpkg to help me on this one.

Since on that machine i have all the Slackware repository for 12.2 up until 14.0 (and even -Current), it's so easy to do so. I just changed the default configuration of slackpkg to use DOWNLOAD_ALL=on just to make sure everything is downloaded before attempting to upgrade the packages. Next is updating the mirror location to the local files and change it to Slackware 13.0 and ran

• slackpkg update gpg
• slackpkg update
• slackpkg install-new
• slackpkg upgrade-all
• slackpkg clean-system

After all of these steps are done, i reviewed changes on the configuration and merged them and make sure that it still worked. This is the most time-consuming if you have so many customized configuration. Since this is a server, there weren't so many packages installed and most of it are basic applications and libraries.

I continued with Slackware 13.1, 13.37, and finally 14.0. These upgrade steps must be done one by one. You can't jump from 12.2 to 14.0 directly or else you might skip some important packages between those two versions.

There are some packages that will not work until you reboot your system and your kernel is updated with a new one. One of them is apr-* packages which is a dependency of httpd (apache web server).

Right now, the server is running on Slackware 14.0 and i'm planning to upgrade to Slackware 14.1 once it's released (it should be released soon).

Big thanks to slackpkg to make my upgrade process went so smooth :)

Ubuntu 13.10 Released

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) to the public as scheduled. This is their latest non-LTS release before Ubuntu 14.04 which is going to be declared as LTS version.

Canonical is also providing Cloud-based service based on Ubuntu with a new service called Ubuntu OpenStack and for the first time ever, they also released it on the phone with Ubuntu Touch.

Check out the features page to find out more about their features and finally, head to the download page if you want to start downloading the ISOs. I have downloaded all of the ISOs on our campus ISO Server which is located here: http://iso.ukdw.ac.id/ubuntu/13.10/.

LibreOffice 4.2.1 Released

Italo Vignoli has just sent a press release about the announcement of LibreOffice 4.2.1, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats. 

The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.5 (with 4.0.6 expected soon), supported by certified professionals.

List of bug fixes for this release can be seen in the ChangeLog for pre-release version: RC1, RC2, and RC3. You can start downloading the binary and source codes for LibreOffice 4.2.1 in their download page.