On day 26 of the following week, Immaculada Puebla, Professor and Coordinator of the Research Group GINTA (who had coordinated the event “Desafío Emprende”) organized a very special class of DAM (Multi-Platform Application Development) in which Luis Iván Cuende explained for two hours on very technical aspects about Asturix 4, which was already installed on classroom computers and some other interesting materials such as asynchronous programming with Node.js, Bootstrap, applications on non-relational databases (MongoDB) for end up talking about his startup (“Holalabs“) and the products “HolaDesk” and “HolaIO” as well as the pitch of his partner Albert Elias in Yuzz. The class lasted longer than expected and some students could not stay until the end due to the transportation problem but those who remained were able to take a group picture and give some gifts to Luis Iván. More pictures of Asturix at the UFV.

All the team was happy about the news, so we decided to publish a post thanking OVH for all. We want to thank their interest on our project, because although we are not a big software project with millions of users, we’re a project growing blazing fast. And, obviously they know it.

Listen to full interview.

Teaching students to choose the most appropriate tools for each task or each time, or person …is so important to the citizens of the future that the team of teachers from the Education Cooperative José Ramón Otero of Madrid has decided to conduct an “install party” popularly known as an event where the party is to spread free culture with practical examples such as the installation of free operating systems (Linux) on computers and help people know more about the freedom they have to choose among thousands of applications that are completely legal and be downloaded from the Internet.

Asturix Project, an association of technology social enterprise whose main mission is to promote Free Culture could not be left out of this initiative. So not only we support it but also we’ll participate actively in it. A team from the Community Asturix will move to the Arctic College coordinated by the leader and founder of Asturix, Luis Ivan Cuende to participate in a talk, in the exposition area and to collaborate in the instalation of Asturix OS in people computers.

 The talk will be to the 13.00 approx. “Asturix 4: desktop innovation with On, “by Luis Iván Cuende in the hall of the Colegio Ártica.

 We’ll deliver a CD with Asturix 4 to all those who install it in the party or bring it installed on your computer.

 Location: Colegio Ártica – C / Los Morales, 25. Madrid – Metro Line 11 (La Peseta)

Date: Saturday, January 28, 2012

Time: 10.30 to 11.00 until 17.00 approx.

Free entrance. More information in http://apuntatealafiesta.com

Arctic College: A party against digital illiteracy

Bringing information and communication systems present to families is a very difficult and painful operation in a society where no one dares to measure digital illiteracy.

The term literacy is not old, you can apply equally to children and adults. Javier Solana told us when he was Minister of Education (1988-1992) “this is a new type of illiteracy: the digital” and that is a hazard that can cause very negative effects on the development of a country. Twenty years later a Minister of Culture (the most unpopular in the history of Spain) said it was with the artists “analog” meaning that penalized those using digital techniques. This is a clear example of social and political evolution of a country with a productivity index parked in the basement and an unemployment rate living in the attic.

 Symptoms of digital illiteracy

When John García Fernández, forty years, marketing director of a company is expressed in phrases like “Please Anne, send me a word with the names of those attending the meeting and an excel with the valuations of the best deals …” this is a typical case of digital illiteracy. John may be licensed, engineer, … is possible he has multiple masters … but has suffered a very skewed education for years in schools that used only a tool of the thousands that were. At his university, more of the same. Ann may be using OpenOffice Writer to draft the document and may send it to John in an open format such as PDF, but John does not speak of “document”, John does not ask for a document open format, perhaps he may not know what that is. And he may have a next generation smartphone working with an operating system based on GNU / Linux and he does not know that he’s using an open source operating system.

When a school is using only one operating system is depriving the students of the enormous wealth of diversity. Are being deprived of knowledge because many of them will leave the center thinking that there isn’t more operating systems. It’s as if we went back many years ago when there was only one TV channel. Imagine coming home and can’t change TV channel, just having one. That’s what happens in most schools in this country, they are using only one channel.

One of the great virtues of Asturix has always been the global vision of users of information systems. Thus, when the innovative Asturix 3 gave the leap into the world with its own personality came to be in the world ranking number 6 in Distrowatch popularity.

Today, January 13, 2011 and only three days of being officially launched the new version Asturix 4 is in the position 8 of the Distrowatch list to seven days, and up, which indicates that the expectations can even be improved. But not only that, in a previous blog post we talked about the huge number of downloads were occurring Asturix 3 despite the release was a year in the market and there was no significant news or publicity about it. Well, in just two days, the 10 and 11 of this month of January 2011 there have been 4657 downloads since 2230 cities in 118 countries, i.e. more in just two days that during all the month of December preceding. It is important to note that in addition to the large presence of European countries (significant rise in Germany, Italy and the UK) and America (sharp rise in the U.S., Mexico, Argentina and Brazil), the new statistics show strong presence in two continents: Asia (Beijing, Mumbai, Singapore, Colombo, Xi’an, Surabaya, Manila, Bangalore, Calcutta,…) and Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Wellington, Auckland,…).

Therefore, the forecasts we made to reach 20,000 downloads this January does not seem far-fetched but quite the opposite.

All thanks to the thousands of people throughout the world support the project both as collaborators in the development and users who contribute their ideas of experience with the system.

Also is very important the new download service in super server we have thank to the sponsorship of OVH and the aftershocks RedIRIS service.

This enormous popular support is a big boost to Asturix Dev Team to keep working hard and continue to innovate to achieve an operating system increasingly efficient and friendly.

Some of its features:

• A new desktop experience. We have developed a new desktop environment to improve usability, productivity and help you stay focused. It just works
• It has the biggest color palette in the world by default. We signed a partnership with GiveLifeCS so you can enjoy more than 5000 colors when you’re using GIMP, Inkscape or another design apps
• Previews of all. Now you don’t have to open the full LibreOffice to preview a document. Hit space on any file, with any extension and preview it. It’s all about productivity
• Social and microblogging networks integrated, such as Twitter, Facebook or Identi.ca
• Asturix Bridge lets you to add, remove and execute web applications as native applications
• Chromium web browser, LibreOffice, GIMP, Clementine, VLC… it has all the apps you want to find in a default install. Plus you can install tons of apps from the Software Center
• Libre and free music thanks to Jamendo bundled into the music player Clementine, and it’s legal!
• Cool workspace management using Super+S keys

• There is a pink zone in the installer. Ok, maybe this is not an issue
• Some settings are not initialized in the fallback session. Will solve it soon
• VirtualBox must have Guest Additions to run it properly

Download:

• Asturix 4 32-bit (MD5)
• Asturix 4 64-bit (MD5)

Some screenshots:

listen to the interview in OGG format

listen to the interview in WAV format