How come Dell can sell a PC with a  copy of Vista home preinstalled for £119, but the cheapest, entry level Dell PC with ubuntu preinstalled is £299 ? I know there must be economies of scale, but this is just silly, and a barrier to open source adoption.  Our solution - buy a bunch of [...]

Can anyone tell me what happened to the National Open Centre, and Open Advantage as well while I’m at it?  I thought the former took over the latter role when funding ceased, but the former’s website is down now.  Is any publically funded body in the UK solely promoting open source any more?

The last big task in our complete migration to open source has been moving our phone system from swyx to Trixbox, the free and open source package containing linux, astrix, free pbx and lots of other packages to make a it stand alone scalelable phone system.  We involved Senokian from early days to get it [...]

As a specialist in short run labels for UK SMEs, we do a lot of digital labelling at Mercian Labels and are firmly committed to the Xeikon digitial process as it give us the best results for our customers. Punch Graphix have launched the new Xeikon 3300 and 3000 digital label printers, and last week we [...]

We have been getting lots of interest in our new Labellock range of security labels from customers and distributors across the world.  Its taken a lot of R&D to get this product range to market, and its great to see the product being shipped out of the door. We’ve invested heavily in the business in the [...]

We have had a long standing probelm with data storage in our business, as we generate or manage a huge number of graphic design files.  With the final stages of our migration coming together, we decided to move all our files to a dedicated network attached storage device (running on embedded linux of course!). We picked [...]

Readers of this blog who are involved in the UK labels industry may be interested to know that there is a new UK based and focussed event being planned for UK label companies.  With the dominance of LabelExpo in Brussells every 2 years, there has not been a UK event of any significance for years.  [...]

Today I’ve been at the Recycling and Waste Management show at the NEC in Birmingham on my continual quest to find a waste management solution for our stripping waste at Mercian Labels.  The disposal of this type of waste is the largest waste disposal problem we have as an industry (apart from silicon liner, which [...]

For anyone in the UK who values their privacy, Phorm is bad news.  Its just such a bad idea for users, the reputation of those companies taking part, and the regulators who approve it.  If my ISP Nildram subscribes to it, they will loose my business for sure. Nuff’ said.

I have spent some time this afternoon working out why ubuntu 8.04 wont install on a brand new pc I bought today from Ginger6 , as it hung and reported MP-BIOS bug 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC Kernel Panic - not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn’t work! Try using the ‘no-apic’ kernel parameter I dont really understand [...]