Open ERP - Open object programming memento

Olivier, who gave the technical class has prepared a memento documenting the essential aspect for developing on the Open Object framework.

Here is the link:

http://www.openobject.com/memento/

It is a very condensed but high quality set of handy information.

Getting Open ERP latest stable code

Simple and easy:

Create a directory. System must have Python and Bazaar...

bzr branch lp:openerp

then bzr_set.py 

You will then get: client, server, web, addons, addons-extra and even the addons-community stuff !

Easy, official, enjoy !

Changing grub default booting kenel on Ubuntu 9.10

Hm, I am having some trouble with the Vaio (still makes fan noise) but now it does not boot properly by default.

I think this is due to a software update... So my solution right away is to boot the previous version which is still on the disk....

• vi /etc/default/grub
   
• change GRUB_DEFAULT=0 value to 2 (kernel variation are installed by 2 - normal & safe)
  
  
• run "update-grub" 
  
• you can reboot then

To check the kernel used -> uname -r.

Open ERP back from the technical training

So I am back from my Tiny technical Open ERP training. This finishes our upgrade to the Silver partnership.

Yes we are Silver partner ! And we did it by the rules (meaning I am having some troubles about the partnership program...)

I learned a lot during these 5 days concerning the customization of the product, how to extend it and how it works. This was a worth attending class ! Well the subject is difficult and sometimes the throughput was high. I need now to find time to consolidate that knowledge...

It seems the same trainer does the functional training. I suppose it must be good too - for sure better than the one I followed last year.

The course lacked real exercises and a complete doc. Although again their trainer (Olivier) has written a very handy memento for programmers. It should be available soon through Tiny... But I don't know yet what will be the format and if it will be free...

The logistic of the course itself was terrible (the first day, the room was damned cold, staying seated in a cold room is a pain and I am sick since Wednesday), the restrooms were non operational and locked until Wednesday (we had to queue in antoher part of the building), etc etc. It seems this was the last course given in their offices in Grand-Rosière and that they will move to a more confortable and professional location... I ope not too far however...


The other attendees were very nice thus making the class enjoyable if not comfortable...


On the Tiny web site but also on the SUN site you will find announcement of the partnership between Tiny and SUN. See http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/openerp/index.jsp.

This will of course gives great visibility to Open ERP.

Technically speaking, it means that there is now a branch of Open ERP built on top of SQLAlchemy (a Pythin based ORM). This makes possible to support MySQL instead of Postgress. Functionally this has little value (sorry to say so). Please also note this is nor the official trunk nor the stable version !

In theory, all databases supported by SQLAlchemy will work (I should avoid the term 'supported' because in fact nobody knows what will be effectively supported at this stage). Commercially, this will could be a good selling point. But when... I think.... Ideally... We can get the same support for Microsoft stuff (SQL Server and IIS). That would  make very much sense as the commercial target of Open ERP fits very well with the Microsoft Small Business server ranges...

Anyway, for the first time I took notes using Freemind. So I have electronic traces of my training... I will try to clean and pack a few things on the blog in the coming days...

Python IDE - switched to PyDev

Last week, I wanted to prepare to my OpenERP technical training. So I was ready to buy one licence for Wingware. I don't mind paying for a licence, but I don't like their activation limit. I am spending my time installing new pcs, real and virtual one. Will I have to negociate with them exta-keys?

So I decided to give a try to Eclipse 3.5.x. Installing Eclipse is fairly easy, specially on Ubuntu 9.10. Adding PyDev (http://www.pydev.org/) took me only a few minutes.

The net result is an excellent IDE probably exceeding Wingware. Very stable and with a bunch of nice features. The ultimate test: debugging OpenERP ! Yes it does without a problem.

So clearly, it is better than a text editor (although gedit is not that bad with plugins) a bit less user friendly than Netbeans (my point of view), yet an excellent tool for programming Python & OpenERP.

I hope later one this week to be able to add Bazaar support to it...

In my class today, I think almost the half of the students have Eclipse on their machine. Kind of standard !

Open ERP - various news - events - plugins - next release

First the Tiny partners event has been rescheduled  to March 25.

Before that, there will be a community event open to all interested parties.

From what I understand this will correspond to the next release (at least announcements) - either 5.2 or 6.0?

I also got a contact with Axelor the new commercial plugins will be officially released and available for purchase end of this month.

There are 3 plugins :
 
Outlook : Sync of calendar, contact and tasks + possibility to link messages to OpenERP objects - like a contract...

Word :  Mail merge with objects.
 
Excel - Business intelligence.

The plugins will be sold either separately or in a bundle per pack of 10 / 20 or 50 licences with an included subscription and e-mail support.

The price information I got seems affordable to me (but I don't want to publish it before they do), there will be a free evaluation version.

Some JPA for a tiny library management app

I am part of the parents comittee of my kids school. Among our projects we are trying to setup a small library for kids.

I like helping the community but  these projects are challenging because we run on a nearly zero € budget.

So I proposed myself to manage the book catalog. I built a year ago a small Java app for printing stickers with barcode (an opportunity for doing raw printing). Now I am working on the application to mange book leases.

I took this opportunity to use JPA for building a Swing desktop application. The databasee has been designed directly with MySQL. I imported the schema and Netbeans (6.8) generated the persistene unit and the Java classes. Good but the generation was a bit disappointing. Foreign keys (many to one) were not implemented as reference to Java objects, so I had to code this myself.

What I like with JPA is the feeling to be isolated from the DB specificities without being tight to one JPA provider. I switched just to try from Hibernate to TopLink to EclipseLink, it works great.

Building Java Swing application is rumored to be a pain. With Netbeans it is relatively confortable.... You can drag and drop components on forms as you do with Delphi or VB.

The interface builder is doing something very nice. By looking at how you position components it deduces rules you would like to see respected. Nice, things get properly aligned and are well adaptative when you expand windows. Conceptually that's perfect.

Yesterday, I was almost finished with the app, being able to lease out and log book returns... Unfortunately I tried to fix a couple of glitch in the status bar of the app. What I did? Don't know. The net result is that after three hours of work last night, my entire layout collapsed and the app is basically unusable at this stage...

No partner meeting at Tiny

There was an announcement last year for a partners event. A few partners complained about the sort notice (calling in December for January...) and the fact it was still holidays in some countries. I checked early in the week. The event is postponed to an undefined date.

It is a nice team of people but they still lack a bit of organization.

I subscribed to the next technical training. So next week I will be back to OpenERP and Python...

Wait and see...

First week almost gone already... - recovering OpenOffice file

Well seeing the first week almost finished is a pain. I have some much to do (this week, this month, this year...) and have the feeling of having done so little...


Early this week a friend sent us a corrupted OpenOffice file. When trying to open it  we got 'The file xxx is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file'.

Well accepting this just opened a blank document. So repaired, yes, but empty...

OpenOffice documents are in fact zipped structure so I renamed the file to xxx.zip and unzip it. At least I could grab the content of the file (content.xml).  So the next step would have been to clean the xml tgas get the content...

I stopped there and tried something else. May be you will think I am sick. I opened it with Word 2007. Word also detected something wrong BUT the recovery was... perfect... So it  seems the odf parser of Word is pretty good !

The lost decade for IT? Best wishes for 2010 !

As we celebrate new year and also the start of a new decade, a lot of reviews article flourished on the net. There, you may rank your favorite gadget, technology or fashion device. Other articles review historical events or political trends, many follows the Top xx scheme.
 

So far, the best I saw is is on Der Spiegel online The Lost Decade - What the World Can Learn from 10 Years of Excesses). It is worth reading and basically shows 2000-2009 as a lost decade marked by 9/11, wars (against terror), the regression of civil rights, the lost of brilliance of democracy, the cut between real street and Wall street… this is a worth reading article. So what about me and IT ?

Personal changes

For me this decade has been astonishingly short. Obviously these dramatic changes in the global geo-politic context have taken some mental energy and promoted a kind of day to day survival attitude. The arrival of two kids also changed a lot my priorities and way of living. Much less travel and more home based work have been my new standards. The Internet with VPN connections made this possible.

Java

Professionally this decade has been Java based. I enjoyed the language and I enjoyed even much more not being dependent of a single vendor like I was with Delphi. However I continue to think it would have been possible to make much more, much better with a bit of effort and much less arrogance from the Java camp and its historical steward – aka SUN. Announcing less and delivering more that would have been great!

Internationalization – productivity

This decade has profoundly changed the economic landscape with globalization. Nearly all sectors have seen their organizations changed as China, India and a few other countries entered on the global market. There is no reason why one can earn his life here and not there. I remark otherwise that the price reduction related to off-shoring is sustained by lack of productivity improvement. Nor the methodology camp (e.g: UML) nor the agile camp provided a serious relief. Moving to dynamic language on the argument to save time on compile is far from what I call productivity improvement. There is still a lot to go to improve software developer productivity.

Google but not the semantic web

On the side of the best invention that changed my day to day life. I cannot forget Google. Yes, I Google a lot. Error codes, product numbers, technologies, bugs  etc There is no day for me without Googling anymore. Truly a good thing, I think. ..

On the other side, this Googling attitude reflects some failures in information organization. Web sites are very often focusing on the flashy side of the communication more than on real information organization, functionality and accessibility.

A bit more than 10 years ago, first web sites were usually built by IT departments focusing more on the web server stuff than on the message to convey on the web. Shortly after, this decade started with the raise of glossy marketing based web sites. That’s a pain and it seems to continue hopelessly. Only those sites that merged information culture, sharp technical design and sense of usability emerged: Google, Wikipedia, Amazon…

We can see in the Google success a global failure to extend the semantic web which was an attempt to build interoperability to classify information and link things intelligently…

Abandon of interoperability and of our citizen rights

The abandon of interoperability is a general and dramatic turn of the end of this decade in IT. When I started looking at the Internet protocols – that is back to 1985. Interoperability was the top subject among networkers. Asking everybody to connect to the same system / provider to exchange information (at that time messages) was considered an obscene non-sense. These were the years one of the most original IT fair / get together was called ‘Interop’.

Dreaming an ideal interoperable world made an entire industry and changed the world

From this seek of openness and interoperability, we have seen emerging the Internet, the web and all the things that go with them.

Unfortunately business centralization powered by an aggressive capitalist seek of immediate profitability has turned the focus on central, closed, non interoperable systems.  I am not writhing anything against capitalism or profit but against a closed, non-democratic, unfair short term minded approach.

Typically that’s the so called ‘social networking / twittering ‘ things. Technologically that’s nothing, functionally not that much either but the surrender is enormous as we give up our private information, liberty, freedom of speech and intellectual property to (commercial) entities.

Security acts excessively affected citizen rights but are unable to grant a risk free world

This trend is accentuated by national security laws issued as a consequence of terror acts. All democratic countries have seen their civil right decreased. In a few cases for the good (may be) but in most cases for the bad. The recent terrorist attempt shows clearly that the loss of privacy in communication has done little to improve security yet the attacks against the independent press and the non-governmental associations continue to surge. The danger is serious to lose much more than we can win.

The 'one way of thinking' dominated and pushed the press of the largest and most established democratic country to support the war in Irak while the so called evidences of the Weapon of Mass Destruction were nothing more than (poorly) animated Powerpoints.

Media decoding in the human sense need to be explained to our children but more unfortunately to most citizens and I am afraid even to a lot of professionals.

Intellectual property & centralizing trend

February first, Belgium will extend its taxes on various media storage devices in order to reward musical artists. In spite of what some says (for example Chris Anderson with its book Free), the issue of intellectual property rewarding is far from being solved. Wikipedia authors are not paid by Wikipedia, but how do they live? Somebody must pay them for what they do. Why not for their expertise? The so called free model seems to be supportable only by huge market and giant operators.  In any case the Belgian taxes looks like a tax on electricity to support gaz lamp lighters…

 

Until now, intellectual property protection for software had little success to establish copy protection or fight reverse engineering. The centralization / software as a service / cloud computing stuff is an attempt to keep the software source inaccessible to users.

While understandable, this is not acceptable if we cannot masterize the life of our own data. Interoperability and privacy are simply implemented with personal devices (this was the great expectation from personal computing at the end of the seventies) but are technological challenges for centralized systems.

We should not surrender or give up on that. This is a call against tyranny, for democracy and civil rights.

Reasons to hope at least to act

A few weeks ago, the Copenhagen submit closed without concrete decisions. I remarked in my surrounding some climate-change skeptics . Everybody has the right to his own opinion. But their arguments are globally not scientific but sophist. Arguments against smoking restriction and creationist are very similar. Again that’s frightening….

Ecologists are usually standing on the left side of the political scene and took global posture against the capitalist world because of devastating industries. Again that’s understandable, although observance of nature destruction by socialist and communist countries should merit serious investigation from most ecologists.

My conviction is that a new economy has to be rebuilt not by re-engineering finance but by enforcing global, multi-factors ethic decisions processes in all our economic and social behaviors. Intense analytic decisions and global transparency will be needed, there IT may help.

Independently of any arguments for or against climate changes. I am convinced that doing anything cleanly is better. Some pretend that this new ecological target will prevent business and will cut jobs. I don’t agree, new industries have to be built; they will bring new jobs and opportunities. Being able to bring wealth to all human instead of a minority will be sign of success.

Helping modestly to build the necessary network of knowledge will be, I hope, on the roadmap of my next decade.

Best wishes for 2010!

Christophe Hanon

Open ERP Outlook plugin

A new plugin is now released and here is the link. http://www.axelor.com/fr/produits/openerp-oocrm/outlook.html. I tried to install it unfortunately it does not work... and I could not find a way to save the settings.

So no major progress on that one.

Also, Axelor again annouces its Word plugin but no spec, download or price.

Plenty of good ideas there but...

Spring 3.0.0 is out !

Spring released its latest major release: 3.0.0.

The new features are there : http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/new-in-3.html.

I have been quickly trough the list, at this stage it is hard for me to say that it is going to change my life as 2.xx did. But for sure I will spend some time looking at these new features.

Open ERP - training company project - end of pre-study

Yesterday I sent the result of our pre-analysis for this Open ERP project for a training/coaching/consulting company.

As I expected, training management is not an issue. The organization of the courses catalog and the subscription facility are quite good and I expect a lot of small companies to be able to manage their activities with this module.

Still the project requires a lot of modifications. I expected some of these but not so much.

So of course the budget is high (compared to the first expected figures). Will the customer sign for this ?

I Don't know.

One problem with Open-Source is that a lot of people think that every thing will then be cheap by nature.

So here is a summary of points that need to be addressed:

• Sales commission / revenue recognition / performance management.
• HR data, contract management (exists but too basic), competency management. Absence management (again it exists but it is too basic).
  
• Multi-company. Open EPR is multi-company but implicitly. Here in an international context, the customer would like to be able to explicitly choose the company it will send invoices from.
• More flexible invoicing. In clear a project will require multiple invoices with different sources and destinations.
  
• International handling: internal invoices generation.
• Intermediate accounting movement. Because they are used to request their customers to pay in advance, they need to write in their books 'deferred income' to indicates that they a have debt to perform some services.
• Calendar management. The system need to be able to summarize the availability of multiple resources.
• Time-sheets screens need to be enhanced.
• Document management security need to be enhanced.
• For accounting, the fact is that Open ERP has a lot of international features but does not in standard have all the output to provide legal statements in all the countries covered by my customer. So the solution would be to sync with an external accounting package.
  

These points are workable, but represent a serious budget. Are they acceptable? The latest point for accounting may be seen as an issue because one of the key result point of the project is the integration between their financial and their commercial systems.

On the pros side, the customer will get what is needed functionally and will then use a standard platform instead of a proprietary solution. They will have new functionalities and potentially will be later able to leverage more Open ERP standard modules - like stock management, direct mailing etc.

On the cons, they will have to train again their users and probably adopt new ways of working. Also globally the Open ERP interface is not necessary more user-friendly than what they are used to.

Next meeting with the customer is within two weeks...

Ubuntu suspend without keyboard

Some similar problems seem related to the intel keyboard controller.
Well the following command should cure and identify my problem :

root@batman:~# echo -n "i8042" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i8042/unbind
root@batman:~# echo -n "i8042" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i8042/bind

No change, so I can forget about the entire set of stuff related to this hardware...

Dzone article about Java missing features

I could not resit to reply to this article on Dzone about Java missing features:

http://java.dzone.com/news/java%E2%80%99s-missing-features#comment-21249

Well, this is more student work than anything else. So for me Java, the language is fine.New things are nice, yes. Don't take me wrong. But I don't think productivity will dramatically change thanks to closure or anything else in the list.

Java the platform is more a problem.

What am I missing from Java :

• Simpler persistence (I know each version makes it simpler but it is still too complicated).May be a pure standard object oriented database with an integrated reporting...
  
• Better, much better Swing, an easy Desktop application framework (I know it is coming, just cannot wait).
• MS (or OO) Office like components (a word processor; a spread sheet,...) easy to embbed and to enhance. All in Java please.
• In the same way, a Java based web browser component. Or merge Mozilla in JVM.
• XUL like language for interface building.
  
• Plenty of bug fixes and performance improvement.
• Better integration with Desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• A standard ZK like web development framework.
• ...

Well plenty of things to make it a good client application builder. And simpler enough to be effective on small size project.
Also political and commercial aspects matter:

• Truly OpenSource I mean the real JDK not a //  product.
• Bundlled and distributed in all Linux distro.
• Popular as PHP among hosters with prices comparable to PHP.
• Nice really Open Source apps -for example CMS - not these open-source-for-the-basic-stuff-and-need-to-pay40K$ -for-getting-still-less-than-joomla.
• transparent market place not the -if-you-want-to-know-the-price-write-us.

So these are my dreams. And be sure that if I find something open and multi-vendors like this, I will consider to move on.

Still searching a solution on hibernate for the Vaio - Ubuntu 9.10 - CS31

While I am testing other stuff I re-installed Ubuntu, did an update and switched to the Nvidia driver.

Suspsend: stops the computer quickly. When resuming unfortunately the keyboad does not work !

Hibernate: black screen, then blinking cursor for around 1 minute, then error messages and finally shutdown. Restarting from hibernate. I see Grub loading. The Ubuntu logo (white) then a minute or two (may be three), error messages and finally I can login and indeed my desktop is properly re-initialized.

So the situation has evolved since I started looking at Karmic (Koala 9.10... I will now try to dig in the logs.

Two busy weeks - still not hibernating with Ubuntu

I still have problem with my Ubuntu 9.10 on my CS31 Vaio.

An old problem of Ubuntu installer related to hibernation is the swap size. There is a need to have a swap size as big as the RAM size. So, I learned that the swap is used to hibernate. Cool and logical. Usually Linux install are recommending a swap size equal to two times the RAM size. Considering the extra requirement of the hibernate swap the allocation of 12 GB - (2+1) x 4G - of swap for 4GB of RAM makes sense.

Anyway, it is not my problem. I saw may posts on the Ubuntu forum on this issue but none of the tips worked. Some net rumors pointed me to think  hat it could be 64 bits related... So I tried 32 bits install, no change - I moved back to 9.04 no changes either ! Glad to see it is not a Karmic problem... Clearly the power - ACPI management changes depending on the video card driver. I swapped the Ubuntu driver by the proprietary Nvidia driver. Good for performance and extra setup controls, but nothing changes on my hibernation issue.

Will I find the time to dig into the ACPI stuff? It is far from my day to day business.

Two busy weeks - back from Milan - Number portability - the Belgium case

Last Monday, I did a one day trip to Milan to give a class about our middleware for number portability. A big piece of Java work that would have very much benefited of Spring.

In fact I solved the beans configuration exactly the reversed way Spring does. Basically I stored all the configuration stuff in a single object for each sub process and every component take what's relevant for its job.

I know this make all this code dependent on this big fat object. I think some people call that a white board design. I agree this lack elegance and hinder re-usability. On the other side it simplified very much configuration and because objects share the config info it is naturally consistent. The same object also implemented a factory pattern, creating and initializing most of the objects (a better part of my design).

Most of us keep looking forward, but I think checking what happened backwards brings also some values.


There is a lot to say on this project not only on the Java side but also project wise.

Number portability (moving from one operator to another but keeping your number) has been implemented in most European countries (because of European market regulation). Yet each country had the freedom to implement it its own way. This has been for me an opportunity to work many times ( for Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary Finland, Latvia, Nederlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary ) on similar but different projects.

Typically, number portability is solved by a central database that lists those numbers that have been ported to another operator. An administrative process - kind of work flow -  has to be implemented, usually with time constraints. Once porting is agreed between the donor and the receiving operators, a technical phase propagates the porting information to all operators. The net result being that all operators own a copy of the central database that feeds the operators switches (usually trough what is called an Intelligent Network platform).

Belgium was the first process I developed. The central database project was outsourced to a contractor -  a very  big, well known international software house.

The entire process was driven by a committee piloting the contractor. That generated what committees like to get: papers (probably also a lot of meetings and a high volume of coffee breaks).

The full documentation filled an entire CD (for comparison I received the Spain technical documentation - a single file format description - on one page).

Technically this was my first exposure to Web services (more or less 6-7 years ago). That part was great. However the web services was described as an XML schema - no WSDL. So I had to use an XML parser,code and decode the messages.

The rest of the project was 'nuts' and was a school case on what not to do.

The committee-contractor tandem generated a lengthy and mostly absurd acceptance process, so we had to simulate business transactions of all kinds in an absurd repetitive fashion. Testing and preparing acceptance reports took finally 3-4 times more resources than developing the Web services.

More funny was the total absence of service oriented attitude of the contractor. The idea of giving an easy test platform, a reference implementation, or any basic tools (e.g: raw messages) for developers was out of their mind. Just for one reason. Not only they got the contract for the central database, they also expected to take the business of all the connecting operators. So the motivation to help anybody was naturally extremely low.


They also provided a web based application. They used Java and the most modern computers stuff at that time - multi-processors Sun servers, clusters, Oracle, Nokia Checkpoint appliances, load-balancers etc This was very professional. Unfortunately the application quickly turned out to be a pig. Users started to complain from availability, performance , error messages, failling transactions etc.

In my opinion, this was due to the inexperience of the programming staff and finally a very poor design.

A constant problem of big consulting companies is that they send their senior people to win a deal and send junior staff to implement it. As the amount of problems became important, their support staff could not follow anymore. They entered into crisis management by the book - thus delivering an help-desk procedure that requested a complete network description just for asking a password... Of course, this exasperated their users more than it solved problems.

I never attended these comittee meetings. The specs were done when  I started the project for my customer.Why have they decided to build their on messaging infrastructure on top of relational database using Soap. I don't know. However I saw later similar designs and it seems they copied a system developed in the UK.


In a search to create additional work, they decided that a VPN was not enough. SSL certificates were used between all parties. Good. Obviously they created their own certificate request process with conventions about what to put in each field of the certificate - this was described in a 20+ pages document (all other countries I saw after, simply ask to exchange public certificates between the operator and the central database - final point). In fact their policy and certificate distribution could have been meaningful if the transaction had to be secured end to end - operator to operator - which they did not.

In the line with their policy to create work, the certificates were issued for a single year, this created a permanent state of maintenance multiplied by two (test and production had to be renewed). The funniest thing was when I setup our messages reception point. The only way I could setup the server to get messages was turning off client certificate authentication! Half of their stuff did not work because they were not providing a complete certificate chain. When I discussed that with the contractor security 'expert', I could measure a long silence that finished by  'what's important is that it works now'. Indeed but  as far security is concerned...

A few years later, the outsourcing contract expired. The operators committee took the decision to swap the contractor and the entire application! So the new contractor re-implemented the entire system ! Their implementation had to be identical for the Soap transaction and they decided to keep  the SSL security system, unchanged...

Open ERP Training module - updates

First of all, my project for a training company continues.

We did 3 days of interviews (mind mapping) and drafted the functional perimeter (a structured list of points). Basically for my customer there are two business lines Open Courses (OC) and Intra Courses (IC). The same difference is present in Open ERP training module.

The subscription mechanism, the catalog and offer concepts fill the need for a training center.  There is also a few screens for 'Intra' which is basically what I call IC.

For my customer, I think on the OC side we have a 99% match. For IC, the situation is more complex. If things go on, I will post more on this project.In fact the training module is so good that most of the work will be for other business management aspects...

Typically the offering process is more complex for IC because by nature the offers are customized to suit the customers requirements. My customer see each of these offers as a 'project' - the current Intra functionality is elementary compared to their needs (sales management, commissioning, revenue recognition, international aspects,...).

Anyway it seems this training module is gaining interest and I saw some posts on the Tiny partners list.

Without revealing any secret (and nothing official here), we can expect the training module to merge with the trunk within a few weeks.  So I hope to find it in extra addons before the end of the year...

Good to know, currently the initial customer for which the module has been developed is in production.

As far as I know they are still at work for the portals. We should have 4 pre-defined portals:student (agenda, achievement, tests results,...), customers-partners (to enroll their employees), suppliers (to view and confirm orders) and teachers (planning + confirmation, access to training material).

On the roadmap they still have the scanning of documents (exams, evaluation form,...).

Not so Karmic Koala

Well, back to my Vaio. I am not yet happy with the current setting. My intention was then to install the latest Ubuntu.

Install was very smooth. I see Ubuntu progressing at each release. very impressing.

Unfortunately, hibernating or suspending is not properly working. Well they may do so but restarting is an issue. I searched a bit on the net. Not that much at this stage...