From 6.0 to 6.1 we have the usual updated browser, flash and excitingly iso-hybrid support.

Customising iso-hybrid

No need for separate img and iso files. One ISO HYBRID file can do both. You can burn the ISO and also image the same file to a USB stick.

The reason why Webconverger has a commercial customisation service is that it used to be very difficult to make trivial changes to the boot command line. Thanks to nils and to Daniel Baumann especially for his hard work on this Debian Live feature, customisation has become a lot easier for you.

The customisation steps are something like:

mount -o loop webc-6.1.iso /mnt/webc/
rsync -av /mnt/webc /mnt/custom
chmod +w /mnt/custom/isolinux/live.cfg

Now edit /mnt/custom/isolinux/live.cfg and change the boot command line with your homepage URL.

Now rebuild the ISO like so:

mkisofs -o /tmp/custom-webc.iso -b -r -J -l -cache-inodes -allow-multidot -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat /mnt/custom

The customisation service remains if you are unable to perform these commands. It's also difficult to edit the package listing, such as changing chrome without the service still. For large deployments, please enquire with sales in how we can help you.

Migrate your video content to open HTML5 video instead of Adobe Flash

I agree with Steve Jobs that Adobe has been lazy.

I am sick and tired of Flash killing the performance of Webconverger on netbooks and its long running instabilities. Flash is really the only proprietary non-free software in this opensource distribution.

So if you are a content creator, please move to HTML5 video. I have quickly made a Web tool to help create HTML5 video.

Webconverger's HTML5 video playback is far more stable and faster than Flash on cheap netbooks. Yes, I'm aware Youtube is being a little bit daft by UA sniffing.

Otherwise, do download and enjoy this new feature release of Webconverger and please report any issues to the mailing list.

Hah! I've discovered a way of showing you the changes from 5.9 to 6.0, without the developer tool vimdiff.

The red bits are the removed packages, so you can see Webconverger has lost some bloatware in the new year.

Also we are back on 486 kernels, meaning wider hardware support at the cost of negligible performance gain to 686 machines.

Please consider purchasing the customised version to support the project. I will offer a 50% refund this month if you photograph your customised Webconverger in use and allow me to use your images.

Download and enjoy! Happy 2010!

Seasons greetings! Apologies for the delayed security release, that is 5.9. I have been enduring a cold and BT 20CN 'professional' broadband which limits me to 3GB of traffic between 9am-6pm for the MONTH in Cornwall, UK! Yes, it's almost 2010! And that also means the feedback email address has been updated to feedback2010@webconverger.com

So what has changed in 5.9 over 5.8?

vimdiff http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.8.txt http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.9.txt

• hefty flash security update
• Bloated GNU grub is dropped on ISO which should mean wider hardware support
• hetty has been upgraded meaning quicker builds and order turnarounds
• Unfortunately some bloat crept in (avahi, dbus, xorg-docs) -- will remove them later

Please report any issues that are not in the todo list on the friendly mailing list.

Happy surfing!

As a UK VAT registered company you are obligated to file a 'VAT return' every three months.

The https://online.hmrc.gov.uk/vat-file Web service from HM Revenue & Customs has improved slowly over the couple of years I've been using it. I've now signed up for Alerts, which tell me when a VAT return is due. Useful.

There is now even an option to see View submitted returns, though it always says "There are no returns previously submitted available to view." on my account.

Right now my procedure for submitting a VAT return goes something like this:

1. Receive alert
2. Procrastinate
3. Swear to myself that are going to do it first thing this morning
4. Get down to doing it a week before the due date
5. Export my data as CSV from my Barclays bank business account
6. Spend far too long putting it in the correct tables in the cash book in http://docs.google.com/
7. Calculate VAT on the appropriate fields (only UK entries)

Then I load up the HMRC site and you get 9 boxes to fill in:

1) VAT due in this period on sales and other outputs

This is what you fill in if you charged VAT on a sale. For Webconverger this is only filled in for orders that originate in the United Kingdom.

2) VAT due in this period on acquisitions from other EC Member States

Since Webconverger deals in electronic goods, this field is always blank for the return.

3) Is automatically calculated (Sum of 1&2)
4) VAT reclaimed in this period on purchases and other inputs

This is the important one, since Webconverger is VAT registered. The items you spend VAT on in the UK, you claim back. For example Webconverger claims VAT back on:

• hardware purchases
• ISP costs
• Google adwords

And such and so forth. Once this is submitted, HMRC deposits this money back into Webconverger's bank account. Thanks very much.

This is calculated on the Gross amount from the CSV import with a formula like (C15-(C15/1.175)). HOWEVER the VAT rate has been 15% in the UK between 01/12/2008 - 31/12/2009 so you need to carefully check the formula is right for the particular date ranges. Otherwise you probably screwed up your return.

5) Net VAT to be paid to Customs or reclaimed by you (Difference between boxes 3 and 4)
6) Total value of sales and all other outputs excluding any VAT.

Once painstakingly importing values from your bank statement into your cash book, you now need to calculate the Net amounts of payments without VAT.

Thankfully most of Webconverger are not in the UK, so the gross amount is the net amount since I do not need to charge VAT for orders outside the UK.

7) Total value of purchases and all other inputs excluding any VAT.

This is calculated in a spreadsheet with a formula like =(C18-E18), I.e. Subtracting VAT (make sure you the correct value) from the Gross amount to get the Net amount (excluding VAT).

8) Total value of all supplies of goods and related costs, excluding any VAT, to other EC member states
9) Total value of acquisitions of goods and related costs excluding any VAT, from other EC member states

I leave this blank, since software supplied over the Internet is not regarded as a "good".

Several ways to screw up the VAT return

I assumed that the form somehow took all your UK (& outside UK) gross sales and calculated the VAT reclaim value for you for that particular period. For some bizarre reason YOU need to calculate this value manually and screw it up in a variety of ways. WHY HMRC? WHY?

For example:

• Getting the tax rate wrong (i.e. copy the wrong tax formula)
• Submitting Gross values (with VAT) instead of Net values (ex VAT)
• Accidentally filling in box 1 or 8/9 if you're a software company like Webconverger

If you fill in 8/9, you are then obligated to fill in ECSL returns. You don't want to go there.

You could avoid all this hassle entirely if you are not VAT registered. However I think being VAT registered has a couple of advantages:

• You can reclaim your VAT, which is important if you make a lot of local purchases and you do much more sales outside the UK
• You can zero rate EU vat easier since companies in the EU expect you to be VAT registered, however since software is an electronic product EU companies should not need a EU VAT number. Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of confusion here.

I want to see a system where my bank transactions are fed directly into the HMRC, so I don't have to worry about this. Currently exporting data from Barclays is a very manual task and then you need to sort out which transactions are UK based and which aren't. If Barclays had some extra meta data (TAX data, origin of payment/receipt) to their CSV exports, it would save a lot of time and money. If there was a standard CSV data interchange format, so I didn't have to convert the CSV into some braindead XML HMRC format, that would be even better.

Again the https://online.hmrc.gov.uk/vat-file can be improved to easily amend recent returns.

Festive greetings!

Apologies for being quiet lately despite big news that Chromium OS sources has been released. Sometime ago I predicted and compared the features of Google's operating system to Webconverger. And I think I am right!

Webconverger does not require any registration and you can now download the latest 5.8 update! The differences can be seen from this package listing:

vimdiff http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.7.txt http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.8.txt

The big difference with this release is that I experimenting by using i686 builds instead of 486. This means that Webconverger will not boot on very old PCs and some cheap CPUs like Geode. If this is problem for you, let me know! For the rest of us with i686 compatible hardware, Webconverger should be a litter faster.

In other news, the spelling from the previous release 5.7 with Firefox 3.5 should now be working for you.

The CJK support might not quite work on these free images, however if you purchase Webconverger with Chinese (or Korean or Japanese) support I will ensure all the relevant fonts and input tools are pre-installed.

Thank you and thanks to the Debian project and Debian Live project contributors to make Webconverger possible.

And just for fun, if you need Webconverger to make a quick sign, please try http://sm.nomeata.de/

5.7 features a lenny backported Firefox 3.5 build, finally!

Overall I would consider this release as experimental.

There is a couple new known bugs introduced with Firefox 3.5. Namely you can now non-persistently change configuration settings in the about: URL and browse the local filesystem.

This introduces possibly some security issues and of course I would rather have the kiosk more locked down that this current state. Sadly Firefox is very difficult to modify into a sane kiosk deployment. I've written a kiosk extension myself and trying to implement NsIContentPolicy to control these local URLs and file downloads is proving to be beyond my ability.

If you're a developer familiar with Firefox, please take a look at my notes on the kiosk wiki page.

Debian installer is disabled

Yes, I've disabled the debian installer again. I am finding it far too complex and I am tempted to to write my own simpler installer based on dd.

If you are tech-savvy you can simply install Webconverger to your hard drive by:

wget http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.7.img
sudo dd if=webc-5.7.img of=/dev/sda

This will replace the contents of your first hard drive (typically) with Webconverger.

What I do in my deployments is use a "debug version" of Webconverger to perform these installs.

5.7 release notes

I've enabled FF3.5's Private Browsing feature by default. Strictly speaking since the ~/.mozilla directory is purged between sessions, this enabling this "private browsing" feature is totally unneccessary and probably introduces problems. However I'm thinking "security in layers" and "lets give it go".

Spelling does not seem to work. Something is wrong with the myspell dictionaries and FF3.5 backport. I need to fix this. On the plus side, you might find Webconverger quicker.

If you notice a SPLASHY ERROR on bootup, do not be alarmed, this is normal. I am looking to replace the horrible software used to simply not have linux print copious lines out to the screen, with another crazy like the 28k SLOC Project Plymouth. Ok, maybe not. If only linux quiet worked.

Download mirrors

• Germany
• California

Questions? Please mail the kiosk's public mailing list!

Do you use Webconverger in your business?

You have every right to do so! Please take a picture of Webconveger in action and upload it Flickr with the tag "webconverger".

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webconverger/

Please email private feedback to the email address at the bottom of http://webconverger.com/, thank you!

5.6 is a bugfix release.

vimdiff http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.5.txt http://download.webconverger.org/webc-5.6.txt reveals the usual browser updates.

The change to webconverger-base fixes the home button when more than one URL is specified on the boot command line.

Lately I have been exploring static Firefox builds, as I hope they may help make upgrading manageable. Also if you are a bit of a browser geek, checkout the Webkit-based surf browser.

Hello everyone! 5.5 is a much delayed release which is not as polished as I would have liked. Instead of delaying any further, I would appreciate you giving these experimental features a try and giving feedback on them.

• Allow ICMP ping replies so that you can check the machine is up and running.
• Allow for several homepages to be specified which get opened in separate tabs, e.g. homepage=http://portal.webconverger.com/%20http://webconverger.com
• noclutter added, which hides the mouse cursor after a couple of seconds of inactivity
• Several new experimental hooks to upgrade and setup CJK locales
• A new PDF viewer based on epdfview, which unlike xpdf has a decent printing dialog!
• Anything else? See vimdiff http://download.webconverger.com/webc-5.2.txt http://download.webconverger.com/webc-5.5.txt

Experimental option to install Webconverger onto a hard drive

The included EXPERIMENTAL installer has problems. For example the USB version only seems to work when installing without a network due to some odd grub2 transition. The development cycles for debugging installer related issues is incredibly long and painful. The whole effort might have been a colossal waste of time, considering USB boots are just as fast as booting from a hard disk.

If you would like to see this feature stay, please test, report bugs and develop patches.

The next release will focus on packaging Firefox 3.5 and the kiosk extension for it.

Thank you!

Daniel let me know yesterday there there is an important flash player security update 10.0.32.18+20090731.120040. The only difference between 5.1 and 5.2 is that updated proprietary package.

Webconverger takes security seriously and we are http://ocert.org/team_and_members.html.

If you spot any security problems please email security@webconverger.com. Thanks everyone!

5.1 fixes the keyboard layout problem present in 5.0.

The bug came from a bad change in a unstable version of live-initramfs from the otherwise fabulous Debian Live project.

The 5.1 package list will show that Webconverger now utilises the 2.6.30 kernel, which means even better hardware compatibilty. The Firefox 3.0.x based browser has been also updated with a minor security fix.

I've just come from Debconf9 in Spain, with the following bits of news:

• Debian Installer has been fixed on USB installs
• Some other interesting installer options are being worked on, so perhaps in future you can install Webconverger without requiring a reboot

For debugging Webconverger or rather live-initramfs the boot option break=top is super useful. To speed up builds, try building on ram with mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /path/to/mountpoint.

In not so good news Iceweasel 3.5.x is proving a pain to backport. I am seriously considering using the official static builds instead.

For now please download Webconverger 5.1 and please report any bugs to feedback2009@webconverger.com or the mailing list. Enjoy!