Ecomoney Systems would like to welcome our newly appointed Secretary, Mrs Sylvimaree Westlake, to the company. Sylvi has a long career in secretarial and administrative work, past employers being the Womens Royal Voluntary Service and for the National Health Service. Sylvi has also organised many fundraising events (such as the Wrawstock festival), and carries out regular voluntary work in the local area.

She has also been a Puppy Linux user for a year and a half during which time she has contributed much to the development of the Ecopup/puppy linux software. She has also been an active member of the scunnymoney forum.

Puppy Linux has been featured in an article in the national Telegraph newspaper. The article makes much of Puppy Linux's compatibility with the obsolete Microsoft standard which, although shrinking, is still by far the most prevelent standard used on home computers today. Ecomoney has taken the stance amongst Puppy Linux's developer community to increase the compatibility between the two systems, specifically in terms of usability and user interface standards. We are glad to see this view confirmed by a mainstream newspaper aimed at the mass market.

We believe that creating good software relies upon good communication with end users as well as developers. In order to better connect with our user base, we have started a facebook profile just for ecomoney.
Click here to view Ecomoney's new facebook profile.

We have equipped the local Priory Lane Preschool with 2 linux computers, one for office work and printing, and the other as a learning suite and multimedia centre for the children.



The Office computer is a P800 with 192mb RAM around seven years old running Ecopup 7.1 Puppy Linux based software, including the latest OpenOffice 2.02 office suite. This will be used for general admin and office work, printing newsletters and posters, and keeping track of expenses.

Our ecopup software is unique in that, as well as being able to operate on extremely old and otherwise obselete hardware, it can also run alongside existing XP installations. This allows its use in environments where the shrinking Microsoft Windows standard must still be employed.



Recently Ecomoney Systems were contracted through the Acorns Dreamscheme Project to deliver an internet safety course aimed at keeping young teenagers safe online. The teaching suite to be employed would be room of modern computers (2000mhz/512mbRAM) owned and managed by the Adult Education service, stationed at Westcliffe Drop in Centre about a mile from Riddings.

We have been nominated for and accepted the position of project co-ordinator for the next community edition of Puppy Linux - 3.03CE, codename "talking stick". Our experience with using desktop linux in the community will be put into the development of this future release, currently estimated to be released early next year.

For details of our work on this, and details of how to help, please see the following links:

Puppy 3.03ce community edition forum thread

Regular readers may have noticed that our website (and that of scunnymoney and our other sites) has recently been displaying a "bandwidth exceeded" message from our webhosts Servage. This is due to people downloading the latest ecopup release (0.7.1) and putting us over the limit that Servage set.....a VERY generous 3.6 terabytes or 3600mb. Until now we have been using less than 1% of this capacity. From this we can conclude that Ecopup has been successfuly downloaded around 5000 times! From the feedback we are getting, this would be a lot more if we had additional download capacity.

However surprised we are at the demand for a copy of the operating system used at a Cybercafe in Scunthorpe, we apologise for the loss of availability of our sites and the any inconvenience caused to their users. Thankfully, several people from the puppy community are actively involved in setting up alternative download locations in order to ease the strain on our own website. A volunteer from Australia (who we know only as "richard.a" through the puppy linux discussion forum) has very kindly donated a site with full instructions and download space for people wishing to test and help develop ecopup further. This site can be found Here. We value Richards contribution highly and ask that people use this mirror for the purposes as a place to download the instructions on how to install ecopup, and as a place they can reliably download ecopup if they wish to become involved in the development and testing programme, which we would would greatly encourage. If anyone would like to donate additional download bandwidth we are sorely in need at the moment. Please contact us at info@ecomoney.co.uk.

We are happy to be able to release a test version the full setup that we use for our work at the cybercafe and our other projects. This is a specially customised version of puppy linux 2.15ce that we have called "EcoPup".

This can currently be downloaded from the following locations -

Australian Mirror, Central Queensland University..
(Many thanks to Neville Richter and the Centre for OpenSource Development, Central Queensland University for providing this mirror)

Front Page of our local newspaper, the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph - Full story here.

Local mother Stacey Ferguson has won her fight against forced deportation to Spain. Although the British courts were prepared to carry out the order, the opposing side decided at the eleventh hour to return to the negotiating table after a long and drawn out court battle.

With the help of a grant co-ordinated by our local Voluntary Action North Lincolnshire, the cybercafe has been again refurbished. Along with a much needed lick of paint (thanks to volunteer Stacey Ferguson) the cybercafe now has matching computer desks (rather than foldaway tables), a carpet and new computer chairs. We have also new multimedia headsets which will enable free international calls via Skype, and thanks to the new puppy linux software release and our Lead developer Brendan,the 100% v opensource Gizmo Project featuring standard VOIP via SIPS.