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The ability to save user settings can come in handy if you want to make your OpenOffice.org solutions more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. In this article, we take a look at how to save user settings in a plain text file and then retreive them from there. In the very first installment of our ongoing crash course series we talked about how to launch external applications using the OOo Basic Shell function.

Anyone expecting the soon-to-be-launched Google phone to change the market like Apple's iPhone has over the past year will likely be disappointed -- for now. Industry insiders who have worked on Google's Android mobile operating system say it will struggle in the near term to match the consumer enthusiasm generated by Apple when its iPhone redefined the touch-screen phone market and greatly improved mobile Web surfing.

Several groupware developers have come together to work on Project OpenMapi, an open source API, based on Microsoft's Mapi.

OpenEMR HQ announced today that it has posted the firstpublic screenshots of its upcoming software release called Phoenix to aspecial area of its website specially set up as a resource for those interested in the project.

Joomla!, a very popular content management system (CMS) is as you may know an easy-to-deploy-and-use content management system. This ease of use has lent itself to rapid growth of both the CMS and extensions for it. You can install it on almost any host, running Linux or Windows. This highly versatile software has found itself in such lofty places as large corporate web portals, and humble places such as the simple blog.

The Linux Exposition of Southern California is proud to announce the 7th Annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 20-22, 2009 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Wide spread acceptance and encouragement from the user community has established SCALE as a premiere Linux/Open Source conference in the Southern California region.

Zend Technologies today is set to announce a series of alliances intended to allow its PHP framework and development environment to work with other widely deployed RIA technologies from Adobe, Dojo and IBM. In a keynote speech at ZendCon, the company's annual PHP developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Zend CEO Harold Goldberg reportedly was to deliver the news.

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption. I've also concluded that excessive love of the Mac and the improbability of the arrival of paperless processes will keep many schools from taking the FOSS leap. However, schools in Oldham, England--a metropolitan borough of Manchester--are leaping.

Sun has been getting serious about opening up its software for a few years now. OpenSolaris, an open source Unix operating system like Linux and BSD, released in May, is its latest foray into the open source arena. I found OpenSolaris to be a production-ready OS that works equally well on desktops and servers. OpenSolaris is released under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which isn't compatible with the GNU Public License (GPL) used by Linux. This means that lots of the technology in OpenSolaris won't be making its way into Linux any day soon. Also, OpenSolaris isn't 100% free, as some components are available only in binary form under the OpenSolaris Binary License.

"There is a need for something, something to explain the license I'm not sure I would call it a EULA because that has a meaning to many people of adding restrictions to software and we won't be doing that," Baker said. "We'll be having a license agreement much as Red Hat has a license agreement that says the software is available under the GPL and don't use our trademarks etcetera. So we'll have a license agreement but we won't think of it as a EULA."

Like nearly everyone else these days, I use computers to write, read email, browse the web, store music and photos, and generally organize my life. Unlike most people, I'm using a free operating system, rather than Microsoft's Windows/Vista, or Apple's Mac OS. Specifically, I'm using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of GNU/Linux.

MokaFive put your Desktop on a USB Flash Drive but is that portable enough? How about your Desktop on your Phone?

Familiarity with command prompts and shell scripts is still necessary if you want to get the most from your GNU/Linux system, but the less time you spend doing that the better, right? Two powerful ways to minimize your time at the command line are shell aliases and functions. The examples that follow are for the bash shell, but all the concepts and most of the code are valid for other shells too. Shell aliases are alternative, easy-to-remember names for long commands that you need to execute frequently.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom. Avoir is a a collaboration of 13 African universities specialising in creating free software relevant to African users.

Not only Firefox became in a relatively short amount of time the most popular web browser on Linux, but it also turned out to be the most powerful competitor to Internet Explorer on Windows, proving itself faster, more stable, more flexible and secure. Some would say Firefox is one of the most important proofs that open-source can and is actually better than closed, proprietary software. Firefox was heavily advertised by the Mozilla corporation, many Linux fans owning blogs or personal web pages put a link to the official Firefox website, initiatives like SpreadFirefox.com or the Firefox Download Day, they all contributed in making Firefox so popular.

This guide explains how you can install Joomla 1.5.6 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Joomla comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) (to enable search-engine friendly URLs) that do not work on lighttpd. Fortunately Joomla has a built-in method to make search-engine friendly URLs work on lighttpd as well.

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix.

Breaking tradition (or continuing it, depending on how often you read this blog ;) we're going to have part 2 of yesterday's two-parter tomorrow and put up our final Perl script to find the maximum guaranteed number sets, or lists, within larger number pools. There's not too much else to explain about it, but we will lay out this road map, so that you can see (or possibly revisit or avoid ;) all of the different topics we covered that are included in this script and/or are directly relevant (kind of a list of directions to this post and its attached script).

Back in 2001, I landed my (then) dream job as a full-time Linux kernel developer and distribution maintainer for a small embedded systems company. I was thrilled - and horrified. I'd only been working as a programmer for a couple of years and I was sure it was only a matter of time before my new employer figured out they'd hired an idiot. The only solution was to learn more about operating systems, and quickly. So I pulled out my favorite operating systems textbook and read and re-read it obsessively over the course of the next year. It worked well enough that my company tried very hard to convince me not to quit when I got bored with my "dream job" and left to work at Sun.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.