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Most people are content to let their word process or determine hyphenation and text breaks for them. And, most of the time, the result is acceptable if they do. However, just as the default justification can be improved if you want to take the time, so can the text flow. OpenOffice.org has the tools you need, but improving the text flow is as much about knowing the conventions of text flow (what you might think of as the typographical grammar) as the settings themselves.

When I began my career as an assistant architect 12 years ago, I used AutoCAD R12, 3D Studio, CorelDraw 6.0, and Photoshop 4.0 for architectural drawing and 3-D modeling. Today, many architects still use their later versions, but those bulky packages provide many functions an architect will never use. Luckily, there are several open source alternatives that are well-suited for architects -- QCad in place of AutoCAD, Blender instead of 3DMax, Inkscape in place of CorelDraw, and the GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop.

Ulrich Dreppernoted a difference between the Linuxconnect(2) man page and the POSIX specification. The former states,"connectionless sockets may dissolve the association by connecting to an address with the sa_family member of sockaddr set to AF_UNSPEC." The latter reads,"if address is a null address for the protocol, the socket's peer address shall be reset." Ulrich explained that he preferred the description in the Linux man page, but the Linux kernel seems to actually follow the POSIX specification,"is this functionality which got lost over time? Or is the man page wrong and this never was the case? Is this a worthwhile change?"

Intel plans to launch an effort called LessWatts.org on Thursday, a combination of open-source software and helpful hints to reduce power consumption of Linux servers, PCs and gadgets.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20.

The first major update of GNOME, version 2.20, has arrived almost two and a half years after GNOME 2.10, its last big step forward. GNOME 2.20 boasts not just improvements to the desktop itself, but multiple significant improvements to GNOME's applications as well. This release also marks GNOME's 10th birthday. The project was created as an alternative to KDE in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza, better known in recent years as the lead developer for Mono.

Moonsoon Multimedia has used embedded Linux to build a consumer DVR (digital video recorder) with remote multimedia file serving capabilities. The Hava -- recently implicated in a GPL violation court case -- aims to let the user access live and recorded TV content from broadband-connected locations.

Linux gamers love Doom and Quake, so why have they been suffering from FPS Rage aimed at id Software? John Carmack puts the record straight regarding Linux and OpenGL support for the forthcoming first person shooter.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia on behalf of two BusyBox developers. The suit alleges that Monsoon' s new product Hava, and its firmware, distribute code borrowed from BusyBox, a collection of UNIX utilities for embedded systems, but aren't making the source code available, as is required under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Daniel B. Ravicher, SFLC legal director, says, "This is the first time that either myself or anyone else that I know of in the United States has actually had to go to court to force compliance with the GPL."

IBM's recently announced embrace of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite project has already borne fruit, with the beta release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony. Does the new word processor, spreadsheet and presentation trio have what it takes to put the Lotus brand back on the office application map?

Those of you who have ever tried OpenOffice (and Linux folks probably make up the majority) have to admit that it’s nice, but not nearly as feature rich as it’s market leading cousin Microsoft Office. Not only that, it’s damn ugly in comparison (it reminds me of the old Office 6.x, the one you used to install from 30 floppies back in 1994). Well after reading an article in Computer World, I now “know why:”

From the wholly minimal to the completely ornate, the Linux desktop has never been sexier. You've already seen the Windows and Mac editions of the Desktop Show and Tell, but you haven't seen variety, inventiveness, and all-around desktop eye candy until you've taken a gander at what your fellow readers are doing with their Linux desktops. Hit the jump for a look at some of our readers' best Linux desktop submissions.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program -- evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered -- and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

With Solid-State Drives (SSD) on the verge of mass consumer adoption, we're left wondering what kind of performance we're going to see from these drives. We already know SSD's require less power than drives with moving parts, but what kind of performance gains will we see? To get an idea, we took one the faster drives on the market, the OCZ Rally2, and ran it through our benchmarking process. To make things more interesting (and see how much performance we could squeeze from the technology, we're using two drives later in this article to use the drives in a RAID0 configuration.

With open source software becoming a household name, another open source movement that may one day see some fanfare is already taking shape. Open source hardware, which I once thought to be little more than a pipe dream left over from a bygone era, is proving to be a dream that it is very much alive and growing. As an example of this trend, MAKE magazine has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace.

A quick look at how and why yum replaced up2date as Red Hat Network’s package management system, as told by Bret McMillan, a supervising RHN engineer. It’s a quick study of how user need drives innovation and how community collaboration solves problems faster and more completely than individual work.

In "How to sponsor an open source project?", Dave Winer says,I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux... and floats the idea of a bounty for the job, as an open source project. Guidance: I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project, Dave says.

This four-part series demonstrates how to use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and XForms together to create a dynamic Web application. It takes a look at some of the underpinnings of each technology, examining the common ground between them that will allow for their peaceful coexistence. This will lay the foundation for developing a Web application that uses both GWT and XForms together.

Lately, there has been a lot of attention in the industry on the current (and future) virtualization products from VMware and Microsoft. However, the latest Linux distributions from Red Hat and SUSE now also include full range of virtualization capabilities based on the Xen hypervisor. How do they compare with VMware and Microsoft's offerings?

In this video interview at OSCON 2007 we talked to Michael Tiemann - VP of Open Source for RedHat and President of the OSI.