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As Windows XP fades into the sunset, Ubuntu community members are trying to reach out to millions of Windows XP users to get them to switch to Linux. Will the effort work? Here are some best guesses.

Review/Comparison of two different Linux Distributions. Archbang and Linux Mint Debian Edition. Check how different and how similar they are. Some facts, and a video at the end.

Amazon S3 is an useful web service that provides unlimited storage at a very cheap rate. It is a good place for people to backup their files to and also for webmasters to offload their images/scripts to reduce their server load. In Windows and Mac, there are several applications that allow you to access Amazon S3 from the desktop. To name a few – CloudBerry S3 Explorer, Cybderduck and S3Hub. In Linux, there are very few S3 desktop clients available and the only way out (for me) is to use S3Fox extension for Firefox. That is until I found DragonDisk.

As usual, the Free/Open Source software world provides the best security utilities for Windows, and for Linux and Mac as well. Eric Geier rounds up four encryption utilities for both local and network storage. Though disk encryption has been around for many years, many of us don't take advantage of it. The basic concept is that your documents, files, and data are scrambled until you provide a password to unlock them. Therefore if your PC or laptop is stolen, the thief won't be able to read your data, protecting any sensitive information you might be storing.

I write full reviews of Linux distros over on my other blog, Desktop Linux Reviews. Sometimes, however, there are distro updates that are interesting but not quite worth doing a full review. So I’ll be covering those over here on Eye On Linux; I call them “Quick Looks.” Peppermint Ice has a new release out today, so I decided to make it the inaugural Quick Look for Eye On Linux. Peppermint Ice, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a cloud-oriented distro based on Ubuntu. I did a full review of it on Desktop Linux Reviews, and also a column called War of the Peppermint Gargantuas that compared it to its sibling distro, Peppermint OS One.

How to install libreoffice in Ubuntu using PPA. LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. It is free software and therefore free to download, use and distribute.

AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.

It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it. When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they'd place LibreOffice in next spring's update of Ubuntu.

So when a good friend of the Blog of helios wrote a comment in reply to a recent publication: Uncluttered Minds Do Not Care, I thought it was a good idea to supply the opinion of someone who does work in cross-platform environments. Gavin uses Linux, Mac and Windows as an IT professional. He is a TechNet Pro subscriber and has extensive experience in all platforms. I simply thought it would be interesting to see his perspective on the MS-centric business world. As always, your input is what we look for...

Google responded to Microsoft's patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola over Android smartphones, saying the legal action "threatens innovation." Meanwhile, analysts speculate on the timing and target of the lawsuit, with one analyst calling it payback against Motorola for abandoning Windows Mobile, and another suggesting the lawsuit is covering fire for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 release.

An email exchange with the Minnesota OET regarding the use of Open Office instead of Microsoft licenses.

Version 5.9.6 of PLplot has been released. PLplot is a cross-platform, scientific graphics plotting library.

Sabayon Linux 5.4 is out , Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.4 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated,

Goldman Sachs is downgrading Microsoft from "buy" to "neutral," lowering its earnings estimates for the current fiscal year by 4 percent, and dropping its price target for the stock from $32 to $28. The reductions come in an extensive, strongly worded report on the Redmond company, released by the firm tonight. "We believe the intrinsic value of shares cannot be unlocked if the status quo remains, and we have increased caution near term on a more elongated PC refresh cycle, combined with the newer threat of notebook cannibalization from tablets, where Windows does not yet have a presence," write Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar and associates in the introduction to the report.

Today the Firebird 2.5 is being released. You can read the press release and most importantly release notes. And sure, you can download it and use/test/deploy.

"I got by Rony another script for automatic generation of OpenDocument invoices, or any other ODF text with a fixed structure... I'm happy to host it here because he's proving what I thought when I started the ODF scripting section of this website: the OpenDocument format is not only really open, it's also so simple that everybody can save lots of tedious, manual office work thanks to it!

Seems like there is a major problem going on with WordPress.com and it’s stats plugin right now. On logging into your WordPress blog, instead of seeing the pretty charts and stats, you will see a login box instead. On logging in, it just redirects back to the same thing again

OpenOffice.org Draw is all about objects -- items inserted into a document, each of which can be edited independently. In fact, whether you insert a picture from a file or create an object selected from the primitives (basic shapes) in the Drawing toolbar, everything in Draw is a frame. Even text in Draw is an object, and behaves differently from ordinary text in Writer. For this reason, knowing the basics of objects is essential for all work in Draw. Learning more than the basics, however, can be next to impossible because of several ongoing problems.

By now, everyone knows that if you want to make a file unrecoverable, you can't simply delete it - you have to use a tool like 'shred' or 'srm' to overwrite its contents. But a common question is whether this is effective on an ext3, ext4, or other journaled filesystems. This article discusses these filesystems, and whether secure deletion tools work on them.

On the back of the news that Microsoft (MSFT) is suing Motorola (MOT) for patent infringments related to Android, Steve Ballmer tells the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android...and that other Android manufactures may be forced to do the same.