Showing all newswire headlines

OpenOffice's future was doomed from the day when Oracle acquired SUN Microsystems. The eventuality became even more obvious when they pulled the plug on OpenSolaris. Thankfully, OpenOffice is an open source software and leading contributors of the original project has forked OpenOffice and the new project will be called LibreOffice.

Want to install the new LibreOffice on Ubuntu or a Debian-based distribution? Although the Document Foundation doesn’t yet offer .deb binaries for these distros, you can use the provided .rpm packages to install LibreOffice on a machine running Ubuntu or Debian.

f you want to share files between Ubuntu and Windows computers, the best option is to use Samba file sharing. The installation and configuration can be done by command line or by via GUI, In this post we will see how to install and configure samba in ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat via GUI.

I've been carrying this book around with me and sampling its wares for a couple of months now, but haven't had the bandwidth to write a review before this. Fear not. The wait is worth it. This is the "twentieth anniversary edition" so I imagine some fanfare went along with the book's release (though I can't swear to it). The question is, why do you want to buy this book? There's a little blurb on the book's back cover that's different than most other blurbs. Most books have quotes of praise from the authors, from readers, and from other people with an investment in the topic, but never (which is to be expected) from the competition. Remember that Prentice Hall publishes this book. Tim O'Reilly (yeah, that Tim O'Reilly) actually touts this book...publicly. It must be something. In fact, it's so good O'Reilly wrote the book's Foreword. Like a number of technical book titles that have gone the distance, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook has already established itself as a classic. People will buy this book just because they really liked the 3rd edition. But what's new in the 4th edition? I went looking for the answer.

OpenOffice.org has established itself as the free alternative to Microsoft's Office suite—but not necessarily the better alternative. Now the project heads are breaking off and starting LibreOffice. It's a great chance to remake the project. So, what should they prioritize?

The Fedora Project announced the Beta release of "Fedora 14 "Laughlin," featuring faster JPEG downloads and MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks. The Fedora 14 Beta also adds improved debugging and IPMI server management, and debuts the "Spice" virtualization desktop framework and "Systemd" management technology for faster start-ups.

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux community distribution is out this week with the first beta of the Fedora 14 release. The new distribution updates key applications and introduces new security and virtualization capabilities as well as support for the latest open source programming languages.

Thanks to Oracle, not only is OpenSolaris now dead along with other open-source projects previously funded by Sun Microsystems now facing hardship, but the OpenOffice.org community has now decided to part ways too. The OpenOffice.org community has decided to launch The Document Foundation as a new, independent organization. The Document Foundation will now be backing "LibreOffice" as the brand rather than OpenOffice.org.

There are no profound revelations here...at least not in this post. It just serves to reinforce something we already know.Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively. When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows. This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs. They don't care...they are just jacked that they are finally entering into the tech age at home. Most times, any concern expressed is with the parent. Of course it would be.

One thing you may not know about SSH is that it has an escape character: ~. To try it out, hit return (the escape character is only picked up at he start of a line, so you must make sure you are) at the console in an active SSH session, then enter ~. Nothing will show on screen; so far so good. Next, hit Ctrl-Z and the session will be suspended -- handy if you want to check something on your local box without logging all the way out of SSH. This trick will also work from within screen, and even from within mutt. To return to your SSH session, type fg and hit return.

The Fedora team announced the public release of Fedora 14 beta. The beta features a number of new features including KDE 4.5 and Spice for virtualization.

Google says its new Chrome version has some serious speed. Thought the limits of browser speed had already been reached? Perhaps not. Google now claims to have something even better up its sleeve. According to its Chromium blog the version 7 of the Chrome browser could get a healthy speed boost.

Tuxpaint is an open source graphics program that occupies a special niche: it is designed for children. This makes it a rarity in the software community known for every developer scratching his or her own itch. Tuxpaint has just six tools: paintbrush, rubber stamp, line tool, text tool, polygon tool, and eraser.

A couple of days ago, I talked about Yahoo's warning messages saying my system (Linux) had not been tested with their mail program and that resulted in a very impassioned plea to help a group of Yahoo Groups users to protest the changes that Yahoo has apparently made to the way Yahoo Groups work. Changes to the way mailing lists work are nothing new. I am a member of several Yahoo Groups. But I am also a member of a number of Google Groups and a mess of mailing lists running on Mailman. While reading the complaint, I had two thoughts.

This morning brought the significant -  and long overdue – announcement of the launch of an independent foundation to host development of the open source, ODF-compliant OpenOffice productivity suite.  It should have happened ten years ago.

An independent foundation is set up to develop, promote and drive further growth of OpenOffice.org, the world’s leading free office software. Introducing The Document Foundation and LibreOffice…

LibreOffice will be uncompromisingly free software, and as one developer observes, "it is hard to think of anyone of any note in the community that isn't involved," including developers from Red Hat and Debian. The hope is that OpenOffice / Libreoffice "will go where people want it to go, because it hasn't been going where people want it to. Initially the focus will be on cleaning up the code, adding polish and increasing usability." In the longer term, the project will be much more ambitious. If LibreOffice takes off, which it has every chance of doing, the test for the developers will be to prove that a distributed free software development model not only gives the developers greater freedom and initiative, but also produces results.

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on CentOS 5.5. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready, ARM9-based i.MX28x SoC and a Coldfire-based MCF5441x MCU, both targeting fanless industrial applications as well as automotive systems. The i.MX28x and MCF5441x each consume less than half a Watt, support extended temperatures, offer clock synchronized Ethernet, and with some models, include a Layer 2 switch for low-cost daisy-chaining of devices.

They say the best blogging is about story-telling. So, let me tell you one of mine how I came to write this post. First, some background: I run a Windows-free environment, and have for a long time. I put in my time with “Windoz” many years ago, and quickly left it behind.