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I was ecstatic today to hear the news that former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation have decided to create a fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice. This fork will be a democratic and community-driven project, free from the dubious motivations of Oracle Corporation. I suspected that someone would eventually do something like this, but I was not expecting it so soon.

The level of modification possible with Nautilus is enormous and some of them were included in our 8 not-so-common nautilus hacks and improvements post. And now, we are going to introduce a bunch of useful Nautilus scripts which can further extend the functionality of nautilus in a big way.

Yesterday Red Hat has submitted comments to the U.S Patent and Trademark Office regarding interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Bilski decision. The submission was made in response to the PTO’s request for public comments to assist it in determining how to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in that case. Although the Bilski decision did not expressly address the standards for refusing to allow software patents, interpretation of the decision will determine whether certain patents are granted. Thus the PTO’s approach to examining patent applications will have a substantial effect on the patent landscape.

Firefox have many add-ons that are created specially for Ubuntu Users like TerminalRun. Chromium extension developers were not ready to fall behind and created couple of extensions that are specially suited for Ubuntu users. So I decided to share these two extensions available as of now.

Why schools should have students use and learn Linux instead of some other OS. What computer operating system should students learn at school? Most schools use MS Windows or Mac, but a number have switched or are in the process of switching to Linux. For schools the advantages are lower costs, greater security, no viruses or spyware, easier upgrades and better reliability. Lastly, there are very few licensing hassles or concerns about pirated software.

A comic book is a magazine which consists of narrative artwork in the form of sequential images with text that represent individual scenes. Comics are used to tell a story, and are published in a number of different formats including comic strips, comic books, webcomics, Manga, and graphic novels. Some comics have been published in a tabloid form.

I ran across was a receipt dated December, 2009 for the purchase of my current desktop computer. I bought a low-end, small footprint desktop: an eMachines EL-1300G. The cost at a local big box retailer was $159. A friend of mine was so impressed she went to the store right before Christmas to buy one as a gift for her sister. The price had dropped to $149. Of course, the systems came preloaded with Windows. Linux was not an option.

It could go either way. After a week of using GNOME Shell, the preview of GNOME 3.0, on Fedora 13, that is the closest I can come to a prediction about how GNOME's new desktop will be received when it is officially released in the spring of 2011. On the one hand, GNOME Shell is an attractive and easy to use interface that integrates multiple workspaces better than any desktop that I've seen. On the other hand, it requires some adjustments in the way you work, and, in its present form, feels inflexible -- although part of that inflexibility may be due to features that haven't been implemented yet.

All you need to record a live stream from the web is MPlayer. Use the -dumpstream argument to capture a MMS, ASF or Live WMV stream to a file called stream.dump.

Forget Perl’s claims, Emacs really is the Swiss Army chainsaw of the *NIX world. Join Richard Smedley for the second of a three-part series revealing how you can do most of your day-to-day tasks without leaving Emacs – from contacts and appointments to GTD, there’s an Emacs way to productivity paradise…

Due to the international audience, all presentations will be in English. Thursday 14 October - Interoperability tests (suppliers only) The first day of the event is reserved for Abisource, DiaLOGIKa, Google, IBM, Itaapy, KO GmbH, Microsoft, Novell, Sun/Oracle, OOo... Interoperability testing starts at 09:30, the scenario's will be published on the OpenDoc Society wiki. Friday 15 October - Presentations Please note that the number of participants is limited. Registration is therefore required but free of charge.

[An excellent opportunity to meet LXer's Senior Technology Editor Sander Marechal in real person! - hkwint]

Rhythmbox is, as you all know, the default gnome music player and default music player for Ubuntu as well. Canonical integrated Ubuntu One Music Store with Rhythmbox through a plugin with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" and the implementation works pretty good. The store has a discreet selection of music if you live in UK or USA, for everyone else it's a very small selection of music, but that's another story.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from October 20th - 22nd, 2010.

LXer Feature: 29-Sept-2010



A while ago, Graham Morrison wrote: "The trouble with Linux: there's too much choice". Implicitly, the article refers to "more choice than with Windows". The article led to reactions from Carla Schroeder [1], Caitlyn Martin [2], Alastair Otter [3] and Ron Miller [4]. While the articles provided for an interesting discussion, none of them addressed the fundamentals of Linux distributions and choice of desktop software in my opinion. Because from an objective point of view, Windows users face as many choices as Linux users do. But most Windows users are just not aware of all the choices they're making.

OpenVPN, or Open Virtual Private Network, is a tool for creating networking "tunnels" between and among groups of computers that are not on the same local network. This is useful if you have services on a local network and need to access them remotely but don't want these services to be publicly accessible. By integrating with OpenSSL, OpenVPN can encrypt all VPN traffic to provide a secure connection between machines. The OpenLDAP backend of iRedmail allows you to integrate all kinds of applications and to realize centralized account management. This tutorial shows you how to integrate OpenVPN into the iredmail ldap backend on Ubuntu 10.04; passwords will be stored in ldap and you can change passwords through webmail.

Lots of young companies / start-ups are only interested by open source as long as it helps them to create value and be bought by a larger and often closed source proprietary company. They only focus on the economical and legal aspect of open source and somehow disregard other key aspects of open source like : social/community, ethics, political/governance, etc. Lots of recent example (OpenOffice/Oracle, Java/Oracle, MySQL/Oracle, Zimbra/VMWare, ...) can be studied. Most of those open source projects are flaky at best and have to design an emergency plan (think disaster recovery here) in order to ... survive. The long term effects are linked to the brand damage those case produce on the Open Source brand...

Yesterday the Open Office community announced they were forking the project. The results of splitting off an FOSS project means many things to many people. Why should the end user care about the forking of Open Office?

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.