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With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find.

Phoronix Media today released Phoronix Test Suite 1.6, which is an incremental update to its flagship testing software. Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 (codenamed "Tydal") makes it easier for ISVs, IHVs, OEMs, and independent users to benchmark Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X computer systems. Introduced in this update are new options to autonomously carry out tests and to analyze the generated results, expanded test coverage, and other features to more effectively test software and hardware on supported operating systems.

Canonical's ambitious plan to create a mobile internet device (MID) market based on Ubuntu appears to be behind schedule and facing numerous challenges. Here's the scoop from Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

There's a story making its rounds across the 'net about a woman who missed several online classes, and failed her semester, and she claims this happened because she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it - instead of Windows. She didn't know what Ubuntu was, and was surprised to see that her Windows software, such as Microsoft Office, didn't work. While this isolated case sounds a bit ridiculous, there is still a bigger problem here.

[This talks about the real problem, which of course was not the girl, not Ubuntu, or even Dell.. It's the entrenched view of the ISPs and the Educators, the, so called, facilitators of technology and learning. - Tracy]

Yet another reason why ALOM, ILO and/or a serial console is always a good thing to have hooked up ;)

Red Hat has released version 5.3, the third update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 operating system first introduced in March 2007. In addition to various bug fixes, RHEL 5.3 also offers a number of new features and improvements. Several improvements affect virtualisation. The x64 version of Xen now supports up to 126 processors and a Terabyte of memory. The paravirtualised network and mass storage drivers for fully virtualised RHEL-5 guest systems have moved into the kernel, and a separate installation is no longer required. Virtio drivers improve the performance of guest systems under the KVM alternative. Features like extended page tables that are included in recent x64 processors are now supported, which is likely to increase the performance of fully virtualised guests.

This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a Debian Etch system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

Linux Format magazine has unveiled its annual Reader Awards (PDF) for 2008 and KDE won a 'landslide' victory in the category of Free Software Project of the year in recognition of the 'incredible' work done with KDE 4. Amarok, Qt, Konqueror and the KDE-based Asus Eee PC were also recognised in the awards. Read on for more details of the KDE related successes.

What do you do when you poo? It is the kind of question you might expect your ten year old son to ask his ten year old mates in the school playground. However, it seems that Microsoft has been asking pretty much the same thing in order to generate some much needed publicity for Windows Mobile.

Sun Microsystems is gunning for the cloud space and eyeing, in particular, the position of being a platform provider. Speaking at a media session Tuesday, Matt Thompson, senior director, developer cloud tools at Sun, said the company intends to be a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, that is, to provide the underlying facilities supporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Back in 2002, Jim Allchin was co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division and was, in his own words, "scared" of the momentum behind Linux, as noted in an email [PDF] sent to several of his direct reports.

Those up top (the Presidential Inaugural Committee) chose to utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the upcoming inaugural events for the new president of the United States. Though Microsoft certainly likes this idea, this leaves out thousands of people in the US and elsewhere who still cannot run Silverlight or an open source alternative on their systems from viewing the streamed video online.

Question: I'm to the point in our organization that load balancing across multiple servers is really becoming necessary. Making the transition from standalone servers to server clusters is a daunting task to say the least. What's the best way to make such a change? Is it possible to start small and increase the "cluster" as we go? What services do well across multiple servers, and which do not?

Okay, first off; you can find other articles out there that state what's new in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2(Shiretoko), including mozilla.org. But we found only few of them stating some of the little things that we do in this following article.

The patience of today’s computer user is low. Time is, very much, of the essence. And for some reason that adage applies in spades to Linux computer and Linux server boot times. Although less than 1 or 2 minutes doesn’t seem like an eternity, when booting a computer it is. And when getting work done (or getting a server rebooted) as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance, every little second counts. That is where configuring which services start at boot time will help you tremendously. If you’re not running a mail server, why have Sendmail start? If you’re not running a web server, why have Apache start? These and many other linux services can be configured to not start at boot up to save you time.

I confess: leave me alone in your house, and I'll browse through your books. I don't usually have the chutzpah to pry into your desktop and configuration files if you leave your computer unlocked, but the temptation is strong. What seems natural to one user isn't always natural to me, and I've learned a lot when I've been allowed to look around another person's system.

New research indicates that Australian enterprises large and small are becoming increasing adopters of web collaboration technologies to improve productivity and communications. While larger enterprises are already big web collaboration users, a significant proportion of small to medium enterprises are also fast moving towards adoption.

My flight from Wellington to Sydney can be easily chalked up as one of the most painful experiences of my life - alongside military service, breaking a bone, and supporting Windows 98. Things improved markedly when, after approximately three hours standing in line, my colleague and I boarded our flight from Sydney to Hobart.

Alright, so we here at InaTux had the time this week to play around with the newest KDE Desktop Environment (version 4.2 *release candidate*) we have to say-- and we might get some criticism for this but-- we think that lately the KDE team version by version have been taking large steps in the wrong direction. They have been doing a good job at making a Desktop Environment that feels almost invisible, but the general design of the Environment itself seems a little too much like a Vista (i.e. Widgets) and Mac (i.e. the theme) clone and this isn't what GNU/Linux was originally designed to be.

LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2009

It seems a Belkin employee was caught red-handed looking for people to write positive reviews of one of their products. Our own Paul Ferris discusses his observations and some of the bigger social issues that 'Astroturfing' exposes.

[Here is a link for those who may be unfamiliar with what 'Astroturfing' is. - Scott]