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There's plenty of ways to convert Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) to OpenOffice.org. Now OpenOffice.org 3.0 imports these Office OpenXML files natively, but natively doesn't mean a fluent translation. You can wait for OpenOffice 3 to mature, but there's another way for the impatient.

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products. The most novel feature of the new program, to be known as Linux Defenders, will be its call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group’s attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a “defensive publication.” Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week. Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers. Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

Suppose you need to chart some demographical or geographical data. Using OpenOffice.org's chart module you can present the data as a bar, pie, or even exploded donut chart. What you can't do, though, is to create a map chart that shows data distribution by continent, country, or region. To do this, you need the EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (EOMCP) extension. Unlike many other OpenOffice.org extensions, EOMCP is not free, but the price is right (it costs 9.90 EUR or about 12 USD), and there is a free trial version available.

For this Howto I use Debian Lenny (still testing and not "stable" for the simple reason as - contrary to Debian Etch and/or Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 - the install routine does setup the initrd correctly so that you can set up encrypted swap and also an encrypted raid1 lvm during install). This Howto will be heavy on screen shots again - a lot of them are repetitive as I set up multiple partitions at once. Basically I will set up the system in a way that (a) everything [except for /boot] will be encrypted, (b) everything will be on a raid1 and (c) have an LVM for your data partition so that this one can be easily expanded.

A little help for those of you who may not be allowed to edit the .swatchrc directly. Since I'm coming down from a week of getting kicked in the teeth (I mean, being 24x7 primary on call ;) this week's Monday Unix and/or Linux script is veering from the direction they mostly go in. My next idea was to create a CLI book reader to compliment out previous script to find free online books.

LXer Feature: 07-Dec-2008

Ok so first some numbers, Tech Republic has a nice list of 10 mistakes new Linux administrators should look out for. Steve Emms gives a review of 6 Lean Linux Desktop Environments of which I had only heard of two before. I also came across Cynthia Harvey's big list of 40 Open Source Tools to help you protect your privacy online that has working links to each of their SourceForge webpages, very cool.

During installation phase we would have to drop to shell and undertake some special actions to prepare runtime profile.Pygrub won’t be able to load DomU utilizing ZFS based image. In particular, ZFS-ID of boot environment will be obtained to compose extra line in runtime profile.

Back in October Ryan Gordon surprised the Linux community by releasing a Linux game demo of Prey two-years after the game began shipping on Windows. He was contracted to port the Prey server to Linux but this was the first time we were seeing any client. A month later an updated Prey demo for Linux was released. This afternoon Ryan has now released the binaries that allow the retail game to be used on Linux.

Registration for Linux Expo opens. Speaker positions still available. Due to the holidays the Calls For Proposals for SCALE 7x have been extended until December 10th, 2008. The Beginner and Developer tracks are almost full; there are still available spots in the three general audience speaker tracks. But if you're considering submitting a proposal, don't delay; the window of opportunity is closing!

Here is a scenario you can think about. An administrator of a company has been accused of hoarding illegal material of questionable moral content on his company network system. You have been called upon to examine the suspect server and unearth evidence related to the said illegal material. Your boss have told you that you are not allowed to shutdown the server. Unfortunately no additional money is available to buy forensic tools or equipment. In this workshop we will explain, how to use free forensic tools to investigate such cases.

Thanks to a Ubuntu Developer named "Teapot", the newest version of Ubuntu (8.10) is now optimized for the XO laptop. Teapot designed this release to be reliable and consistent with many modifications.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just click your way to a custom distro? After all, most of the packages you will need are sitting on a well-connected web server somewhere, so it makes sense to build ISO images and repositories directly on that server. And since that server has a HTTP interface, why not make the distro building software into a web application? This is the principle behind http://www.instalinux.com, created by Chris Slater. It's based on the SystemDesigner CGI scripts from the Linux Common Operating Environment project, originally developed as a tool for internal use at HP, and now released under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client is very popular among Linux users, but it has poor visual integration with the Linux platform. Fortunately, Thunderbird is finally getting some Tango love and its own Linux theme. Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark published a blog entry this week that provides an early preview of some recent theming work that will significantly improve the look and feel of Thunderbird on Linux. Magnus Melin has started working on a Thunderbird gnomestripe theme which uses icons from the user's default theme in the menus. Michael Monreal also came up with a cool userChrome.css hack that applies Tango icons to the main user interface.

An image viewer (also known as image browser) is a desktop application that can quickly display or handle stored graphical images in different graphics file formats. It can render images according to properties of the display such as display resolution, color depth, and color profile. Other image viewers have advanced features like editing and web publishing. Some Linux users may not care much on whatever image viewer they are using. But to those who are rather picky, they can always get and install other image viewers with different features to suit their needs.

I recently promised you a strategy for a long-term exploration and transition to Linux and Open Source. This plan is for home use; organizational Linux is another issue. You also can follow this strategy to get some idea of how well a netbook will work before shelling out big bucks. You can decide whether Open Source applications work for you without installing Linux. Why? Most come in Mac and PC-compatible versions as well. Start by downloading and trying out the big ticket items, Open Office, Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail client, on your PC, replacements for your must-use for-fee applications. Wikipedia.org has a good list of addition software.

If one was to believe IBM, the days of the Microsoft desktop are numbered, soon to be cut short by a combination of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, IBM's Lotus range of office applications and a virtual desktop from Virtual Bridges. The trouble is IBM's solution is nothing new and addresses none of the issues associated with moving away from Microsoft.

Keith Curtis spent years as a Microsoft programmer. Then he quit and became deeply enthusiastic about source development. This is his story..."A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."

After trying Ubuntu 8.10 for two days on my Macbook, which proved to be a success, I now take Fedora 10 for a spin. Read on to see how my two days experience was with this Linux distro.

I read a longish post from Linux Canuck, “How Windows Users are Changing Linux and What We Should Do About It,” which attempts to sum up a lot of the issues that have been discussed at length here. The gist of the post is that, as former Windows users wander over to explore Linux, they bring their own Windows prejudices and expectations with them, and that the accommodating Linux community tries to make them feel “at home.” Canuck wonders — is the Linux community in danger of being too accommodating — to the point that it attempts to be more Windows-like and loses its own identity?