Showing headlines posted by mfioretti

After I published "Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers (VPES)" I discussed how to actually build them only out of Free Software with John. He says, for example, that Zimbra gives the best user interface but the system requirements are huge for what it provides and that he investigated how he could make any profit creating an easy VPES setup script with a fairly low monthly price point.

GUI presentation software, be it PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, KPresenter or anything else, can be quite time-consuming and distracting. If you need to produce editable slideshows ready to be used in any office and think that the cleaner they are the better, but don't like the time it takes to put them together in a GUI, here's a solution: two scripts that take an empty OpenDocument template and insert into it the content of a plain text outline.

I still have on my computer several personal documents that I wrote and saved in FrameMaker format in the 90's, before I started thinking at file formats, and I'd really like to access again some of them. I am sure there are many thousands of people in the same situation. Unfortunately, it looks like (see article) there is no way to convert those files to Linux. Please tell me that I'm wrong!

What if your boss demands a new version of a spreadsheet, with fresh data, every day? Should you enter them manually? No, if your data have a fixed structure and the spreadsheet can be in OpenDocument format (ODF)! If that's the case, it only takes a bit of shell and Perl scripting to generate automatically a new spreadsheet whenever the raw data change.

How do you quickly create a spreadsheet where, for example, every other line has a background of a different color? Here are a couple of methods. The first one is faster (and works even in controlled environments where you can't install extensions) if you want white rows alternated with colored ones. The second trick is more flexible, but doesn't refresh coloring when you add or delete rows.

One of the biggest obstacles to personal email management is lack of user demand for Virtual Personal Email Server (VPES) software. In this article I describe what a VPES should be and look like: a Linux-based distribution that contains all and only the software needed for a VPES plus an integrated web-based interface to configure all its parts and could run on a home computer, in a datacenter Virtual Private Server, in a virtual machine or in the cloud.

Beside its openness, there is also one more reason why ODF is great for everybody who must produce a lot of office documents: ODF is really simple to generate or edit automatically. Even if you aren't a professional programmer, it takes very little effort to put together a script that generates or processes in any way texts, presentations or spreadshets in ODF format. You can also ask for specific ODF scripting recipes that you would like to see added to the website.

Here is a script takes an Opendocument template and fills it with data from a plain text file (which could be generated on the fly by querying a database or in many other ways), creating an OpenDocument invoice ready to be printed or sent via email.

When you start setting up your own email server, you soon find out that the hardest, or at least lest documented task, is not how to send email, or how to block spam. It is how to find out if your email server looks like a spam source. Here is a short list of tips that I used to check this part of my configuration. Feedback and integration are welcome!

This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

Tony is going to host audio tutorials and podcasts that are relevant for the blind using Linux: follow his guidelines and you'll produce audio tutorials very useful for all potential Linux users, not just those with vision problems!

The project to deliver One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for educational purpose in developing countries is doing great in Paraguay. According to developer Bernie Innocenti, this success comes from a way to manage the development of the Sugar educational software that other countries (or any other similar projects, see for example the Teachermate or the italian JumpPC) could and should imitate.

Some months ago I described how the XO laptop is used in some Nepali schools. This time I interviewed Bernie Innocenti, an italian developer who worked on that project and now is doing the same thing in Paraguay. Says Bernie "Even if OLPC deployed here in Paraguay only 4000 laptops, I believe that the project is turning out as a huge success."

Last week I interviewed Tony Baechler, an active member of the Blinux mailing list, to check how things are going in 2010 for Linux and vision-impaired users: "the Linux features I personally like the most are of course the cost and the fact that it's so much more stable and faster than Windows. I don't have to plan on a daily reboot!"

Main news: How Microsoft is working on OpenDocument, an ODF viewer for Android, handling of application-specific features and making ODF books out of wikis.

The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference

One Netlive DVD is enough to bring Linux to all the computers in a lab without installing anything on them. In this interview the Netlive developers explain to all ICT teachers and their principals why they may love Netlive

Document Freedom Day is a "global day for document liberation". A job offer posted by Microsoft just a couple of months ago explains very well why Document Liberation is important... and, by corollary, why any campaign from Free Software advocates focused on promoting "Gnu/Linux vs Windows", instead of "open file formats vs proprietary ones" is doomed to fail...

Two italian students think that it's very bad when public schools only teach students to use proprietary software(even if the Italian government sees no problem with that). Therefore, for their final High School state exam, they are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting: an alternative to Microsoft Windows!

The Italian Constitutional Court just published its decision: two articles of a 2009 Italian regional law that promotes Free Software and open digital standards violate the Italian Constitution. It will be VERY interesting now to find how many other local laws (both in Italy and in OTHER countries) have similar problems...