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Fact is, OpenOffice is good enough for the vast majority of businesses seeking a productivity suite. The bigger problem facing OpenOffice involves bloggers who grew up deploying and troubleshooting Microsoft Office.

Almost back to trying to get back on a normal sleep schedule :)

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 has been released. This milestone is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. This milestone includes improvements to private browsing mode, and better performance and stability with a new Tracemonkey engine.

A windfall for corporate Linux Users? What gives?

Linux doesn't have much in the way of advertising. While Apple's wonderful "I'm a Mac" TV ad campaign is famous, and Microsoft's Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads are infamous, Linux really doesn't have anything. Now, the Linux Foundation is trying to change that with it's "We're Linux" Video Contest. The winning designer will get a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009. The Linux Foundation doesn't have the money for a major or even minor for that matter, television advertising campaign. But, at the very least, the winning ad will get some news and online exposure for both the winner and Linux.

Recently Red Hat has decided to go on the offensive with their patent strategy. With this patent Red Hat is attempting to patent “Method and apparatus to deliver messages between applications”. To me this smacks of the way Microsoft deals with patents. They patent “ideas” or “the framework of an idea” in case someone happens to get the same idea or a similar idea. This “offensive patent” strategy is very much in line with the Microsoft way of business. Of course Red Hat does have a different twist. What they have promised is these “offensive patents” will not be enforced against open source development.

LXer Feature: 15-Mar-2009

I figured I would start the Roundup this week with a good play on words with Michael Tiemann's, From the End of the Beginning to the Beginning of the End. Caitlyn Martin gives us a review the very different results in testing the performance of different Linux distributions. Mozilla starts to contemplate a future without Google and Derek Knowlton shows us The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the The EeePC and Aspire One. Oh and by the way Happy 15th Birthday, Linux!

My trusty Oxford Dictionary defines a kernel as "a softer, usually edible part of a nut" but offers as a second meaning: "The central or most important part of something." (Incidentally, it's this first definition that gives rise to the contrasting name 'shell', meaning, in Linux-speak, a command interpreter.) In case you're a bit hazy on what a kernel actually does, we'll start with a bit of theory. The kernel is a piece of software that, roughly speaking, provides a layer between the hardware and the application programs running on a computer. In a strict, computer-science sense, the term 'Linux' refers only to the kernel - the bit that Linus Torvalds wrote in the early 90s.

It's that time of the year again - the Debian GNU/Linux project is in election mode with the process for electing a leader for 2009-10 having begun. The campaigning period goes on till March 28 and the online voting process will be conducted between March 29 and April 11. The new leader will begin his term on April 17. This year there are just two people contesting, the lowest since elections began in 1999. One is the current DPL, Steve McIntyre. The other is Stefano Zacchiroli, developer since 2001. Only two developers, Wichert Akkerman and Martin Michlmayr, have been re-elected to the post.

Time for our weekly distro release roundup. We have another slew of Ubuntu-based alpha releases and numerous other new distro releases.

The new SheevaPlug device at $100 offers a 1.2 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB flash, Gb Ethernet, 1x USB, 1x SD and a mini-USB serial connector. It's the true hackers device. Photos within!

Laugh until you, ultimately, cry ;)

There's been a certain amount of discussion about behavioural differences between ext3 and ext4[1], most notably due to ext4's increased window of opportunity for files to end up empty due to both a longer commit window and delayed allocation of blocks in order to obtain a more pleasing on-disk layout. The applications that failed hardest were doing open("foo", O_TRUNC), write(), close() and then being surprised when they got zero length files back after a crash.

Recently, I blogged that every good IT technician really needs Linux in their toolkit – even if you're strictly a Windows shop. Here are more good reasons why a bootable Linux CD can really save your bacon including indispensable tools you must have.

This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running Debian Lenny. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

There are many, many Linux distributions, and a lot of unique reasons to like them. Read on to see which open-source operating systems inspired our readers to provide our biggest Hive Five response to date. In the call for contenders, we asked not only which Linux distribution was your favorite, but a note on why, with the hope that readers new to Linux would learn a thing or two. You responded in force. This was the most popular Hive Five to date, with over 800 votes and many helpful comments.

During the 1970s, the Palo Alto Research Center was the hotspot for computer technology, with various important technological advances in computing coming from these Xerox labs. One of those advances was a humble cable and associated protocols: ethernet was born. El Reg interviewed one of the inventors and the driving force behind ethernet, Bob Metcalfe.

The netward program, a simple hey why are you connecting to that program has entered beta stage. The program uses libpcap to detect when a port should not be accessed and logs. Currently plans for the program are to add one more tweak to cut down on noise for admins and possibly add an event handler script.

15th birthday Linux. For a teenager, you're pretty well traveled. In fact, you've gone to some pretty weird-arse places. Places I probably wouldn't go myself, and not just for sanitary reasons.

Thanks to a message to the grassroots mailing-list by Yama I discovered hat OLPC is looking for people for the following job opportunities which are also an indication of where OLPC might be heading in the forseeable future..