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One of the main complaints about the open source OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications is that the applications are slow compared to the comparable Microsoft Office apps. If you've run into this problem, and if you use OpenOffice but occasionally run into compatibility problems in sharing files with the Microsoft Office applications, try Go-oo. Even if you don't use Go-oo all of the time, it is good to use in conjunction with OpenOffice for several reasons. Here they are.

What's wrong with people that they won't use Linux? Is it them or is it Linux or both? About a month ago, research firm IDC released a report summarizing personal computer (PC) sales and their projected growth over the next few years. Included in the report are Desktop computers, Server computers, and Laptops. The boost in sales and projected growth are due to the upsurge in consumers purchasing low cost portable computers (Netbooks) like the Asus Eee PC and others.

I feel like I'm booting children off a train. Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it. But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so. But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

Adobe cautions in an advisory against a whole series of flaws in Adobe Reader 8.1.2. Most of them also affect Linux.

Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux's existing "suspend-to-disk" capability. Warp 2 comprises a bootloader, Linux kernel, and a "hibernation driver," says the company. The driver takes a snapshot of RAM when hibernation is launched, saving the contents into flash memory, optionally compressing the data. On start-up, the contents are quickly returned to RAM, so that the system resumes its previous running state.

Still skeptical about open source ERP and POS (point of sale) software? Openbravo says it has exceeded 1 million downloads and has nearly 100 channel partners. Is the channel shifting to open source business applications? The VAR Guy takes a look.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago. I hadn't intended for this to be a three part series, but it's been pointed out that I didn't cover the make utility and I think it's almost negligent to discuss software development and not discuss make. Since I don't like to think of myself as negligent, I decided to extend the series to one more article.

Last month, the open source community was buzzing over a report released by the Linux Foundation that placed the value of the Linux ecosystem at around $25 billion. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, we caught up with Amanda McPherson, the foundation's VP of marketing & developer programs, to get her thoughts on the study, what the results mean for the community, and what the take-away message ought to be.

With inexpensive storage and lot's of features will Open Storage be a game changer for Sun? And does the fact that it is built on open source software make a difference?

Longtime LWN readers will be aware of your editor's tendency toward the publishing of wild predictions at the beginning of each year. The 2007 predictions irritated some Debian developers and users by suggesting that, after getting the Etch release out the door, the project would go back to arguing about firmware issues. At the end of the year, it became necessary to acknowledge that this prediction, like so many others, had failed to come to pass. In retrospect, the error in this prediction was obvious: the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a release once it's looking close to ready.

At the 6th Annual OpenOffice.org Convention in Peking November 5-7, the project could celebrate a new milestone in their 3.0 release: downloads of their office package have reached 10 million.

Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.

Proprietary virtualization player VMWare has just announced its VMWare Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) designed to bring virtualization to mobile phones. It's due to ship in 2009, and is a lightweight software layer that can run even on memory-constrained phones. For several reasons, this virtualization platform could have an impact on mobile phones running open source operating systems, and on application development for mobile open source operating systems.

Red Hat has found a way to link open source with Star Wars. Sci-Fi Geeks across the galaxy must be celebrating as Red Hat seeks to conquer the digital entertainment universe. Here’s the scoop.

I've been nonplussed the last few weeks as ordinarily sane compu-journalists opine that Windows 7 will somehow kill Linux on netbooks. This weekend, I had a chance to actually see XP running on an EEE 900, and I can tell you, Linux has nothing to fear from Redmond.

The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.

LinuxPlanet classics: The folks who run NTP servers are generally providing a free service, so it's rather crass to repay their kindness with thoughtlessness when you're setting up your own NTP clients. Carla Schroder shows how you can be smarter than famous big commercial vendors and set up your timeservers the right way.

Dave Whiting, the principal at Red Newt Cellars winery in upstate New York, was tired of chasing vendors to try to get them to support clunky custom content management systems on his site at RedNewt.com. The independent winemaker decided to branch out and teach himself site development skills, with the help of some popular open source applications. The happy result is a full-featured interactive ecommerce site that Whiting says is flexible, scalable, and secure.

Over on TechRepublic, Jack Wallen shares what he feels was KDE's major transgression with KDE 4: Using Dolphin in lieu of Konqueror for file management. KDE has gotten its share of criticism for its delivery and handling of the 4.0 version since the initial release last January. The new desktop rolled out massive changes -- some good, some incomplete, and some that were just puzzling. The past eleven months have seen the KDE project build on the good and make impressive progress on the incomplete. As Wallen points out, however, there are still some aspects that people find puzzling.

When you return from a trip and copy your digital pictures over to your file server, you might like to rename the image files or (losslessly) rotate them to their correct orientation to make finding and viewing them simpler. You might even want to embed comments right into the image files in such a way that all image viewing tools should be able to harvest and share this metadata. In this article we'll take a look at some command-line tools to help you with these tasks.