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The free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org might be a killer app for many, but its inability to properly display documents created in the proprietary Microsoft Office formats hinders its widespread acceptance in multi-OS business environments with many legacy .doc and .xls files. If changing over to an open document format is not an option, try SoftMaker Office. It's no OpenOffice.org-killer, but it's a full featured office suite that has great compatibility with Microsoft Office. Sure, it costs $80, but you can increase your karma by running it on Linux.

PyRoom is not the only distraction-free editor out there, but it does contain a few useful features that make it a good choice for users who are looking for a lightweight full-screen editor.

It's time to stop calling Red Hat a Linux company. In fact, Red Hat has recruited 250 partners to help the company push far, far, far beyond Linux. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

The “edge” for free software over proprietary software comes from volunteer effort. You should spend just as much effort on designing a comfortable and inviting project as you would on any consumer establishment: you may not be trying to convince customers to part with cash for your product, but you are asking volunteers to part with their time for your project (which is not easier).

The Ubuntu project says that the initial alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the "Jaunty Jackalope") could be available for testing in less than twenty-four hours. Yes, that's a little less than a month after the current, stable version, "Intrepid Ibex" was finalized and formally released.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) have just published the joint International Standard, ISO/IEC 29500:2008, Information technology - Document description and processing languages - Office Open XML file formats.

In this article by Dmitry Dulepov, we will discuss why planning an extension is important and how to plan an extension. Planning issues related to web development are covered in depth in many specialized books. Here, we will cover planning only with regard to TYPO3 extensions.

Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.

If you've ordered the DVD, you're probably already busy throwing sheep and beating up rats in a lovely virtual countryside. You're now Frankie the sugar glider (an Australian marsupial with the Latin name petaurus breviceps), familiar to many from the "Big Buck Bunny" Blender video.

Hi All, Here's my 7th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to check your Access Control Lists configured in your directory server":

I know that this is a Linux blog, and thats what readers have come to expect. But sometimes one encounters stuff that is just too good to pass. So that other day my dad bought a new HP Pavilion desktop, and since I am the geek in residence I ended up setting it up for him. So while I was waiting for Microsoft’s endless configuration and setup screens I decided to dig into the fluffy paraphernalia and promotional material bundled with the Desktop. The first thing that fell into my hand was this Microsoft Vista promotional booklet that had an image of the ideal happy family computing on a laptop. What stood out was that the laptop looked awfully similar to the Macbook Pro! In fact I am 90% sure that its a Mac! Oh and while we are at it, last time I checked Microsoft had a gaming division. So why the hell are they using Playstation joysticks on the last page?

Of all of the so-called "innovations" of high tech, I think YouTube deserves to be in the Top 10. Some folks, like the MAFIAA, see it only as a den of thieves, stealing the bread from their children's mouths. But to me it's a fantastic showcase for anyone with minimal tools-- a computer, a camera, a bit of editing software-- to create and share. Naturally the MAFIAA and their ilk can't stand the idea of not profiting from other people's work, but I think it's great stuff.

This tutorial explains how you can set up MySQL master-master replication on four MySQL nodes (running on Debian Etch). The difference to a two node master-master replication is that if you have more than two nodes, the replication goes in a circle, i.e., with four nodes, the replication goes from node1 to node2, from node2 to node3, from node3 to node4, and from node4 to node1.

The KDE project has announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Beta 3, the third beta version of the future version 2.0 release. In a statement announcing the new beta, the KDE team said the “intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decreasing duplication of functionality and easing maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities.

Everything's going open source nowadays. Why not government? That's precisely the question that some analysts and consultants are asking, along with citizens themselves. President-Elect Barack Obama has begun to implement a bit of open source thinking with his Presidential Transition Project Web site.

It's just 71 years ago this month that a seminal paper from Alan Turing was published, which helped pave the way to today's multi-billion dollar IT industry and confer on Turing the title of father of modern computer science. As is often the case in scientific endeavour, Turing was actually working on an entirely different task when he stumbled on a way to create a general-purpose computer.

[Not directly FOSS related but I couldn't pass up on posting this. - Scott]

Need to create a screencast to demonstrate an application feature or nifty software technique? The easiest way to do this is to install the recordMyDesktop screen recording utility and the gtk-recordMyDesktop graphical front-end to it. Most mainstream Linux distributions include both packages in their repositories, so you can quickly install them using your system's package manager. On Debian-based distros like Sidux, installing both packages is a matter of running the apt-get install recordMyDesktop gtk-recordMyDesktop command.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their partnership, Microsoft and Novell said Wednesday they were releasing tools to help users manage and support SUSE Linux. The news, which comes a week and a half after the official Nov. 2 anniversary date, was preceded by a new Microsoft investment in the partnership that took affect Nov. 1 and calls for the vendor to purchase up to $100 million in additional Novell SUSE Linux support coupons to distribute to users.

An attempt to explain an awk program, with a nested if statement within a for loop, in plain English. Today's post is going to be a follow-up to yesterday's post on convoluted column arithmetic in awk. I have a nasty habit of listing all my stuff as "beginner" material. Mostly this is because I try to write my material for the middle level to newer user of Unix, Linux, Perl, etc. I have absolutely no interest in picking apart the finer points of quantum mathematics or advanced concepts in programming or operating system design and implementation.

Anyone that uses Linux regularly is familiar with the "Google to see if it works under Linux" procedure before buying any hardware. I was thrilled when I saw the ad for a USB Atari 2600 joystick clone that had a label on the box claiming its Linux compatibility.