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Comes quite handy: Dmitri Popov offers as lateste productivity sauce an installation guide for downloading the brand new OpenOffice -- a nice little manual.

Ever fancied stuffing a self-contained Linux powered computer inside a Mac to make the Apple just that little bit better? Great, because now you can.

The Audacity audio editor is a great program. Take that as you will: It's truly functional software. It's a great illustration of the power and versatility of open source. Audacity has been an active project for some time. But because it provides an esoteric service, it was only recently I had reason to sit down and use it.

The OpenOffice.org website was swamped today, shortly after the organisation announced the release of version 3.0 of its open source source office suite. The OpenOffice.org website returned multiple timeout errors early this afternoon as the site was presumably innundated by expectant downloaders. Today’s release was the official announcement of the new office suite version, although most of the major mirrors have had the latest version since Saturday evening.

It was a big week for our favorite technology last week, as true believers no doubt already know. Not only was Linux 2.6.27 released -- causing no small amount of discussion on Slashdot -- but the operating system itself also turned 17 years old. The Linux Journal article noting that momentous day had already received well more than a thousand Diggs by Friday.

There is a precedent in the Linux and Open Source IT community of coldness and belittlement toward inexperienced users. Contributors to Linux have forgotten the time it takes to develop an awareness and capability of utilize Open Source . All contributers can become frustrated when others are not on the same level of understanding. That said, there is an important reason to develop simplistic and intuitive user interfaces to empower persons of all aptitude to benefit from the collective effort of our Copyleft movement.

A recent court decision in the UK seems likely to make software patentable there for the first time, with terrible knock-on consequences for free software in Europe and elsewhere. Ironically, the "winner" of the case was Symbian, which has announced its intention to open source its operating system for mobile phones.

This past weekend's Ohio Linux Fest was another great success. Over 1,000 people showed up for one of the best community based Linux events held in the United States. Many notable Linux podcasters such as The Linux Link Tech Show and Dave Yates covered the event and have made recordings available for download.

The Sun Report Builder extension adds powerful reporting capabilities to OpenOffice.org Base, and using it to create reports is easy, as we can see with a simple example. Suppose you're a freelance writer, and you want to keep track of your submissions using a simple OpenOffice.org Base database that stores article titles, publications, submission dates, current status, and payment rates. This is a useful solution, but adding reporting capabilities turns the database into a handy analytical tool. With Sun Report Builder you can generate a list of articles grouped by publication, shows the sum of article payments, and displays a chart of payments for each publication.

A research report is throwing more fuel on the prerelease fire surrounding T-Mobile's G1 phone using Google's Android open source operating system."Success for Android has Little to Do with User Acceptance," claims the ABI Research headline, and director Kevin Burden writes that Android can help sell a lot of smartphones only if carriers and manufacturers recognize the business value of using standard platforms.

Paul Rubens describes Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop as cheap 'n' cheerful, and easy to use. But Canonical also offers a server version of the software, and this raises an obvious question: Do you really want to be running cheap and cheerful server software at the heart of your enterprise?

Mac users might less vulnerable to Internet security threats than those who take the Windows route to computing nirvana, but 'less' is not the same as 'not at all' and that's why the world's first miniature hardware Internet security devices for the Mac have been announced today with a little help from Linux.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed!

There is a big Linux event in NYC today and tomorrow - but I won't be there. The Linux Foundation's End User Collaboration Summit has some big names presenting including Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, Red Hat EVP and an impressive list of financial industry executives from UBS, NYSE, Credit Suisse, CME and AIG. But I won't be there to hear any of them in person. The Linux Foundation has decided to keep the End User Collaboration event as a closed event without press (at least that's what they told me)

OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is being released today, is not the great leap forward in look and feel that version 2.0 represented, but it justifies its label as a major release with dozens of changes, some major, some minor, but in all more than can be easily summarized.

It's one small step for Dell and Consumer Linux. And one giant leap forward for Canonical's Ubuntu distribution. Specifically, Dell has launched advertising for the Mini 9 Netbook running Ubuntu. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Christmas is coming early for webcam users. Support for hundreds of popular webcams, available from Michel Xhaard's GSPCA project, is merged for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.27 kernel. The amount of tweaking required from the user, the distribution, or both, has been cut, and it's likely that a random webcam will now just work out of the box.

Interesting facts, questions and puzzles for every day of the year! This week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script is another chapter in our book "Never ever leaving the CLI ever" ;) Previous entries you may be interested in include our posts on Accessing the International Dictionary, checking out the world's weather, spewing out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, doing encyclopedia lookups, accessing the online Thesaurus, translating between different languages and, of course, using the online dictionary.

Sun Microsystems Inc. today boosted the processing capabilities of its most popular Unix server line with the aim of attracting bigger IT workloads, including databases, ERP applications and large server-consolidation projects. The new system, called the Sparc Enterprise T5440, is based on Sun's eight-core UltraSparc T2 Plus processor — a version of the company's T2 chip that was designed to enable two of the devices to share cache and other system resources. The four-socket T5440 expands on the two-socket T5240, which was introduced last spring along with the T2 Plus.

Poverty is a global problem, which is not limited to third world developing countries. Even mature developed nations like United States has ~18% poverty rate. There are many reasons and causes of poverty, which includes but not limited to, natural disasters, war, disease, politics, religion, and over-population and so on and so forth. Some of these causes are beyond our control while others are beyond our means. There is no single factor that can totally eliminate poverty, even the almighty latest Linux Kernel release; but many ideas and anti-poverty initiative can come together to reduce the causes of poverty.