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The first question a company asks when presented with a Microsoft Office alternative is how well the software supports Microsoft's de facto standard file formats. Based on eWEEK Labs' testing experience with productivity applications based on the Open Document Format standard (the most prominent of which are Sun's StarOffice and its open-source sibling, OpenOffice), document fidelity consistently falls short of 100 percent, and that's not good enough for most companies and organizations.

To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that you become quite comfortable with using the command line interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on computer resources.

The BASH shell has a feature called job control that allows you to run and manage multiple processes from a single interactive prompt. In the age of serial connected dumb terminals, this was a killer feature. In the age of multi-homed multi-core Macs, not so killer, but there are certain situations where it can still be useful.

If you’ve ever had to install a large number of Linux systems, you are probably aware how tedious the install process can be. While tools like kickstart can help automate an installation, there are other pieces to the puzzle. There really hasn’t been a tool to unify all the ways you can install Linux–until now.

Blue GNU interviewed Gustavo Narea and Olivier Cleynen of GNU/Linux Matters, the organization behind GetGNU/Linux.org.

Articles about Linux and mainstream Linux news tends to be dominated by the big Linux distributions, those with large corporate backing and/or large development teams. I’m primarily talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it’s free clone CentOS, Novell/SuSe, and Ubuntu on enterprise servers and Ubuntu, Fedora, Linspire, and Mandriva on the desktop. Throw in two venerable and widely respected distributions, Debian and Slackware, and you’ve got about 90% of the industry chatter covered, maybe more.

It was with sorrow that we learned of the death of David S. Rushby, aged 27, in a drowning accident in the Black Sea at Anapa, Russia. David has been the sole developer and maintainer of KInterbasDB (firebird) Python interface for some years

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices– from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

Attempt to use compiled binaries might fail sooner or later due to hardware issues. Fortunately, 2.6.18-xen kernel does understand the hardware assembled on ASUS P5B Deluxe and Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet in particular. Actually, it means that any board based on (I965+ICH8R) or (I975+ICH7R) would be in general OK for Xen 3.1 Binary installation , but may have trouble with Ethernet Adapter.

According to its Web site, LyX is"the first WYSIWYM document processor," coupling a familiar word processing front end to the powerful LaTeX typesetting engine. Last month's new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home. Now that Dell and Lenovo are running the distribution on some of its machines, and Novell is promoting a desktop version of Suse, the stage is set for a serious change in expectations. It was one thing when companies were using Linux quietly, on back-end systems like Web servers to cut costs or improve scaleability. This week’s LinuxWorld Expo show in San Francisco has demonstrated that open source is moving much closer to the front end than ever before, and with that begins another quiet shift, which will probably happen among departmental lines.

This article describes how to implement SSL-enabled name-based vhosts - that is secure virtual hosts which share the same IP address and port - with the SNI-capable mod_gnutls module for Apache's httpd web server.

Groklaw is reporting that Judge Kimball in the SCO v. Novell case has decided some of the Summary Judgements. Novell Still owns the copyrights to Unix.

You may be forgiven for thinking that a tumblelog is just a blog for lazybones. While there are a lot of similarities between these two kinds of content management systems, a tumblelog is more like an online basket, which you can use to collect your thoughts and discoveries and share them with others. Unlike with blogs, tumblelog readers don't expect you to provide any commentary in the published items, so you don't actually have to"blog about" the stuff that you publish. The idea is that the post item itself implicitly expresses your opinion on it, or, to put it in a slightly different way, you let the item speak for itself.

Editors' Blog If computer game development is your thing, save your pennies and get yourself over to the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

The arch directory in the kernel source tree contains all of the architecture-specific code. There is a lot of code there, despite years of work by the development community to make things generic whenever possible. There are currently 26 different top-level architectures supported by Linux, many of which contain a number of sub-architectures. Two of those top-level architectures are i386 (the original Linux architecture) and x86_64, which is the 64-bit big brother to i386. There is quite a bit of commonality between those two architectures, and some efforts have been made to share code between them whenever possible. Even so, the source trees for the two architectures remain distinct from each other.

LXer Feature: 10-Aug-2007
I've been trying to catch on and to understand what this thread's all about (It started with R. Hovespian from Novell explaining why they needed a deal with MS). I thought, maybe I could try to summarize it all to understand - and maybe explain to others - what's happening here, so I made up a tale of the whole situation:

This post contains step by step information on how to install and configure QuickTime 7.1.6 on Linux with Wine. The browser plug-in also works in IE 6 there is also two shots at the bottom of the post of Windows Media Player 9 running in Wine.

KDE oldies may remember this interview with Stephan Kulow from back in 2000. Well the folks at openSUSE have clearly been watching us, not only have they started their own openSUSE news site, they have also started their own interview series with a brand new interview of Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been release dude for much of the KDE 3 series and now shares the same honoured title for openSUSE.

What I didn't get a chance to do is mention specifically some people that truly deserve mentioning. I have received a ton of emails about the show and many of those people thanked me for my efforts with Komputers4Kids. Some have even been inspired to copy the effort and that in itself makes it worth all the hassle. But one of you went a bit too far.