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OpenOffice.org suffers from a wildly inconsistent user interface (UI) that combines unique elements with borrowings from Microsoft Office. Now, in the upcoming version 2.3, it is finally having some of the cosmetic procedures it so badly needs -- at least in the charts subsystem. The changes include a new default color scheme and a heavily revamped wizard, but only small changes in functionality, making this revision a case study in UI design for both better and worse.

For many seasoned Linux developers, device drivers still remain a bit of a mysterious black art practiced by a select few. While no single article could possibly attempt to covered everything there is to know about writing drivers, Valerie Henson gives us a brief taste of what's involved, by implementing a device to return "Hello World" using all the major driver frameworks.

This article shows how you can install the Linux version of Google Desktop on a PCLinuxOS 2007 desktop and an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) desktop. Although the program is still marked as beta, Linux users can already search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts.

The Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has offered a prize for the best campaign against Microsoft's attempt to gain international standardisation for its Office format.

I run a small but fairly active Web site from a home server, as was commonly done back in the early days of the World Wide Web. What started as a learning project soon grew to be my primary hobby. It takes a bit of knowledge of Linux systems, various open sourced applications, and how the Internet works to start a Web site from scratch. Here are some of the applications and tools that help me stay on top of things.

A spoof cartoon of ever increasing war of OS between Microsoft and Linux.

Neuros Technology has rolled out pre-release firmware for its Linux-based OSD networkable set-top box that allows the gadget to suck down and show YouTube content. The firmware allows the OSD to be used to browse and play the entire YouTube video collection on any standard-definition or HD TV.

David Kline left a comment regarding my blog on Intellectual Dishonesty. There are a few points that David makes to which I’ll respond and then I’ll touch on his invitation to show “…any evidence at all…” that supports the view that the patent system is being used to stifle innovation.

Nora Denzel says open-source software is changing the landscape of an industry led by Hewlett-Packard and IBM. You might dismiss her as just another fan of open source, the freely available software best known by Linux. But Denzel is the former head of HP's software group. She resigned last year. Denzel recently spoke with IBD about open-source management software.

Look at how to create scripts that are able to record their output, trap and identify errors, and recover from errors and problems so that they either run correctly or fail with a suitable error message and report. Building scripts and running them automatically is a task that every good administrator has to handle, but how do you handle the error output and make intelligent decisions about how the script should handle these errors?

The KDE e.V. and KDAB are happy to announce continued collaboration on the Free Desktop, with KDAB becoming the latest new Patron of KDE. KDAB is known for its high-quality software services.

Last January, Host Europe, a company that runs the Web sites for 120,000 businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, secured an unlikely supplier for the open-source software it uses to run almost all of its computer servers.

At the second day of aKademy 2007, the contributors conference closed with the aKademy Awards Ceremony. Two of last years winners, Boudewijn Rempt and Laurent Montel awarded no less than four awards to Sebastian Trueg, Mathias Kretz, Danny Allen and Kenny Duffus.

The developers of Slackware this week announced this year's first release of their Linux distribution, Slackware 12.0, which they have described as a "must-have upgrade for any Slackware user".

aKademy 2007 continues! Sunday, the second day of the conference, brought more talks covering a wide diversity of topics.

Len Brown can only be a glutton for punishment; he is, after all, the maintainer of the Linux ACPI subsystem. That is a difficult position to be in: ACPI involves getting into the BIOS layer, an area of system software which is not always known for careful, high-quality work. Supporting ACPI is a complex task which, among other things, requires the embedding of a specialized interpreter within the kernel, a hard sell at best. Even with that background in mind, one must wonder just how much masochism is required to lead one to deliver three separate talks at the 2007 Ottawa Linux Symposium. That is just what Len did, however; the end result was a good view into several aspects of the power management problem.

This simple guide will bring up the Windows start menu inside GNOME and allow you to run, use and install any Windows app (that can run in a VM) inside your existing desktop. It takes about 10 minutes to setup, minus the time to install Windows, and involves one command in total.

The rise of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of Ajax. JsonML is an extension of JSON that enables you to map XML data using JSON type markup, and this in turn enables you to easily create XML or XHTML data based on JSON markup and to build and exchange user interface (UI) elements.

Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence. But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.

It was on July 20, 2006 that I had issued The State of ATI Linux while ending off the ATI Redblog, which was a fifty-day experiment for using the ATI fglrx driver under Linux exclusively to see how well the driver really could compare to that of NVIDIA's binary competition. It's going on a year later and it's now time for this year's address as far as what I have seen from the driver in the past year and where I hope and believe the driver is going in the near future.