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It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it. When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they'd place LibreOffice in next spring's update of Ubuntu.

So when a good friend of the Blog of helios wrote a comment in reply to a recent publication: Uncluttered Minds Do Not Care, I thought it was a good idea to supply the opinion of someone who does work in cross-platform environments. Gavin uses Linux, Mac and Windows as an IT professional. He is a TechNet Pro subscriber and has extensive experience in all platforms. I simply thought it would be interesting to see his perspective on the MS-centric business world. As always, your input is what we look for...

Google responded to Microsoft's patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola over Android smartphones, saying the legal action "threatens innovation." Meanwhile, analysts speculate on the timing and target of the lawsuit, with one analyst calling it payback against Motorola for abandoning Windows Mobile, and another suggesting the lawsuit is covering fire for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 release.

An email exchange with the Minnesota OET regarding the use of Open Office instead of Microsoft licenses.

Version 5.9.6 of PLplot has been released. PLplot is a cross-platform, scientific graphics plotting library.

Sabayon Linux 5.4 is out , Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.4 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated,

Goldman Sachs is downgrading Microsoft from "buy" to "neutral," lowering its earnings estimates for the current fiscal year by 4 percent, and dropping its price target for the stock from $32 to $28. The reductions come in an extensive, strongly worded report on the Redmond company, released by the firm tonight. "We believe the intrinsic value of shares cannot be unlocked if the status quo remains, and we have increased caution near term on a more elongated PC refresh cycle, combined with the newer threat of notebook cannibalization from tablets, where Windows does not yet have a presence," write Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar and associates in the introduction to the report.

Today the Firebird 2.5 is being released. You can read the press release and most importantly release notes. And sure, you can download it and use/test/deploy.

"I got by Rony another script for automatic generation of OpenDocument invoices, or any other ODF text with a fixed structure... I'm happy to host it here because he's proving what I thought when I started the ODF scripting section of this website: the OpenDocument format is not only really open, it's also so simple that everybody can save lots of tedious, manual office work thanks to it!

Seems like there is a major problem going on with WordPress.com and it’s stats plugin right now. On logging into your WordPress blog, instead of seeing the pretty charts and stats, you will see a login box instead. On logging in, it just redirects back to the same thing again

OpenOffice.org Draw is all about objects -- items inserted into a document, each of which can be edited independently. In fact, whether you insert a picture from a file or create an object selected from the primitives (basic shapes) in the Drawing toolbar, everything in Draw is a frame. Even text in Draw is an object, and behaves differently from ordinary text in Writer. For this reason, knowing the basics of objects is essential for all work in Draw. Learning more than the basics, however, can be next to impossible because of several ongoing problems.

By now, everyone knows that if you want to make a file unrecoverable, you can't simply delete it - you have to use a tool like 'shred' or 'srm' to overwrite its contents. But a common question is whether this is effective on an ext3, ext4, or other journaled filesystems. This article discusses these filesystems, and whether secure deletion tools work on them.

On the back of the news that Microsoft (MSFT) is suing Motorola (MOT) for patent infringments related to Android, Steve Ballmer tells the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android...and that other Android manufactures may be forced to do the same.

Dijkstra's simple shunting yard algorithm comes in quite handy to parse expressions. By extending the parser, it is also able to parse function calls and object-oriented expressions.

GParted is an essential system administration tool. Learn to use it wisely. Last week, you found Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools with which to familiarize yourself. But, don’t overwhelm yourself with self-discovery of all ten, because this week you’ll learn one of those tools, GParted. It is a powerful ally to those who handle it with wisdom and restraint and a harsh mistress to those who throw caution to the wind.

CloudSN (Cloud Services Notifications) is an application similar to Specto (which is not maintained anymore): it can display notifications when you have new emails (POP3 and IMAP), new Identi.ca messages, Google Reader unread items or it can watch any RSS feed for changes.

In July, Jared Smith took up the position of Fedora Project Leader, replacing the outgoing Paul Frields. Among Smith's first jobs is to guide the development and release of the upcoming Fedora 14 Linux distribution, set for general availability in November. Building the Fedora Linux distribution is one of Smith's key responsibilities as Fedora Project Leader, but it involves more than just pure code. "A lot of the time we think of Fedora as just the bits and the bytes that we burn on a CD every six months and ship out, but Fedora is more than that, it has to be a community," Smith said. "As such we have to concentrate on building that community and taking care of the community as much as we take care of the bits and bytes."

The success of the Apple iPad has prompted other manufacturers to launch their own tablet devices, mainly based on the Android platform. But can Android have the same impact as it has done in the smartphone market? Phil King examines the market and speaks to analysts and retails to find out…

If you want to configure compiz in ubuntu10.10 Maverick Meerkat , there is a simple configuration tool for compiz called SimpleConfig settings manager that will help you doing this job, it is quick and useful especialy for linux newbies.

I have a heavy-used website powered by LAMP stack (CentOS Linux, Apache 2, MySQL and PHP). It started on a shared hosting so I had to use MySQL. Year and a half later, I switched shared, virtual hosting and not run it on a dedicated server. I decided to try Firebird to see how it performs and also how it compares to MySQL in RAM usage, disk usage, etc.