FreeSoftNews

OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER

Volume 04 - Issue 5 - 11/2006

Please send news clippings to:
newsletter@marketing.openoffice.org

For up-to-date news visit the OpenOffice.org Newsletter Blog:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com

To read all of this month’s stories in full:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_ooonewsletter_archive.html

ATOM feed:
http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Contents

1. Announcements
—————-
* OpenOffice.org 2007 Conference - Call for Location
* Welsh OpenOffice.org released
* Norwegian Native-Lang project wins language prize
* OpenOffice.org Mac porter meeting at Google office

2. Success Stories
——————
* OpenOffice.org at the French National Assembly
* OpenOffice.org on 35,000 computers at the Canary Islands state schools

3. Featured News
—————-
* OpenOffice.org wins 2006 LinuxJournal Editors’ Choice Award
* “20 percent intended to install the free OpenOffice”
* Corel to support ODF
* Italy considers ODF for national standard
* Team from China for QA

• Read more: OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 04 - Issue 5 - 11/2006

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, wrecked or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data is being salvaged from storage media formats such as hard disk drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system. Although there is some confusion as to the term, data recovery can also be the process of recovering deleted information from a storage media for forensic purposes.
Read more at DebianAdmin

Automatix is a graphical interface for automating the installation of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based Linux operating systems.

Read more at DebianAdmin

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the second beta release of the most exciting Drupal yet: Drupal 5.0 beta 2! You can grab it while it’s hot at:

http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.0-beta2.tar.gz

You can read about the new features present in Drupal 5.0 in the beta 1 announcement. Since beta 1 we have fixed a ton of bugs, having reviewed and committed over 160 patches, more than five every single day. So many thanks to you for the testing, the bug hunting, the patches and reviews. Please keep up the good work and help us turn this beta 2 release into a release candidate; we still need your help! Read on to find out how….

Read more at Drupal

Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, entered a not-guilty plea in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland in the slaying of his wife, Nina Reiser, 31. Today, attorney Daniel Horowitz withdrew from the case, saying Reiser couldn’t afford his services.

read more

Hewlett Packard has sold its 100,000th Linux-based server in the UK. The company has also shipped over 1,500,000 Linux servers worldwide.

read more

The quick synopsis is, Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on Hula. As a team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula project is and the opportunities in the market and in the end we had to conclude that we couldn’t justify investing at the same level in Hula going forward. So those of us who have been developing Hula full-time will be moving on to other roles and to other parts of the company.

hula-general

The Free Software Foundation’s founder Richard Stallman has confirmed that the recent patent covenant between Novell Inc and Microsoft Corp is not a violation of the current version two of the GNU GPL, but will be outlawed under version three.

“What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play,” Stallman told the GPLv3 Conference in Japan, according to a transcript of his speech produced by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

cbronline.com

Tweakers.net, a dutch community of online tweakers, benchmarked their potential new server with PostgreSQL 8.2 vs several versions of MySQL 4.1.20 and MySQL 5.1.20a.

Full review starts at (in English):
http://tweakers.net/reviews/657.
Concluding graphs (in English):
http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6.

PostgreSQL

Yesterday LightScribe had released their first Linux Software Development Kit (SDK) for Linux. This SDK allows developers to build software that can use LightScribe Technology. The SDK download is available in RPM format, and can be found here. Also available for Linux is the system software and a simple labeler (download links).

Phoronix

The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.6 series. Many bugs in Kexi and Krita as well as in most other components were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. You can read more about it in the announcement, and the release notes. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.
KDE.news

Linux kernel version 2.6.18.4 has been released. It is available from:

Patch: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.18.4.bz2
Full source: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.18.4.tar.bz2

Sizes in bytes Compressed Uncompressed
————————————————————
Patch 85048 369791
Full source 41852862 240189440

—————————————————————————–
This is an automatically generated message. To unsubscribe from this list,
please send a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org containing
the line:

unsubscribe linux-kernel-announce

… where is the email address you are receiving
this message at.
—————————————————————————–

The following files were changed in this release:

• Read more: Linux kernel 2.6.19 released

Linux kernel version 2.6.18.4 has been released. It is available from:

Patch: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.18.4.bz2
Full source: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.18.4.tar.bz2

Sizes in bytes Compressed Uncompressed
————————————————————
Patch 85048 369791
Full source 41852862 240189440

—————————————————————————–
This is an automatically generated message. To unsubscribe from this list,
please send a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org containing
the line:

unsubscribe linux-kernel-announce

… where is the email address you are receiving
this message at.
—————————————————————————–

The following files were changed in this release:

• Read more: Linux kernel 2.6.18.4 released

Linux Screen Reader (LSR) is an extensible assistive technology for people with
disabilities. The design philosophy behind LSR is to provide a core platform
that enables the development of LSR extensions for improving desktop
application accessibility and usability and shields extension developers from
the intricacies of the desktop accessibility architecture.

The primary use of the LSR platform is to give people with visual impairments
access to the GNOME desktop and its business applications (e.g. Firefox,
OpenOffice, Eclipse) using speech, Braille, and screen magnification. The
extensions packaged with the LSR core are intended to meet this end. However,
LSR’s rich support for extensions can be used for a variety of other purposes
such as supporting novel input and output devices, improving accessibility for
users with other disabilities, enabling multi-modal access to the GNOME
desktop, and so forth.

• Read more: LSR 0.3.2 - BSD Licensed!

Samba is an open source project that allows Windows users to connect to a Linux server from which to share data. If you are looking for a simple, affordable home file server, or need more disk space on your office network, a Linux server with Samba is the way to go. Linux along with Samba offers a stable, secure environment that is available at no cost, along with features such as remote administration, immunity to Windows viruses, and the ability to run on low-end machines. Here’s how you can set up a simple Samba server on Slackware for SOHO use.

Read more at Linux.com

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth’s invitation to openSUSE developers last week has generated heat from openSUSE developers and some members of the Ubuntu community. In an effort to set the record straight, Shuttleworth says that it was not his intent to offend openSUSE devs.

In an email response to questions about his most recent blog post, Shuttleworth says that his offer is “an invitation to an Open Week, not a criticism of SUSE.

“Developers move between projects all the time, and I know a number of SUSE developers are frustrated by Novell’s handling of the Microsoft deal and are considering other projects. So pointing out that we are hosting an Open Week seems timely.”

Shuttleworth also says that he hopes that Open Week “could in part be a forum for discussing collaboration between Ubuntu and SUSE.

“Currently we don’t have deep links between the distros, in the same way that we do with Debian, and I think it would be interesting to see how to go about setting that up. I’ve responded to questions from some SUSE folks in that vein.”

Shuttleworth defended his decision to solicit openSUSE developers directly, writing that “In the past two weeks I’ve fielded many mails from SUSE developers in regard to this, so I believe it was reasonable to point out the timely Ubuntu Open Week. I very much hope all of this helps to bring home to Novell executives the folly of their course, and results in the termination of the patent-related aspects of the deal.”

Read more at Linux.com

The stable Flash Player plugin for Linux is crusty old version 7 — trailing more than two calendar years, two major revisions, and one corporate buyout behind the Windows and Mac offerings. But now Adobe has finally unveiled a beta release of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Was it worth the wait? And should you install it now, or hold off a little longer for the official, stable product instead?

The beta is available for download — without registration — from Adobe Labs. The downloads are ELF binaries for 32-bit x86 Linux exclusively, and require ALSA for audio. This time around, Adobe has supplied not only a Netscape Plugin-compatible browser plugin, but a standalone GTK player as well.

Both packages are simple gzipped tarballs containing the binary and a readme.txt file. To install the browser plugin, copy it to either your personal plugins folder (on Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey this should be ~/.mozilla/plugins) or the system-wide plugins folder (typically /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ or /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins). The standalone player will run from any location.

Read more at Linux.com

We have written before about the innovative Amazon Web Services Platform. This stack was officially announced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during the recent Web 2.0 summit and is now considered part of the core business strategy for Amazon. While analysts, competitors and Wall Street are pondering what to make of this move from a business sense, in this post we look at who is utilizing Amazon Web Services - and how. This post is based on personal communication with those people, along with the set of success stories available on the Amazon Web Services site.

The fact is many small, medium and even large businesses (even Microsoft), rushed to put Amazon Web Services to use. Why did they do it? Because Amazon offers a decade of experience in running one of the largest internet enterprises - and has wrapped this expertise into a set of pre-packaged services and APIs.

Read more at Read/WriteWeb

Damn Small Linux 3.1 has been released. Excerpts from the final changelog: “Converted 54 Lua and Lua/Fltk programs to Lua 5.1.1 Fltk 1.1 via MurgaLua interface; Updated SQLite to 3.3.6; made Unionfs the default boot; improved mount tool for ‘after boot’ pen drive support; updated hard drive install for consistent fstab; New boot option ‘dosswapfile’ to auto-scan or specify DOS swap file; Read more at DistroWatch

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case that could make it harder to obtain patents, with technology giants Microsoft and Cisco Systems supporting a change. The case, involving a patent on gas pedals for vehicles, has the Supreme Court examining how lower courts arrive at a decision that an invention was obvious, and therefore not patentable. In the case, Teleflex and Technology Holding, holders of the electronic gas pedal patent, sued KSR International for patent infringement, but the defendant argued the courts should invalidate the gas pedal invention for obviousness. After oral arguments Tuesday, some patent lawyers said they expected the Supreme Court to overturn a 4-decade-old approach to deciding obviousness often called the teaching-suggestion-motivation test. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has used this test, saying that there must be some proven teaching, suggestion or motivation to lead a person of ordinary skill to combine “prior art” products into a new invention for that invention to be declared obvious. Other patent lawyers said they expect little movement from the Supreme Court, although any change would have a huge impact on patent holders. If the Supreme Court throws out the motivation test, all current patents could be suspect, said Paul Andre, an intellectual property lawyer with Perkins Coie, in an interview. Read more at LinuxWorld