FreeSoftNews

OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER

Volume 05 - Issue 04 - 10/2007

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

Contents

1. Announcements
================
* OpenOffice.org is Seven Today
* New version of Outlook alternative available
* Community edition of Sharepoint alternative released

2. Success Stories
==================
* German Foreign Office comes out in favor of Open Document Format
* OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis
* Linux-based laptops ordered by Nigeria and Uruguay
* German department store chain saves money with StarOffice

3. Featured News
================
* Great OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review / Tutorial
* Global ODF Conference Convened in Berlin
* About the ODF Adoption in India
* ODF becomes government standard in South Africa
* Apple starts supporting ODF
* Corel introduces ODF support in latest WordPerfect beta
* Adobe’s Buzzword will support ODF

4. Tips & Tricks
================
* “Parliamentary Toolbox” including OpenOffice.org
* Fax support for OpenOffice.org
* Test the new OpenOffice.org Presenter Screen!
* XQuery and ODF
* Better Statistics Support in OpenOffice.org Chart
* Open Source Archiving Software with ODF Support
* “Creating interactive forms with OpenOfice.org Writer”
* “OpenOffice.org Base primer”

• Read more: OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 04 - 10/2007

I’ve updated the Unofficial FAQ for Fedora 7! Hooray!!

You can see the new version at:

http://www.fedorafaq.org/

I’m expecting to be MUCH faster on the update for Fedora 8,
which I’m going to start working on in advance, very soon.

I’ve overhauled all of the questions to be up-to-date with
Fedora 7. I’ve also re-worked the yum configuration a neat way, so
that every package is available to you from every repository, without
any cross-repo conflicts!

Let me know if you have any contributions!

http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/

-Max

–
http://www.everythingsolved.com/
Competent, Friendly Bugzilla and Perl Services. Everything Else, too.

Microsoft has blundered with Vista in terms of its user interface approach, and it won't take long before Apple's gain in market share will become staggering, according to Don Reisinger in his C|Net Blog.

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At the first international workshop of users of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Berlin to which the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic had invited about 150 users and political observers, Brazil and India, in addition to German cities such as Munich, emerged as leading proponents of open standards in the office area. Brazil was making “intensive use” of free software, Deivi Kuhn of Serpro, a company founded at the behest of the Brazilian government, which coordinates the use of open source in the up-and-coming developing nation, declared. The ODF standard adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was mandatory when it came to state interoperability standards for e-government, he observed. It was a good tool for securing user freedoms and access to knowledge, he added.

Read more at heise online

The government does not know how much open source software it uses or what its value is, ministers have admitted.
Gillian Merron, minister for transformational government in the Cabinet Office, said there were no targets to promote the use of open source software such as the Linux operating system or the OpenOffice productivity suite, “except where it is the most cost-effective way” of meeting government needs.

In answer to questions from Liberal Democrat MP Julia Goldsworthy, Merron said: “Information on the total use and value of open source in government is not held centrally and could not be obtained except at disproportionate cost.”

Read more at ComputerWorld UK

Today the new Wine help and discussion forum at wine-forum.org went live, the forums are meant to be a meeting place for anyone interested in Wine usage or development. In the past there there has never been a single forum dedicated just to Wine. In the past the Wine project has used mailing lists, newsgroups and other methods for user discussion leaving many postings about Wine in other forums where Wine was always relegated as a sub-forum.

Read more at Wine Review

Today, I’m starting a new theme for this blog. Instead of ranting or trolling like a good chunk of bloggers out there, I’ll be writing about the cool new stuff upstream Gnome developers have coded during the past 6 months (probably more, since I’ll try to go back to older features as well) and that we offer in Gentoo, but are hidden.

As many know, Gentoo is about choice, and the default choice is to “opt-in”. So if you install Gnome on Gentoo, you get a bare-bone Gnome experience, sometimes in stark contrast to what other distros do. So in order to level the playing field, I’ll be writing about how to enable some of those cool features.

Today’s special : gnome-keyring’s pam module.

Gnome-keyring now provides its own pam module, so you don’t need to emerge pam_keyring. Just enable the pam use flag (it should be on by default) and you’ll be ready to start configuring it

Read more at Remi Cardona blog

Multiple Distros on multiple machines to test Linux for the Enterprise Desktop continues

Last time out I was on an adventure of my lifetime, traveling to our Pune, India office to meet others in BMC’s R&D Support team. I had taken my Dell D620, configured with Mint 3.1. It was reliable and trouble free. What was left over from that trip was an issue from the previous post about OpenSUSE 10.3. It was troublesome enough on the D620 hardware that I ejected it at the last minute in favor of Mint 3.1.

I had two days back in the office between trips, and spent one evening after everyone left setting up a new set of Linux test systems.

Laptops

I tend to use laptops to test all things Linux desktop for these reasons.

1. Linux on a laptop is usually a harder test for Linux, since the hardware can be less standard. Call it a stretch goal.
2. My office is only so big! Laptops save space, and power, and have built in screens so I don’t have to have to have a KVM infrastructure.
3. Laptops now outsell desktops, and why not? Dual core, 64 bit, increased memory on RAM and Disk… what do I need a desktop for?

This approach has been borne out by my recent D620 work with OpenSUSE 10.3 and Mint 3.1. OpenSUSE was problematic, Mint was largely flawless. This is not to say that there would not be a different laptop where the exact reverse could be true. This is one finding on one laptop. It would be a scientific mistake to generalize this one data-point. That is where the IBM T41 and Dell Inspiron 8100 come in.

Read more at BMCSoftware

In public health, harm reduction is a practice that, rather than trying to eradicate potentially dangerous choices like prostitution, tries to minimize their effects. Often, the practice involves a limited condoning of the practice, such as safe injection sites for addicts. Harm reduction is the path that Fedora 8 has chosen on the issue of MP3 and other non-free codecs in the form of Codec Buddy, a Codeina-based program that tries to educate users about free software while giving them easy legal access to codecs by linking to the commercial Fluendo site. It’s a decision about which the Fedora Board and community leaders feel considerable ambivalence.

In a more commercial distribution, the issue would barely exist — the company would cut a deal to include non-free codecs, and the problem would be solved. Conversely, in a distribution more used to public debate, such as Debian, where the eradication of the non-free repository has become an issue several times in the last few years, the issue of Codec Buddy could easily cause a community firestorm. However, if the Fedora’s user list is any indication, many in the community are more interested in the pragmatics of running their system than in upholding software freedoms in public. According to Fedora chair Max Spevack, the board has received very little reaction to the inclusion of Codec Buddy, and it is true that, although a few negative criticism can be found, such as Ronald S. Bultje’s blog comment last March, you have to search to find them.

Read more at Linux.com

I have been getting several e-mails in this month wanting to know my
suggestions and tips on what the best way is to backup your Firefox
install.

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension)

read more

Have you ever glanced over at someone else using Ubuntu 7.10 and
said to yourself “woah, they’ve got all the COOL stuff!” No? Er…
neither have I. But, if you would like to get some cool stuff, here’s
how you can enable extra repositories, like the non-free and Multiverse
areas.

First, you’ve got to open Synaptic, the package manager for Ubuntu. Go to System-> Administration-> Synaptic Package Manager. You’ll be prompted for your password.

Once Synaptic is open, go to Settings at the top and then Repositories.

read more

mokoNinja posted a video a few hours ago on YouTube showing the newly created media player application for the OpenMoko. This is a pretty standard feature for all smart phones, and since I am looking to replace the need for a portable media player when I get a Neo1973, it is nice to see that it is coming along nicely with all the standard features one would expect raised when raised in an iPod generation.

Read and look more at mobilemoko

What’s the most exciting emerging technology for enterprises in the next 3 to 5 years? Hint: It’s not going to be designed by Apple. It just may be open source ERP, Gregor Bailar, former CIO of Capital One, told attendees of the CIOΙ08 The Year Ahead conference, being held this week in San Diego. Surprised?

Maybe you’re not. You don’t meet many CIOs who don’t have some ERP angst. Worse, that angst has been simmering for three to five years now. In CIO’s recent 20th anniversary issue, we noted the “ERP hangover” that so many CIOs experienced in the 2004 timeframe after completely revamping their ERP systems, only to realize that the replacements were big, expensive, and took a lot of time and money to customize. Today, most CIOs still run newer versions of that same ERP software, from the two biggest vendors in this marketplace, Oracle and SAP.

Read more at CIO.com

AppArmor is one way to protect your assets on your Ubuntu Gutsy system.

read more

ClarkConnect Server/Gateway version 4.2 has been released: “Community Edition 4.2 is now available. Highlights include: improved hardware driver support (Linux 2.6.9 to 2.6.18); mail archiving; content filter group support; web browsing antivirus support; web proxy access control; web site upload via FTP and Windows file sharing; encrypted file….

Read more at DistroWatch

Crossbeam Systems has started shipping a massive chassis-style, “unified threat management” (UTM) system based on an open Linux OS. The X-Series UTM server runs the company’s Linux-based “XOS” OS, and targets highly scalable firewalls and other security applications for large data centers and service providers.

The X-Series UTM competes with high-end UTM systems such as Juniper Networks’s SSG, but is more open, thanks to a Linux-based OS, Crossbeam says. The company’s “XOS” Linux implementation is claimed capable of “seamlessly” unifying the resources of up to 100 separate processing cores spread out over up to 14 blades, enabling admins to tune available resources for optimal processing of specific individual traffic streams.

Read more at LinuxDevices.com

While OpenOffice.org’s Impress is a reasonable presentation program, it lacks one often-requested feature: the provision of a separate screen for the presenter which would contain notes, an indication of what the next slide is, etc. So it is encouraging that the OOo developers have just announced that this feature is now in development; see this page for some description of how it is expected to work. “Implementation of the Presenter Screen extension has begun and there is an early extension that shows its basic capabilities.

Read more at LWN.net

As an intern at Red Hat in 2003, Michael Chen was no gofer. He didn’t fetch coffee or make copies. He helped craft the Raleigh, N.C., software company’s strategy for entering the Chinese market. Soon after earning an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, he headed to Beijing to oversee Red Hat’s operations in the greater China region. I met Chen, who grew up in Chengdu, a city in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, while reporting in Beijing last year.

Read more at LinuxInsider

While privacy and open society advocates have been concerned about the dominance of Google’s search engine for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook’s growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends and colleagues online. Personally, I’m concerned that one corporation controls so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. With Microsoft’s recent $240 million investment in Facebook, the company has all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions.

Read more at NewsCloud 

Recently after 650 days of development Freeciv 2.1.0 has been released. A couple of things were improved in the new version and new features have been added, especially concerning multiplayer games, there is a rather long list of changes since v2.0.9:

Read more at linuX-gamers.net