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Openoffice is an open source software offering its users many desktop applications as text editing and spreadsheet application. Since its appearance it was the first competitor of Microsoft Office but has never been the number one ! Microsoft Office is still the best sold Microsoft product ever! This desktop suite alone is making huge revenues and still the most desktop suite used in the world. You may say that’s because integrated with Windows but it doesn’t. It’s sold separately from Windows. IE is integrated in Windows and couldn’t beat Firefox so it’s time to OOo to have some wings !

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In this article, we’ll examine a few options for running your Small Business, pitting Microsoft’s offerings against the alternatives.

Part of any business today is computing, and computing is an incremental cost, especially in a growing company. Lay out the money for the hardware, the printers, the office suite, the technician to take care of it all, the network, the server, and so on. In the Microsoft scenario, the costs get pretty high, and keep growing as your company grows.

What if you could just install everything once and have it work? What if adding software to your entire network (whether it’s just three employees or three hundred) only took moments? Well, I’m going to look at some options where you can do this, and show you how much you can save.

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After finding how-to upon how-to that said to use "apt-get install
ubuntu-xen-server" and repeatedly banging my head against the wall
because it kept telling me the package wasnt found, I finally found the
Xen page at the Ubuntu Community site that explained the situation.
Apparently, there is no such package for amd64 kernels and you need to
specify each needed package. Thankfully, they list the command you need
over there:

(you do need to uncomment the universe repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list)

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Things are not looking good for KDE, following the news that KDE will not be getting long term support (LTS) whereas GNOME will according to Canonical. The Hardy Heron will be assured of LTS status it seems, making Ubuntu 8.04 the second version of this Linux distro to get the Canonical commercial blessing. The decision would appear to be a simple commercial one, after all GNOME is far and away the most popular when it comes to downloads. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO, reckons it accounts for around 65% of all Ubuntu downloads. So where does this leave the other 35% who are loyal to KDE?

Read more at daniweb

The most important thing that make youngsters so attached to Windows
and reject Linux distributions is running games. To solve this problem
we give those links:

How to install any game using Wine?
This
question was asked in the Linuxquestions.org and largely discussed. It
mainly deals with the best tools to run games on Linux such as Wine and
VMware.

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As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software. Moglen, 48, is a Connecticut native who grew up in Manhattan and began programming for pay at the age of 13. Eventually, he worked as a developer at IBM to put himself through college and law school. A longtime friend of free software advocate, Richard Stallman, Moglen recently talked with Computerworld about his work, his belief in open source and what he sees as the changing future of software in the world economy.
Excerpts from that interview follow:
How did you get so passionate about free and open-source software? When I went to law school in the fall of 1980, I thought that I was in all likelihood, like my mother, going to be a university professor.

Read more at Computerworld

In the past, I’ve noticed that reviews of the various GNU/Linux OS distributions have frequently made point of their downfalls when compared to one Microsoft OS or another. This doesn’t make much sense in the grand scale of things, because most-if not all-of Microsoft’s advantages come from being the long-time market leader, not the better OS.
So, in light of that, I decided to right a few wrongs by creating a review of Windows XP
Media Center Edition 2005 (which is arguably the best Microsoft OS to date) as if Linux were the market leader, and Microsoft, the upstart.
Obviously, certain points must be ignored in this reverse scenario, but this will encourage an equal playing field.
The biggest factor that will be ignored is the certain proprietary softwares that are locked into the Windows world, e.g.: Adobe Photoshop, autoCAD, Corel, games, codecs, and the ever slimming list of device drivers.
(I will, however, mention drivers included with the OS, just not the ones that don’t exist at all.)

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One of the things that’s been discussed a lot over the years is how Linux seems to succeed enmass across many different markets whereas BSD is relegated to just a sizeable slice of the server world.  Finding anyone who actually runs any of the BSD’s as a desktop seems very hard to come by.  But why is this?  Likely it’s due to the excessively open nature of the BSD license, as many have claimed.  In short, the GPL says that “if you change it, you must share your changes”, yet the BSD license says, “Feel free to take what you like, but you don’t need to give anything back.”  That in itself has lead to a plundering of the BSD’s the likes of which would make any pirate proud.

Read more at Raiden’s Realm

Recent releases of Ubuntu have a feature where the installation CD
can be used as a repository for installing software, just like any
repository on the web.

The advantage of this, obviously, is it means that you can save
bandwidth for some packages that haven’t been updated since the
release, or even sometimes be able to install new packages without an
internet connection at all. The main disadvantage - the CD has to be in
the drive.

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Warning: You should proceed with caution using this Howto, if you do not know what you are doing you could damage your relationship with Friend 2.0 or totally break it. Also, using this Howto extensively with multiple Friend 2.0’s may damage Life 4.5, and end up as a sorrow lonely geek.

Prerequisites :

Before attempting to convert Friend to Linux, there are some major tweaks you need to do. If you already done these tweaks and living by them then good for you, if not then doing this is a MUST:

First of all you need to have a Friend first to convert before attempting to convert. And in order to have a Friend you need to have a Life right? Let me try to make it simpler for you my fellow geek: Now you have a package named whatever-3.42.tar.gz, what will you do? Untar it, then configure, make, make install right? But you will need a compiler first right? Now think of Life as your compiler, all of us have Life, but we need to recompile Life first using the -lessgeek and -moreoutgoing flags in order to create Life suitable for Friend. So in Life directory do the following:
Read more at hehe2.net

The Firefox Web browser community has created thousands of wonderful extensions that make surfing and working with the Internet fun and productive. While many extensions are homes runs, here are a few that just don’t make it out of the ballpark.

The object of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is to write a 50,000-word novel in a mere 30 days. That’s stressful enough without being constantly reminded of how far you’re falling behind, yet that’s just what the Nanowrimo Meter does. Most writers won’t want a reminder of their cumulative lack of progress. Unless, of course, you’re the type of writer that can churn out 11,554 cogent words in two days. If that’s the case, we should talk.

Read more at Linux.com

Lately, I have been looking into other distributions that, like Ubuntu, are working to make strides to attract new users. I still have Debian Etch burned to a CD, waiting for a test in our lab. Next up is going to be Fedora. In the past, I have never been too impressed with RPM-based distributions, but to be fair, most of this came from nightmare scenarios with Mandriva and SuSE. And the last time I really took Fedora for a solid run was with Fedora 5, so it has been a while since I tested the Red Hat supported distro.

But I can only take so much of Debian’s minimalist approach when it comes to describing features and why I should care to use the distro. After looking into what Fedora has done , I think it is clear which distribution is really working hard to attract new users.

Could Fedora Outperform Ubuntu for Casual Users? With the upcoming release of Fedora 8 (at the time of press time), I see solid indications that Fedora could dethrown Ubuntu with its latest release.

Read more at MadPenguin

About a week ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled “New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition” yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games, regretable since his conclusion was that it “blows away its competition”. This was done in the same style as Barr’s previous feature, “Tremulous: The best free software game ever?” which described Tremulous but also lacked comparisons and relations to other games. This feature hopes to be a thorough comparison of the major free software shooters.

There have been many free software first-person shooters (FPS) projects over the years, from modded Doom and Quake engines to enhance the existing games (ezQuake, EGL, ZDoom), to free art packs such as OpenQuartz or OpenArena. In 2002, along came Cube, a single and multiplayer FPS based on its own engine, including artwork, maps, models and an ingame map editor.

Read more at linuX-gamers.net

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 71 for the week
December 16th - December 29th, 2007. In this issue: Dell adds DVD
playback, Ubuntu Live Conference proposals, Hardy Alpha 2, Ubuntu
Desktop training course, a community approach to commercial training,
Kubuntu 8.04 LTS status, Full Circle Magazine Issue #8, new Kubuntu
members, IRSeek, a new Official Ubuntu Book, and much, much more!!

== In This Issue ==

* Dell Adds DVD Playback
* Ubuntu Live Conference Proposals
* Hardy Alpha 2
* MOTU News
* Ubuntu Desktop Training
* Kubuntu (Will 8.04 Be LTS?)
* Full Circle Magazine
* New Kubuntu Members
* IRSeek
* Official Ubuntu Book
* Launchpad News
* Forum Interviews & Announcements
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* Kubuntu Tutorials Day
* Meetings & Events
* Community Spotlight
* Updates & Security
* Bug & Translation Stats

• Read more: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #71

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

WordPress

Ken Smith has announced the availability of the first release candidate for FreeBSD 7.0: “FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 available. The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on….

Read more at DistroWatch

The PCLinuxOS development community has announced the release of PCLinuxOS “GNOME 2.21.2″, a remastered, community edition of PCLinuxOS containing the latest beta version of GNOME 2.22: “Ken Dotson has announced the release of PCLinuxOS GNOME edition 2.21.2. Featuring kernel 2.6.22.15, GNOME 2.21.2, GNOME office applications, Firefox 2.0.0.11, Frostwire,….

Read more at DistroWatch

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 updated

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its
old stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (codename `sarge’). This
is the first time we update the old stable distribution during the
lifetime of the stable distribution. This update mainly adds
corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with
a few adjustments to serious problems.

• Read more: Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 updated

Those of you that have installed the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) of Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) may have noticed that some areas are fixed, entirely new things are broken and some things just remain the same, like the slow file transfer issues over a network which is still present.

Don’t get me wrong, Vista SP1 RC1 does fix some issues that have plagued Vista since it released, the slow shutdown, resume from hibernate/sleep are all fixed.  There are other speed increases as well but perhaps are not so noticeable by the average user with the proof in artificial benchmarks.

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The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users.

Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said.

In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%.

In particular, the browser has faced competition from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), which is now used by nearly 80% of all web users.

Read more at BBC News