Tracey Donvito reviews Hentzenwerke‘s “The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org”
The small publishing company Hentzenwerke focuses their books on two areas: the migration from Windows to Linux, and OpenOffice.org. They have already published three books on OOo, and are becoming the go-to publisher for OOo information.
Congratulations to author Benjamin Horst, editor Solveig Haugland and publisher Whil Hentzen!
A Slashdot blogger notes that Sveasoft releases Alchemy 1.0, an updated firmware image for the LinkSys WRT54G family of wireless routers. There’s been a lot of controversy with Sveasoft charging a subscription fee for access to the beta development forums for the software, which is a mixture of Linux software, modifications by LinkSys, and original development by SveaSoft. There have been a lot of charges on both sides of theft, DMCA violations, copyright and license infringement. It’s disappointing seeing so much controversy surrounding such a great project.
The Greater New Hampshire Linux Group manned a booth today at the Hosstraders Hamfest and swap meet. A number of local Linux luminaries were there, evangelizing Linux, talking up the local Linux User Groups, and demonstrating a variety of different Linux distributions, including several with Ham Radio specific software.
The Doc Searls Weblog posts Flattening out. “Getting Flat, Part 2 completes my long essay for Linux Journal on Tom Friedman‘s The World is Flat. (Here’s Part 1. …. Most of what I write in Part 2 isn’t about Tom Friedman. It’s about the boat anchor we call the bell curve, and why continuing to shape kids with it is The West’s worst handicap in a flattened world… In case you haven’t noticed, my life has been one long fight against the bell curve. I recount some of that in the piece as well.”
What starts out as a review (and many links to a pan) of a “new paradigm of the month” book turns into a touching, intensely personal and insightful complaint against the prejudices of the bell curve. Well worth reading and contemplating.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, recurs the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute campus starting at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF. It has a new “Scriptor” API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.
Hope to see you there!
A strange article at InfoWorld: Top News titled Microsoft: Let the 64-bit era begin. Microsoft was one of the companies that started the Windows 64-bit era with Windows NT running on the PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha chips in the early 90s. DEC produced the Alpha chip and went on to port UNIX to the chip as Tru64 UNIX. Sun responded with the UltraSPARC in 1995, also 64-bit. For reasons unclear to me, Microsoft dropped all but the Intel 32-bit version of their Windows products in 1999, effectively ceding the 64-bit market to to Sun, DEC, Compaq and HP. Linux has run on 64-bit chips since they were available. A recent post on the GNHLUG board indicates that Linux will run on an AMD64 laptop as well. Wow, 64 bits on a laptop!
The article mentions the 64-bit release of Windows XP, but seems focused on the long-promised “Longhorn” release of Windows, and has a couple of strange paragraphs claiming that the Longhorn flavor Windows Explorer can provide much of the search capabilities of the oft-promised (but not included in Longhorn) WinFS database-as-file-system:
The various transparencies, shading, and richer animation capabilities of Longhorn’s graphical interface that will be featured in the demo are not glitz for glitz’s sake, because these improvements are designed to help users to “collect, organize, and visualize data in a way that is not possible today,”
Uh, hunh.
I don’t think this column is coincidentally timed with the release this Friday of “Tiger,” Apple’s latest OS X version 10.4, including the built-in “Spotlight” desktop search feature. Can’t wait to see how Tiger delivers!
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Windows 2000 Users: The Clock Is Ticking. June 30 marks the end of mainstream support for both the client and server Windows 2000 releases. A Windows 2000 rollup pack is still due by midyear.”
Time to start evaluating your options for your next operating system. There are lots of good choices out there. Me? I’m thinking Tiger, Ubuntu, Fedora and perhaps a little SuSE ought to do me.
OSNews also points to Linux Insider: How Linux Saved Microsoft. “Rob Enderle has an commentary at LinuxInsider discussing the effect Linux has had on Microsoft. An excerpt: “As I look at how Microsoft is changing to address the Linux threat, one that may actually turn out to be no more real then Netscape’s was, I can’t help but see how Microsoft has dramatically benefited from it — and much more broadly so than they did from the rise of Netscape.”
I think Enderle is right on when he talks about the effect that Open Source is having with Microsoft. “Competition breeds Innovation.” However, I think he falls off the deep end in his last section “False Threat?” where he tries to explain what Open Source is.
… “open source” which, in turn, is based on a false concept. This concept is that people actually want to look at source code. No, it’s that people want the security of knowing that the code is there for a community to maintain, support and enhance, that a monopolistic code owner can’t take away the freedom to run the code they have.
Finally, we know that what is largely holding the open-source community together is a dislike for Microsoft. Little holds the community together! 🙂 But the individuals who choose Open Source each choose it for their own reasons, often freedom of choice, freedom to experiment, freedom to extend, integrate, modify and hack together the solution to their own problem. It’s not about Microsoft, nor Computer Associates, nor IBM, nor any other one target.
… unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we’ll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Perhaps, Rob. See you in 2015 and we can compare notes.
Cleaning out the basement, I came across a Dell Latitude XP 4100CX: a 486/100 with 24 Mb RAM and 500 Mb HDD, and a tiny color screen. Hard as it is to believe, Linux will run on this, too. Found instructions on how to proceed without a CD-ROM drive here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/network-install.html
Remarkable.
OSNews posts Linux Can’t Kill Windows. “One fundamental difference guarantees that Windows will continue to dominate says Tom Yager.” I’ve enjoyed Tom’s editorials on the back page of InfoWorld for the last year. This isn’t a flame. I’ll be interested on seeing where Tom is going with this – an editorial with a “continued next episode” teaser.