Everything About Envelopes in OpenOffice 2.0

Envelope printing is the tax return of office suite tasks. Everyone has to do it, and everyone hates it. Printing envelopes in OpenOffice.org, or in any office suite, is complicated because of printers. When you take printers out of their comfort space of letter or A4 size paper, they get cranky. Well, not cranky; they just have different rules for how they print, and it's not always obvious what those are. OpenOffice expert Solveig Haugland walks users through custom envelope creation and design.

Impressions: Xubuntu (5.10)

"In this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, a new Ubuntu derivative called Gnubuntu is mentioned. A little earlier in the announcement a reference to Xubuntu is given. Xubuntu is news to me! I just had to try it. I headed over to the Xubuntu site to figure this thing out. Their Introduction statements is as follows: "The aim of the Xubuntu community project is to provide a nice Ubuntu desktop experience by using Xfce4 as the desktop environment and GTK+ 2 applications wherever possible."

Linux and the XBox 360

The Xbox-Linux team have got to work on trying to port Linux to the Xbox 360, in a project named 'Free 60'. The Free60 Project aims to port open source operating systems like GNU/Linux and Darwin to the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. Here is some interesting documentation already from their website.

OS Virtualization: an Introduction

"One of the hottest topics in all of IT today is the subject of virtualization. While it has been around for some time, it has just recently started to garner the attention of the biggest names in tech. Everyone from Intel and AMD, to Microsoft, Sun, and virtually every commercial Linux vendor has either current or planned support for virtualization. So what is it, and why is everyone so head over heels about it?"

Time to Take Off the Training Wheels

How are users supposed to learn if they never fall down? For many users, being faced with "safety" features just creates more workaround. Confirming, clarifying, and checking every operation, as most applications these days do, is intended to protect users from accidents. The result is similar to what many people find after putting training wheels on a child's bicycle: the vehicle is more cumbersome and the child never learns to ride it properly.

Discussing a D-BUS Service Framework

The ICT-Business is known for strategic terms. One of those terms, which was used quite a lot over this year, is services. The term is interpretable; however, the focus was on technical concepts implemented to serve for a sharply rendered use case, like managing user data and authentication. Services in that sense are served over a type of network. Despite the first impression, they are not served to a user but to a calling application. This client utilizes one or more services for internal purposes. Though, the user may be expected to provide data (the password, for example) or to wait and receive a gathered result.

Dual-Core Chips: AMD Smashes Intel

"After reading the round-by-round account of our dual-core desktop CPU prizefight, it should come as no shock that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 chips are the runaway victors here, laying out the Intel Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition 840 chips pins up. If we had to call out one chip, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is an outstanding bargain given the competition, but as our results show, any AMD dual-core CPU will serve you better than its similarly priced Intel equivalent."

Linux-Vserver on Debian Sarge

"Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. All services, such as ssh, mail, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VPS, without modification, just like on any real server. Each virtual server has its own user account database and root password and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers." A guide for Debian is available here.

SkyOS Gets Webserver

"The SkyOS service collection has been extended with a web server service. Thanks to Gareth Owen (developer of ghttpd) and Cody Mays (ported ghttpd to SkyOS) you can use SkyOS as a web server now. The web server configuration is done with the common graphical service configuration plugin for the System Manager. Using Nvu and Firefox you have great tools available to develop and maintain websites from within SkyOS." A screenshot's here. This web server and the service plugin will be made available in an update package, available via the SkyOS Software store.

Updates to Bluebottle

"Bluebottle is a powerful operating system developed in the Programming Languages and Runtime Systems Research Group, based on the Active Object System (Aos) kernel. The Aos kernel provides a compact runtime environment for the Active Oberon language, which supports active objects (threads) directly, and enables the construction of efficient active object-based systems that directly run on the hardware." You can read the changelog for the latest changes, and be sure to check the screenshot of the window manager.

10 Things That Make Ubuntu a Neophyte’s Distribution

"I have always wondered what is it that makes people embrace Ubuntu over other Linux distributions. After some pondering, it struck me that the unique selling point of Ubuntu is its user friendliness. Ubuntu is a distribution targeted at the non-techie crowd - those that want to get their job done and not spend time tinkering with the OS. And consequently, the developers at Ubuntu have bundled simple easy to use GUI front end tools to achieve common system administration tasks. Here I have put together 10 things in Ubuntu that make a new user's life that much simple."

Galeon 2.0 Released

"Yes, the day is finally upon us. As I promised when I announced our future development plans, here's the actual Galeon 2.0 release. Its' been about 3 years and 8 months since work began on the 1.3.x development series and it's been unofficially stable for about half that time - so this acknowledgement of that fact is well past due."

Escaping the Java Trap

"For the last couple of years the community has been working to ensure that developers can create applications using Java without having to depend on proprietary software. Today, the Free implementations are already very capable and support a vast amount of functionality that developers expect from a Java-like environment. Important large applications like JOnAS, OpenOffice.org 2, Eclipse 3 and Tomcat 5 are known to work and now included in distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora Core. This document provides a road map of the various projects; how they work together, where they are, where they're going, and how we make sure that they work well and are compatible."

Blocking Skype Using Squid and OpenBSD

"After much digging online for an effective way to stop this pesky application that is highly de-centralised and a big pain to blocked, I finally found a way to do it. It has been working perfectly fine on our corporate network, and we have had no complaints of users being denied access to legitimate web destinations (that are in compliance with our security policy of course)."

Linux vs. Windows Web Hosting: Does It Make a Difference?

"One of the most confusing decisions someone new to web hosting will have to make is which platform their server should be on. There are a number of different choices out there but the main two are Linux and Windows web servers. There are also a lot of sources of information about hosting, but the majority of them are tainted by the author's biased personal opinion unfortunately confusing the issue."

SkyOS Beta 9 Released

"This release features new core components like the integrated mouse gestures, new Font system and API, new applications (Pixel Image Editor, ...) and various driver/system updates as well as more than 200 fixed bugs reported in our bug tracking system." In addition, the SkyOS team has decided that the version numbers got too confusing. Therefore, SkyOS v5 will now simply be named SkyOS. I might even start missing the "SkyOS v5 Beta 8.4 Alpha 1 of the 3rd Beta Released" headlines. In any case, here's the changelog.