September 13th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Bruce Byfield writes European Union sponsors new FOSS education portal for Linux.com.
“Heavily funded by the European Union, the Science, Education, and Learning in Freedom (SELF) consortium launched the beta version of its site this week with the motto, “Be SELFish, share your knowledge!” By the end of the year, SELF hopes to develop into the Wikipedia of free learning materials, with a heavy emphasis on material about open standards and free and open source software (FOSS).”
The program is pan-EU, but also pan-Earth: “The original consortium consisted of the Internet Society Netherlands; the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (University of Catalonia) in Spain; Free Software Foundation Europe; the University of Gothenburg in Sweden; the Internet Society Bulgaria; the Fundación Vía Libre of Argentina, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.”
A cool project, and I wish them great success!
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on European Union’s New FOSS Portal
September 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Notes 8 has become very interesting to me now that it includes OpenOffice.org code and the ability to create ODF files!
From a strategic standpoint, IBM really had to do this–Microsoft has been using its power in the office suite market to target Lotus Notes users for switching to Exchange, so now IBM is taking the fight back to Microsoft. Lotus Notes 8 users will now receive daily reminders that they might not need MS Office afterall, since they’ve already got ODF creation tools right in front of them. And knowing that 100+ million new users can read ODF files will embolden users of KOffice, OpenOffice.org and others to share files in the ODF format, building market and mind-share for this key open file format.
In this context, Mike Heck reviews Lotus Notes 8 for InfoWorld and finds it very compelling on its own merits:
“Notes 8 has a clean new look, logical menus, and customizable layouts; for me, this design makes the client easier to use compared to Microsoft Outlook… You can preview documents in a vertical pane to the right, and you can recall messages — two features that Microsoft Outlook has offered for ages. Where Notes now beats Outlook, though, is in its capability of arranging messages as a conversation thread — and these can span an entire mail file, not just your inbox. Just highlight one message and all related ones automatically become part of the thread…”
I’d love to see IBM develop a strategy to get Lotus Notes into small businesses… by offering a fully open source version of the application! I think their current clients, mostly large enterprises, would continue to purchase service agreements, so existing sales would not be cannibalized. And small businesses would jump on an open source Lotus Notes, which would be much better for them than Exchange, too tightly tied to the Windows platform as it is.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Lotus Notes 8 Review
September 11th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
IBM has long been involved with the ODF file format, and has even embedded a customized version of OpenOffice.org into Lotus Notes 8, but now they’ve taken their commitment one step further and formally joined the OpenOffice.org Community.
The press release announces, “IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.”
IBM will assign 35 developers to work fulltime on OpenOffice.org itself, and will leverage OOo technologies in other products (as they’ve already done with Lotus Notes). Sounds like a very healthy and sustainable relationship with the community will come out of this!
Slashdot discusses the announcement here.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
September 10th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
After years of searching for software to help organize me, and watching Chandler grow and evolve, the Open Source Applications Foundation has released Chandler Preview (version 0.7). (Download page is here.) I haven’t seen a formal release announcement for it yet, but this version was posted on Friday and today is the previously-declared release date.
I’ve got high hopes for this application as a new paradigm in organization that will replace my Inbox with something more effective… and in some ways its design concepts seem to have already influenced other applications, with even Apple’s website mentioning Chandler in several places!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Chandler Preview Busts Loose
September 5th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
As I get deeper into researching Drupal for some upcoming projects, I was seeking a way to install it on my MacBook for home testing purposes.
Along comes MAMP, a pre-packaged installer for Apache, MySQL and PHP on your Mac OS X system. And Rob Cottingham provides a tutorial for installing MAMP and Drupal on your Mac. Very handy!
Five quick steps, and you’re up and running. I was able to install and configure everything while also watching Law and Order.
Posted in How-to, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on Install Drupal with MAMP
September 4th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The new OOo Extensions site has launched.
Among its catalog of extensions is the cool new OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs by Przemyslaw Rumik.
Rumik introduces his new extension to the mailing list: “The extension lets you export Writer (and in theory also Calc) documents to Google Docs. You simply need to choose the Google Docs menu and Export to Google Docs item, enter your Google Account credentials and voila! your document lands on your Google Docs list :-)”
“The extension works with OpenOffice.org 2.2 (should also work with
OpenOffice.org 2.04+) and StarOffice 8, and requires Java 6 SE :-(, and was
tested under Windows.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
August 30th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DesktopLinux.com has released the results of its 2007 Desktop Linux Survey.
It’s clear that Linux on the desktop is a healthy and fast-growing market segment. Publicity and interest in the survey was significantly larger than last year: “This year’s survey produced 38,500 votes versus 14,535 votes over the same number of days in a similar survey one year ago.”
Specific questions on preferred Linux distributions (Ubuntu, followed by SUSE), desktop environments (GNOME pulls ahead), web browsers (Firefox dominates) and email clients (Thunderbird, with Evolution not far behind) provided some useful data reference points in this quick zeitgeist of the Linux realm.
Full results are available at the 2007 Desktop Linux Market Survey page.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on 2007 Desktop Linux Survey
August 29th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Chandler Hub, the online demo of OSAF’s Chandler Server, has now been updated to version 0.7.0.
“Chandler Hub now demonstrates more pieces of the Chandler vision. In particular, the Hub now supports not only tasks, but Chandler item “stamping” which lets an event also be a task and vice versa. Your tasks and events can be viewed and “triaged” on a unified web dashboard.”
From my use of it over the past day or so, I’ve been impressed. I have long been interested in the concepts behind Chandler, and now to see them start to take concrete form is very interesting.
The project is seeking interested users for beta testers, as real-world usage is the best way to see if the concept and the implementation of the concept are viable.
“You are invited to use Chandler Hub for daily usage or testing of Cosmo 0.7.0. We’re a small service, but we will do our best to keep your data secure and always available for your use.”
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on Chandler Hub Update
August 27th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
NeoOffice 2.2.1 for Mac OS X is available to the world starting today. (Slashdot also picks up the release.)
The project site announces “This release is based on the OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 code and includes all of the new OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 features. NeoOffice 2.2.1 can be downloaded here.”
NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, but unfortunately there have been disagreements between the two projects. The official OOo Mac porting project has picked up a lot of steam recently, and has received fulltime employees paid by Sun, so if I can speak for the wider community, all we want is for these two projects to carry on amicably. While they have different goals and purposes, there is still a lot of common ground on which I personally would like to see ongoing collaboration.
Congratulations to the NeoOffice team for today’s release!
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on NeoOffice 2.2.1 Released
August 23rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Got a note from my friends at Bug Labs about the launch of their beta program.
“We need to test out the SDK, the environment, the interfaces, the APIs, and, yup, you guessed it, the hardware too. Now to set expectations right off the bat: we don’t have nearly enough units to go around (yet), so there’ll be quite a bit of testing in a software-only environment (which is a-okay, as we have a full emulator that gives you a Virtual BUG!). Also, we’re going to use a bit of a “staged” approach, so we will start small, then slowly expand the pool of testers as time goes on.”
For now, the units are scarce and the company needs to ramp up its ability to collect and process feedback, so they are wisely starting with a limited beta. You need to sign up on the site for consideration. But if you’re a hardware and software hacker with an idea for Bug’s modular platform, get on it!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Bug Beta Begins