April 17th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Leif Lodahl writes about Gribskov, Denmark‘s annual savings of 1 million Danish Kroner per year due to its adoption of OpenOffice.
Michel van der Linden is head of IT in Municipality of Gribskov in Denmark. In this article he explains how the municipality changed from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice some years ago. Initially they saved about two million Danish Kroner and later one million per year.
(According to Google, 1,000,000 Danish Kroner is about $180,000 US dollars.)
Machine translation of the original article in Danish is available here.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Gribskov, Denmark Saves Millions with OpenOffice
April 16th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
With OpenOffice 3.1 due any time now, I’ve begun using the OOo 3.1 RC1 on a daily basis already. I haven’t encountered any reason to make it feel like anything other than a final release, so hopefully others are in the same boat.
H-Online covers the OpenOffice release candidate in a recent post:
Baring any delays due to major bugs the final version is expected to be released on the 15th of April. A full list of features in the upcoming 3.1 final release can be found here.
Whoops, that day has passed, but it must surely be coming very soon!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice 3.1 Release Candidate
April 15th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Widelands is an open source real-time strategy game, inspired by Settlers I and II.
The screenshots look good, and I’m downloading the game now and hope to try playing it over the next weekend.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Source Games: Widelands
April 13th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Our friend Christian Einfeldt reports on Slashdot that Hungary and Tatarstan (in Russia) have made strategic moves to adopt Free and Open Source Software.
On April 2, the Hungarian government announced that it will be modifying its procurement rules to mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology. In Tatarstan, a Republic of 3.8 million inhabitants, the Deputy Minister of Education announced that by the end of this school year, all 2,400 educational institutions in Tatarstan will have completed a transition to GNU/Linux, following a successful pilot program it rolled out in 2008.
With the 2010 annual OpenOffice.org conference to be held in Budapest, Hungary, this is especially timely news.
Posted in Education, Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Hungary and Tatarstan Choose FOSS
April 10th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
BestCollegeRankings.org posted a list of 101 Killer Open Courseware Projects from Around the World: Ivy League and Beyond.
The following list of 100 open courseware projects are designed to offer readers access to supplementary materials for education. They are free (hence “open”) and available to anyone who has access to the Internet. The downside to these courseware projects is that you cannot earn credits; however, a few colleges do offer tuition-paying students a chance to earn credits by completing some projects online.
The list is quite sizable and not organized into subcategories (though each entry is annotated), so there’s still work to do if you want to understand it and choose a program and/or individual courses.
To my knowledge, the one university that created Open Courseware and appears to have placed all of its 1,800 courses online, deserves special mention. That university is MIT.
Many other great resources make this list essential to bookmark. Enjoy!
Posted in Education, Free Culture | Comments Off on 101 Great Open Courseware Projects
April 9th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
It’s great to see the increase in ordinary articles about OpenOffice.org in mainstream computer (and other) magazines. Not just “here’s an open source alternative app” but instead, “how to do X in OpenOffice”…
Today’s entry in this category comes from PC Mag, in OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do.
They are not complex things, and you probably already knew they were possible, but for the target audience of this article, the tips it contains could be quite helpful.
The first tip is for editing multiple parts of a document in different windows at one time:
OpenOffice.org doesn’t let you split a window into two panes, but it offers an even better feature. Click the Window menu, then New Window, to open a new window that displays the same document you’re working on. You can open as many windows as you want, each at a different place in your document; any change you make in one window immediately appears in all others.
(I don’t think I knew this one…)
Other tips include opening legacy document formats–in which OOo is a true champion–modifying the default saved file format, playing an easter egg game, and automating various actions with macros.
Posted in How-to, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on PC Mag’s OpenOffice Tips
April 8th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Google’s Android platform, while starting slow, shows a great deal of potential and has piqued the interest of many phone vendors and carriers. In the NY Times’ piece T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home, Ashley Vance discusses new T-Mobile devices planned for Android.
T-Mobile plans to sell a home phone early next year and soon after a tablet computer, both running Android, according to confidential documents obtained from one of the company’s partners. The phone will plug into a docking station and come with another device that handles data synchronization as it recharges the phone’s battery.
There have been many rumors of netbooks adopting Android, in part because it is expected the brand power of Google would be strong enough to convince buyers they don’t need Windows. In fact, T-Mobile’s home phone sounds very much like a phone-netbook hybrid to me:
T-Mobile’s use of Android to advance its ambitions also shows just how blurry the line has become between phones and computers. Its tablet-size phone device resembles a small laptop without a keyboard and has a seven-inch touch screen. It would handle basic computing jobs like checking the weather or managing data across a variety of devices in the home.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Androids in the Home!
April 7th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Frank Mau writes Pootle and OpenOffice.org, in which he discusses continued refinements to the translation tools available for OOo native language communities. Among those tools is Pootle, which helps to manage translation project teams.
Of interest to the whole community, is the vast breadth of translations that have already been completed for the development branch of OpenOffice 3.1. Mau announces:
OpenOffice.org 3.1 is knocking on the door and we are proud to deliver more languages than ever before. I’ve seen near by 100 full install-sets for m5 testing! Great to see this engagement by the community, big thanks to everyone.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
April 6th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
ComputerWorld publishes a lengthy piece titled 25 Highly-Anticipated Open Source Releases Coming This Year.
It’s a roundup of some major open source project releases scheduled for the rest of this year, although article commentors pointed out a number of important projects that weren’t mentioned… which shows how important and enormous the field of open source has become.
Firefox 3.5, Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, Android, Maemo, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org 3.1, Kaltura, Dimdim, Foswiki, WordPress, several open source hardware projects, and much more.
It’s going to be a huge year for open source!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Maemo, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 1 Comment »
April 3rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
John C. Dvorak, a PC Mag columnist long seen as a major Microsoft apologist supporter, has become enamored of Ubuntu for himself and his readers, and expresses it in a recent column, Dvorak Likes Linux:
The critical mass has been reached, and it’s time everyone tried Ubuntu.
A strong statement, and a major shift for the irascible writer. He expands it with:
I seriously like the Ubuntu 8.10 implementation and will now install it permanently on my latest machines. It’s a winner…
In many instances the complexity of Linux turns out to be smoothed over by the Ubuntu architecture. It’s so good that I’m a little annoyed with myself for not getting to it sooner.
It’s a pretty amazing change for this IT veteran, made even more so when he caps off the piece with this:
If I had a small or mid-size company, I’d probably use only Linux and open-source software, just to stay out of the way of the software police and their onerous “audits”—another abhorrent situation that, to me, is intolerable.
Congratulations, John, for coming around! Welcome to the new world.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Dvorak Prefers Ubuntu