OpenOffice.org Base is undoubtedly a powerful database application, but when it comes to its built-in reporting engine, words like "underpowered" and "outdated" come to mind. Fortunately, you don't have to put up with this situation any longer: with the Sun Report Builder (SRB) extension, you can add nifty reporting features based on Pentaho reporting engine -- assuming you can figure out how to use it without any help.
The Secure Shell (SSH) network protocol makes it easy to connect computers that are running Linux, share files, and remotely run applications. Along with an X server, it can make sharing a single computer simple on a home network.
There's a wealth of information stored in online collaborative services like YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, but are these Web 2.0 services built to facilitate sharing their content across their individual boundaries? A group of academicians at Cornell University argue that this new wave of applications should be constructed with interoperability in mind. The result of their research, funded by DARPA and NSF, is Fedora, the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. The project was recently awarded a $4.9M grant by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand the functionality of its software platform.
Last week's announcement of a patent infringement suit against Red Hat and Novell set in motion speculation about motives, theories, agendas, and behind-the-scenes players. If you've been feeling like you need a scorecard to keep up, then you're in luck.
If you want to experiment with tags on your WordPress site, there's never been a better time. The newest WordPress version, 2.3, offers native tagging support. Working with tags in WordPress 2.3 is not a totally intuitive process, and ubiquitous tag management plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior is not supported in 2.3, so coders have been busy writing new plugins to help you take advantage of every ounce of tag functionality in WordPress. Here are five tag management plugins for 2.3 you might want to try.
I've been pacing the chumby maternity ward for nearly a year, waiting for this unique wireless device to see the light of day. I recently took delivery of my own little bundle of chumby joy and, at first look, I think it will make a great addition to my growing gadget family.
Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.
Theoretically, search engines should find all the best Web sites and rank them at the top of their search results. Unfortunately, due to the gap between artificial and human intelligence, this doesn't always happen. Users have the ability to alter the rankings by doing search engine optimization (SEO) -- a two-edged sword that can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whose hands it's in. You can improve your site's search-engine rankings by using free or open source software (FOSS) tools for SEO.
Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements. Scott Switzer, the project leader, recently went commercial with the project, securing $5 million in venture capital and a new CEO straight from Skype. The key to the company's success? "I have really seen the value in what a community can give to a software project," he says.
O3Spaces is a proprietary integrated collaboration and document management application for workgroups and businesses. Almost a year after its launch, the company behind the software has released version 2.2 beta. While the new version doesn't offer any earth-shattering new features, O3Spaces 2.2 sports a wealth of improvements aimed at solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.
For several years Puppy Linux has been breathing life into old and dated hardware, but instead of being just another minimalistic distribution, Puppy boasts smart features that save resources without cutting down the number of applications. The latest major Puppy release, Puppy 3.00, continues this trend by making the less than 100MB distro binary-compatible with Slackware 12 and providing other enhancements.
rr -- short for retain and recall -- is a small utility that's both simple and useful. When you need to work on a config file buried deep in the bowels of your system and don't want to type its full path name to do so, rr is just the thing.
The first-ever Ontario LinuxFest, unapologetically modeled on Ohio's conference of the same name, took place on Saturday at the Toronto Congress Centre near the end of runway 24R at Toronto's international airport. With only a few sessions and a lot of quality speakers, the organisers kept the signal-to-noise ratio at this conference as good as it gets.
Translating a command line tool to a graphical interface usually means a loss of functionality. However, in the case of the newly released trowser text browser, while I wouldn't swear that the transition has retained all the functionality of the less command that it is intended to replace, I doubt that anyone short of an expert is likely to notice the difference. Not only does trowser offer a comparable wealth of key bindings for moving about displayed text files, but it also adds such features as custom highlighting, a search history, and bookmarks as well. The result is an easy-to-use tool for developers who browse code listings, or anyone who browses log files, HTML pages, or other plain text files.
If OpenOffice.org's own bibliography feature doesn't really cut it for you, you have several choices. One popular bibliography solution is Bibus, a cross-platform tool that integrates nicely with OpenOffice.org. It is, however, not the only bibliographical tool out there. In fact, there is another nifty tool called Zotero that turns Firefox into a powerful research tool. More importantly, it comes with an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to use Zotero as a bibliography database. Zotero also sports a few clever features that make the process of creating and managing bibliographies much more efficient.
On October 11, 2005, proprietary software maker Xara announced its plans to open the source code to its flagship vector graphics package Xara Xtreme, and with the help of community developers port it to Linux. Today, two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community.
Rick Ross, founder of Javalobby, a popular site among Java developers, recently wrote an article about the One Laptop Per Child project and how cool it is. Ross also noted that OLPC does not appear on Sun Microsystems 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which outlines that company's social responsibility obligations. Ross thinks it's time to change that.
Mandriva 2008.0, released this week, is the best version of Mandriva since 7.2.
Today, COR Entertainment is scheduled to release version 6.10 of Alien Arena 2007, the popular free software, 3-D, first-person shooter built atop id Software's Quake II engine, which was released under the GPL in 2001. The new release of Alien Arena comes with seven new arenas, a better arsenal of weaponry, and a new game mode for one-on-one duels.
If you spend most of your time in OpenOffice.org, you might want to be able to manage to-do lists and tasks without leaving the comfort of the office suite. Since Writer doesn't have such a feature, you can create your own no-frills task tool and at the same time sharpen your OOoBasic skills.
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