The OpenOffice.org guys are doing some interesting analysis as part of their Project Renaissance UI improvement project. This click map caught my eye this week (click to see the whole thing):

More information on what they're doing can be found over on the GullFOSS Blog.

In VirtualBox 2.2.0, which was released today, that is. The new OpenGL acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests allows compiz to run very nicely in a virtual machine. (Click the thumbnail for a Theora video of compiz running in an OpenSolaris guest in OS X.)

EDIT: I suppose I ought to add there's some other cool stuff in 2.2.0 as well, particularly the ability to import/export appliances in OVF format.

Sun released VirtualBox 2.1.0 today. In addition to bugfixes, new features include:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental; see user manual, chapter 1.6, 64-bit guests, page 16)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID; see user manual, chapter 1.2, Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V), page 10))
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL (see user manual, chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), page 66)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (see user manual, chapter 5.1, Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA (AHCI), SCSI, page 70)
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots (see user manual, chapter 5.2, Disk image files (VDI, VMDK, VHD), page 72)
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support (bugs #1046, #2438, #2223, #1247)
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

Downloads for Solaris, OpenSolaris, Linux, OS X and Windows are available here.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released today, and is available for download from virtualbox.org. New features include 64-bit guest support, host interface networking on Solaris and OS X hosts, support for nested paging on modern AMD CPUs, and a native front end for the OS X client (and a move to Qt 4 for the others).

More detailed changelog here.

Like many of you, I'm sorting myself out tonight to fly to what will be my seventh GUADEC in Istanbul tomorrow. (I'll actually be there for two weeks, as my wife is flying out after the conference to join me for a week's vacation.)

Pleased that there's a very healthy crowd of Sun desktop folks attending this year (18 at last count), and rumour has it we'll have some OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCDs to be giving away, so you can play along live with John Rice's talk :) Hopefully I'll also find a few interesting things to snap with the Lomo Fisheye camera I got for my birthday last month...

So, Sun's latest round of cost-cutting layoffs is out of the way at last, in Ireland at least (and probably the US by the time you read this, but still not everywhere). Relieved that our team was pretty much unaffected, but naturally disappointed that it had to happen at all, and that not everyone was so fortunate. The mood in the office is pretty sombre today, as it always is on these occasions, but I'm sure we'll all refocus soon enough.

From now on, that's pretty much all you'll need to do to install the latest JRE/JDK on your Linux box¹... Sun have just changed the way they license Java binaries to Linux (and OpenSolaris) distros. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo are already taking advantage of this, along with NexentaOS, BeleniX, and SchilliX on the OpenSolaris front. Read the DLJ FAQ, or get more info at the jds-distros project website.

¹ Ok, actually it's apt-get install sun-java5-[jre|jdk]

Sadly, I'm inclined to agree with Fernando Cassia about the aesthetics of our latest workstations... luckily they work so much better than they look!

Much gnashing of teeth chez nous tonight as we tried to persuade StarOffice 8 to create some address labels from a spreadsheet (one address per row), something which Julie apparently does quite regularly in MS Office.

From the online help, it seems there's a nice little wizard for creating them from a database, but from a spreadsheet? Nada.

Seriously, how many home users are going to learn how to set up a database just to print a few address labels? Anyone know if it's possible to do what we want?

Update: Julie figured out how to do it, pointed in the right direction by an email from John Corrigan... File->Wizards->Address Data Source->Other External Source, from which you can choose a spreadsheet as the data source. Thanks John!

Have to confess I always let out a slight pfft of derision when I read quotes from US folks (in this case, a fellow Sun employee, but it's nothing personal!) like:

If we get to over $4 a gallon [of petrol], I may be [working at] home full time.

I've been away from the UK for six years now, and a gallon of petrol there cost more than that before I left!

It's been a long time coming, but Real Player 10 is now available as a free download for Solaris SPARC and x86.

A minor amendment to the location, if anyone's thinking of going along: it's now DIT Bolton St, Room 259. Time and date remains 18:30 on Tuesday 27th Sept.

This just in from Fintan:

Thanks to Jamie O'Leary of DIT Netsoc we have a venue
available for the first Irish OpenSolaris meeting.

So, the time and venue

	DIT, Kevin St @ 6:30, Tuesday 27th Sept

Primary Speaker 

	Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Architect

and then a general discussion on what people would
like to get out of the UG.

Further details and directions for the exact location in
DIT will be sent out before the UG meeting.