Dienstag Februar 20, 2007

Bruce Byfield: "Configuring OpenOffice.org Writer"
Here is another useful article by Bruce Byfield. Here is a quote:
"If the available options are more than you care to handle, in most cases you can safely ignore them. In almost every case, the default options for Writer are likely to be acceptable to most users, even if they are not ideal. Some, like the viewing of nonprinting characters are available from the menu, while others can be set elsewhere in Writer, such as the default fonts. However, when you want more control of your word processing or desktop publishing, spent some time familiarizing yourself with the options. Unless you're very unusual, you're sure to find a tweak or two that will make your computing easier."
( Feb 20 2007, 02:31:18 PM CET ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org wins in the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards
"The polls are closed and the results are in for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards (http://www.linuxquestions.org/awards/). Among the winners are Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL and OpenOffice.org. The Members Choice Awards allow members of the Linux community to choose their favorite products in a variety of categories including Linux Distribution of the Year, Office Suite of the Year and Web Browser of the Year. The total number of categories this year was 21."

Congratulations to every OpenOffice.org community member!!!

More details can be found here.
( Feb 20 2007, 02:27:40 PM CET ) Permalink

The OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 will be in Barcelona, Spain
It has just been announced by John McCreesh, the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead, that Barcelona (Spain) will be the location for this year's OpenOffice.org Conference. Congratulations! The Call for Papers will probably start soon as well.

In the voting process for the location Barcelona, Spain got 297 votes, Dehradun, India 224 votes and Beijing, and China 82 votes. Thus, chances are good that next year's OpenOffice.org Conference will be in a location outside of Europe.
( Feb 20 2007, 02:12:36 PM CET ) Permalink

More details about broadband wireless under Solaris

In order to get my UMTS 3G broadband wireless card to run under Solaris (Nevada build 56), I used the information from two resources, this one and this one. There is one more article which originally helped me to get my UTMS card running on Ubuntu, but I can't find that article anymore.

The PCMCIA card that I'm using is a Option Wireless Technology (Qualcomm 3G CDMA, GT 3G Quad). I installed the usbsacm cardbus driver as explained in the OpenSolaris article. However, the driver binding looks a bit different for my card. Based on the information that prtconf provided I had to add the following line to /etc/driver_aliases:

usbsacm "usbaf0,6300"

Instead of /dev/evdo I named my device /dev/umts. That is also the name of the device I put into the setpin script that is explained in the Ubuntu article already mentioned above. The script is needed to set the pin for the wireless card. Otherwise it will not work.

Then I created the scripts for the PPP daemon. I more or less used a mixture from both articles and some knowledge that I have from a third article which I currently can't find anymore:

# cat /etc/ppp/umts-chat
ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' ABORT VOICE ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE' ABORT 'NO ANSWER' ABORT DELAYED
'' ATZ
OK-AT-OK "ATDT*99#"
CONNECT \d\c

# cat /etc/ppp/peers/umts
hide-password
noauth
connect "/usr/bin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/umts-chat"
debug
/dev/umts
460800
defaultroute
usepeerdns
noipdefault
user "t-mobile"
remotename umts
ipparam umts

I think it does not matter what you put in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. As recommended in the OpenSolaris article, I installed the inetmenu tool and enabled its use for my user account via "Administration - Users and Groups - myusername - Properties". The inetmenu tool made switching between different networks very easy.

I first had some problems, because I could see in /var/adm/messages that I got a local and a remote IP address as well as IP addresses for the nameservers, but dumb me, I first forgot to copy the files /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/nsswitch.dns to /etc/nsswitch.conf. The inetmenu tool takes care of that in a nice and comfortable way.

City of Zaragoza (Spain) moving to OpenOffice.org
According to this Spanish article the City of Zaragoza (Spain) will move to OpenOffice.org. The open source office suite will be installed on about 3,000 computers.
( Feb 20 2007, 06:43:49 AM CET ) Permalink

Interesting Experiment
"Solveig Haugland, the founder of GetOpenOffice.org, one of many organisations that provides training and support for OpenOffice users, relates a relevant story: A client organisation's meeting to discuss potential use of OpenOffice was under way, and Haugland's client was typing notes, which were then projected on a screen. Almost everyone agreed that Microsoft Office alternatives would be "too hard." The client asked, "What do you think I'm using to take notes?" The answer came back "Microsoft Word"; in fact, the client was using OpenOffice Writer, which disarmed some of the "too hard" objections immediately. This scenario would likely have played out the same way were the client using Evolution, Thunderbird or impressive up-and-coming Office alternatives such as ThinkFree.com (which provides both free remote and relatively inexpensive locally hosted office-software options)."
Found here.
( Feb 20 2007, 06:39:10 AM CET ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org on Dell computers some day?
"Dell's new Ideastorm site launched last week--it's interesting to see how quickly a few main issues came to light: 1. Pre-installed Linux option 2. Option to not have all that extra software installed 3. OpenOffice pre-installed"
Found here.
( Feb 20 2007, 06:24:11 AM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]