KOffice team have released the third beta of the upcoming 2.3 version KOffice suite. According to information on the oproject`s official site,

"Between 2.3 beta 2 and 2.3 beta 3 there have been 443 commits by 29 different authors.

All applications have received bug fixes and improvements. Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one."

The KOffice project is clearly getting more and more usable and with 2.3 release more users will be ready to use it in real-life applications. While 2.2 release was clearly for early adopters this next one will be interesting for much wider audience.

This release provides some important improvements, such as:

• improved support for reading MS Office documents
• much-waited KPresenter slide-sorter mode
• decent track changes support in KWord

Back in 2002, I and other Red Hat users where not really satisfied with the tendency of Gnu/Linux systems to become fatter and slower (on the same hardware, of course) at every release. We felt that hardware, instead, is only as old as the software it runs. We felt that it should be possible to Run Up to date Linux Everywhere (RULE!). Eventually that project stopped, but since lots of its ideas andsuggestions remain, IMHO, valid and useful even today, I have cleaned up and rebuilt the whole website at rule.zona-m.net. Enjoy!

Check it out here:https://sourceforge.net/projects/mysqlcapicheck/

I wrote this so that I could integrate it with network monitoring systems that needed to curl a url to get their answer, knowing that some of the checks I needed to do were to see not only that the database was up, but that I could still query specific tables/look for a specific value without needing to login/have web services running just to get a simple answer.

And I wanted to make it 'light'.

I'll make this one short as it is late and that I don't want to go into endless details right now about my experience with Kubuntu 10.04.

In short, it hasn't been very successful. Too random bugs. Package manager sometimes refuse to launch, network management failed after suspend to ram, sometimes it didn't even go pass the boot screen. In short : It gets the jobs done, but it's not stable enough. It's a combination of small annoyances.

I have now installed OpenSUSE 11.3 on my laptop. As expected, the wireless card did not work out of the box. For everyone who have a System 76 Pangolin Performance and want to have the network working, here's a nano-turbo-brief how-to to make it work. It doesn't apply only to OpenSUSE.

A dmesg with some filtering gave me this info about the wireless card in Kubuntu:

"Linux kernel driver for RTL8192 based WLAN cards"
"rtl819xSE 0000:06:00.0: firmware: requesting RTL8192SE/rtl8192sfw.bin"

Basically, you need to get the Realtek RTL819xSE driver from their Web site and compile it. The 8192se driver is here. Now, all you need to do is install the kernel headers, the basic compilation tools that comes with your distribution and compile the driver.

On OpenSUSE, I installed gcc, gcc-c++ (although I doubt this one was needed),  make and kernel-devel. Extract the driver somewhere and from the directory in which you extracted the driver, make and make install (you might need root access to do so). Reboot (or modprobe the newly compiled driver and restart networking services) and enjoy.

I didn't need to do anything else for now to get things up and running in OpenSUSE. I have yet to test the Web cam - I see a /dev/video0 entry, but I didn't test it yet in an application. That's about it. So far so good with OpenSUSE. Let's hope it stays that way!

Hi All,

I have just released a basic first release of the PHP/bash code for my EVA RSS programme for HP Enterprise Storage Arrays, code is seperated out into its functional parts and requires LAMP install along with HP SSSU to work.

Working on a proper README/Install doc, and looking for volunteers to assist in further dev and maybe creating an self contained Virtual Appliance containing the App.

Feedback would be good. Am aware that it needs improvement, but as the screenshot suggests, it does what it says on the tin ;-)

check it out at :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpevarss/

Thanks

Matt

We are pleased to announce our new Issue 146 of openSUSE Weekly News.

This Week:

• openSUSE ass-kickin’ keynote
• openSUSE News: The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released
• Rares Aioanei: Kernel Weekly News 23.10.2010
• Make Tech Easier/Tavis J. Hampton: Advanced KDE Administration
• Nelson Marques: openoffice.org and Libre Office…

Like ever we have now finshed just the english Version under: http://en.opensuse.org/Weekly_news. From now on startsthe translating Process. You can see the actual results under: http://en.opensuse.org/Weekly_news#Translations. If any Translation is ready the Translation Team moves the Language up to "Available".

No we hope you enjoy the reading :-)

Comments, News and Wishes can send to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

At http://www.dudalibre.com they are running a campaign to make every owner of computers running Linux register.  The aim is to prove that the general assumption, that only 1 % of all computers run Linux is wrong. Everyone is needed if this effort is going to succeed.

http://www.dudalibre.com/en/gnulinuxcounter

The page can also be displayed in Spanish and French

Regards Henning

Gökcen Eraslan has announced the availability of the beta release of Pardus Linux 2011:

Hi,

Live[1] and Installation[2] images of Pardus 2011 Beta release for 64-bit and 32-bit architectures are ready. For a smooth installation experience, please verify the checksum of the ISO files after you have downloaded, use quality DVD’s and burn them in low speeds.

In this release:

* If we mention about the important feature of Beta release, first noticeable one is YALI with renewed interface, LVM/RAID support and disc partitioning screen.

* The boot splash of Pardus has completely renewed. 2011 release offers richer theme support and more capable animations by using Plymouth technology,

* Pardus 2011 Beta release, coming with latest release of KDE desktop environment, KDE 4.5.2. With this release the backbone of desktop environment Plasma, the file manager (Dolphin) and desktop effects has become more stable and faster with a lot of fixes,

Pardus 2011 Beta

* Firefox gets new stable release rapidly. 4.0b8 pre release presents many new features like the new interface of the browser as well as tab grouping, bookmarks between computers, passwords and history matching, a new add-on interface. HTML5, CSS3 and WebM technology supports are also most important features for the developers,

Firefox 4.0b8

* The alternative web browsers such as Chromium and Rekonq are ready
for the users which prefer the alternative internet browsers other than Firefox,

Chromium Browser

* The applications which are frequently used by desktop users such as Amarok (multimedia player),  Skanlite (browser interface), KTorrent (torrent
interface), SMPlayer (video player) is installed in Beta version,

Ktorrent

* Those who use office applications extensively, can try LibreOffice,  OpenOffice’s continuation project, with improvements like Turkish spell checking, add-ons and compatibility which are prepared by Pardus developers,

LibreOffice in Pardus 2011

* As well as the some innovations and effects on The Package Manager interfaces, more fast package updates and installation can be performed with the improvements in Pisi infrastructure. Package scoring and screenshot features which are the users’ ambitions expected for 2011, now supported. Screenshot from the web interface and voting will be done soon,

New Package Manager Interface

* System Settings configures Wacom tablet, Touchpad and Bluetooth devices. 2.6.36-rc7 version of Linux kernel provides support for the users who have new computer with current hardware,

Configure Blueatooth etc

Known problems for this release:

* Shrink partition option YALI has some bugs.
* YALI sometimes does not set system time correctly.
* LibreOffice start in second run.

Keep in mind that this is a beta release and because of the fast development process, you will get massive number of package updates as more bugs are fixed.

We’ll be pleased to hear about bug reports and enhancement requests through product of ‘Pardus 2011′ in bugs.pardus.org.tr address.

Regards.

[1] ftp://ftp.pardus.org.tr/pub/pardus/livecd/2011/Beta/
[2] ftp://ftp.pardus.org.tr/pub/pardus/installcd/2011/Beta/

–
Gökcen Eraslan

——

Original Announcement: http://liste.pardus.org.tr/pardus-announce/2010-October/000086.html

The organizers of the first Linux presentation in an Italian shopping center asked me to prepare a short list of questions to hand out to all the visitors of that shopping center.

They specifically asked for short, very simple questions that would fit in one page and help everybody, especially people with no interest at all in software as such, to get a quick idea of some basic issues, and possibly engage in a discussion.

Since such questions may be useful in any occasion in which you want to quickly give an idea of what Free Software is all about to people in the street, I have put online an English adaptation of those questions

I have collected in one page some tips, tricks and links useful to print many OpenDocument files, or to convert them to any format for which OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, for that matter) have an output filter. Here is the tutorial, if you have any comment or suggestion please let me know!