LibreOffice migration guide

LibreOffice: A fork of OpenOffice.org

with No Comment linux news
Exactly ten days after Mandriva was forked, another major Free Software has also been forked. And this time, it is OpenOffice.org, the free suite of office applications similar to Microsoft Office. The fork, or the new office suite, will be temporarily known as LibreOffice. It has the backing of community heavyweights, and its development will be overseen by a newly created foundation called The Document Foundation. Part of the announcement follows: ...
Mageia 2 Beta 3 Boot Menu

Forking Mandriva Linux: The birth of Mageia

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Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked, and the new distribution is named Mageia. With the well publicized mass exodus of developers and contributors, this does not come as shock. I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons:
  • Mandriva's management has done a very lousy job with the resources they have. It is pretty appalling. Mandriva was supposed to be to the desktop space what Red Hat is to the server market. But no, the company got stuck somewhere between 1998 and 2005. There were no new ideas. They could have done what Steve Jobs did with Apple, if only they had the vision and a good understanding of the technology and community they had at their disposal.
  • The other reason I am pretty happy with this development is with the announcement by the new distro developers. Here's an excerpt: ...
Linux

China’s supercomputer will run Linux

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TuxIt's official: China's next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as "Godson") family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server. The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning 5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company, which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a lack of support for Windows, and the ICT's failure to deliver a sufficiently powerful chip in time. ...
Linux

Switching to Linux: A Windows developer’s view

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A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now. ...
Windows 10 reserved notification

What Microsoft Doesn’t Get – And What I Hope You Do

with No Comment Basuralinux news
You know what Microsoft doesn't get? -- For one thing, the Internet. Microsoft doesn't control it. What it used to be able to do in the dark now falls out of its noxious bag of tricks into the Internet's bright light, stage front and center. And there stands Microsoft in the spotlight, with its pants down, and let me tell you, it's not a pretty sight. Take the failed patent hustle of a couple of days ago, apparently maneuvering to enable proxy patent trolls to sue Linux. The idea, I gather, was to damage Linux, but without any way to trace it back to Microsoft. Thank you OIN and AST for foiling the plan. And by the way, are courts supposed to be used like this, to attack the competition? The court system is designed for adjudicating conflicts that are real. If you get damaged, you can go to court and try to be made whole. And so far as I know, there is no definition of abuse of monopoly that would exclude what just happened from being part of what antitrust law covers. ...