Results tagged “OpenOffice” from CLICK

I'm having a very, very, very hard time believing this is not a joke. Apparently there's a group of people developing an 18-button mouse for use not just with OpenOffice but a bevy of other applications both free and proprietary.

And not only are there 18 buttons, there's also a joystick (seen at right).

Adding to any supposed authenticity of this project, it has a Web site and a development blog.

It's said all the time that many a free, open-source software project is borne out of a developer "scratching an itch," and building something that he or she really wants to use themselves. And if anybody else finds it useful, that's great, too.

This mouse — this 18-button, single-joystick mouse — looks like the itch-scratcher to scratch all itches. I'm surprised an actual scratching device doesn't burst forth from the plastic casing and offer to scratch a real itch on one's back, front, or wherever itches crop up.

I still really don't believe this is real. It just can't be.

Jeremy Reimer writes an excellent article for ArsTechnica on the demise of Microsoft Word and the whole idea of a "word processor" that is designed to format text to be printed out on (gasp!) paper and handed about:

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world

In the longish article (and yes, it is worth every word), Jeremy shows us why Word is an anachronism, why any number of other applications — and principally the Web, content-management systems and wikis (such as MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia) have pretty much made the traditional word-processed document not just obsolete but also a pain in the ass.

Just read it already.

The image above right is a clay tablet found at Ebla, Syria. It dates from about 2250 BC. Nice, isn't it? One thing you can say about clay — it can last a long time (if you don't crack it in half ... or worse).

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1.

I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4.

But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop.

By the time OpenBSD 4.5 is released in May, FF2 will be no more. That was another factor governing my decision to finally upgrade to FF3.

I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3. (Remember that OpenBSD doesn't generally update binary packages after each release. Unless you run -current and compile everything, it's six months between upgrades for the OS and the applications.)

I was prepared for trouble, but everything went well. It didn't hurt a bit. All of my FF2 settings and bookmarks are intact, as are my add-ons (including Web Developer). Java still works, too. And performance of FF3 seems more than a little bit snappier than FF2. I can really feel the difference with Web-based apps that use a lot of Javascript.

Yeah, I'm months late to the FF3 party (at least on this platform), but I can more than safely say that I'm damn glad I finally and painlessly made the switch.

To replace FF2 with FF3, here's what I did in an xterm window:

$ sudo pkg_delete mozilla-firefox
Password:
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.16p3: complete
Clean shared items: complete
$ sudo pkg_add -i firefox3
firefox3-3.0.1p3: complete
--- firefox3-3.0.1p3 -------------------
Please see /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/README.OpenBSD
for information about running Firefox on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD users face a similar dilemma in version 4.5, in which OpenOffice 2.4 will co-exist along with OO3. For the release after that, just like with FF, OO2.4 will be gone, and only OO3.x will remain. I'm OK with that, too. I just started using OO3 in Windows, and I think it's a pretty good release thus far.

I love it when things work. It happens more often than not in OpenBSD, and that's why I've stuck with it. If things were breaking down software-wise, I'd be sprinting back to Linux. But as long as not having Flash 9 or 10 doesn't totally harsh my proverbial mellow (OpenBSD is mired in Flash 7 due to subsequent Linux Flash Players insisting on ALSA sound, which the BSDs don't have), I'm comfortable.

And if I could manage to edit video in Blender, I would work around the lack of up-to-date Flash.

Now ... back to the OpenBSD way of keeping things up to date (or not ...).

I can't decide whether, and if so how much, I'm troubled by keeping the same version of various apps on my machine for six months at at time. At one level, I'm happy not to be constantly doing apt-get update apt-get upgrade or having the Update Manager pop up every day.

But if you want to keep current in OpenBSD, you need to either patch your box to -stable, or just run -current which is what developers and other edgy types install on their own equipment. I'll confess that if I understood a little better how to make a -release box -stable, or keep a -current box current, I'd be more game for doing it (and I might get there at some point). I do know that a lot of compiling is involved, and I'm no fan of sitting and waiting for ports to build. But if Firefox 3.0.8 is what I craved, I could get it now either in by running -current or by and building the port. Even in Ports, Firefox is stuck at 3.0.1 in my 4.4 environment.

I've seen a few users claim that keeping an OpenBSD box at -stable or running -current and updating it is no big deal. I'd love for that to be the case.

Right now, on this install, I have maybe 2.5 GB in /usr, and after my experience running out of space to build Java, I'm reluctant when it comes to bringing down the source of OpenBSD and compiling it. This is just about as close to a "production" machine as I have, and I can't risk bricking the install, so I'll be ordering my OpenBSD 4.5 CDs very soon (make that very, very soon) and upgrading that way. I've done it once, and hopefully I can do it again.

Time's short, so I'll hit the high points:

• The fix for all the problems I was having in Opera 9.51 (the Linux version) in OpenBSD was easy. All I had to do was change from asynchronous DNS lookup to synchronous. I even reinstalled Flash for Opera. Regarding the fix, l'll elaborate later.

• Now that I can run Opera, I've been using this circa-2002-03 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron) for just about all of my daily work. The laptop's running great, with excellent performance from OpenBSD 4.4 itself and its default Fvwm window manager.

• I wanted to change from IMAP to POP for one of my main e-mail accounts. I had been using Thunderbird in Windows with IMAP. That worked pretty well, but in OpenBSD, I wanted to use POP and have all the mail on the hard drive.

  Either Thunderbird itself, or the entire POP protocol, won't go into nested folders on an IMAP server and grab everything. At least it didn't in my case. So I tried to bring all those IMAP folders onto the local drive en masse. That didn't work so well. I suspect the server won't stay connected long enough to move many hundreds of messages at a time.

  I'm sure I lost quite a few messages, but I also have many hundred that I'll try to move from one Thunderbird installation to the other.

  Knowing what I know now, it would have been better to get EVERYTHING in order on the first Thunderbird installation and then move the entire "profile" over to the second PC. As it stands now, I'll have to figure out how to tap those exact folders/directories and move them over individually. The Thunderbird menus aren't much help with this. Thunderbird needs a robust backup utility built into it.

• In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

• Before I figured out how to fix Opera, I rolled out an identical Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu 8.04. That installation went perfectly fine. No problems at all. That laptop has 256 MB of RAM at the moment, and during the 300+ package update after the initial install, there was a whole lot of swapping. Have you noticed in Debian and Ubuntu that the package management uses as many resources as you can throw at them? The machine was unusable during the long update (for which I ran the Update Manager in GNOME).

  You don't have to roll in 300 packages every day, month ... or just about ever, so that's an unusual circumstance.

  I'll keep the Ubuntu laptop at the ready in case I need it for video editing (a task I'm not sure can be done in OpenBSD; if anybody can point me to a package or port, I'd be grateful).

  But for now, the OpenBSD Toshiba is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power.

So I'm working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it's a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs.

It sort of, kind of looked OK in Google Docs, except that in a few places I couldn't get the fonts and the margins right.

And outputting the Google Docs document back into .doc or .odt (OpenDocument) was a real mess, with a mix of Web styles, Word styles, strange margins, etc.

After getting nowhere fast in Google Docs, I finally tried to remove all formatting and start over. But I couldn't even get the line spacing right.

I'm sure a little CSS hackery could have made things right, but I'm not in any mode to do that.

So I exported the document in .odt format and worked on it in OpenOffice Writer. Now I can save it as an HTML, MS Word or RTF document, or better yet export it as a PDF.

I love having Google Docs enable me to work on things anywhere, at any time, but I've found that the cloud-based app works best when documents originate in Google Docs and stay there. Converting them to .odt, RTF and .doc format causes the formatting to break down.

I've blogged in the past about how poorly Google Docs offline with Gears worked for me.

So at this point, what would work better for my situation would be cloud-based files accessed by apps on my local client.

And I'd like to see the ability to access networked files in the cloud be available from every application, meaning the feature would be integrated in the operating system or desktop environment and not be part of a single application.

Just a thought. I'll feel better about Google Docs later this week when I get back to what I mostly use it for. I'm dropping code and documentation into it all the time and sharing those files with my co-workers. That's one thing that Google Docs does better than anything else I've seen.

And I will try to create a heavily formatted document in Docs. I just wish it could be the SAME document shared between Docs and OpenOffice. Maybe a Docs-formatted document would play more nicely in OO than a Word-formatted document turned into a Docs document, then an OO document.

Upon seeing 17 software updates waiting for me on my Debian Etch box this morning, I hurried over to the Debian security site and learned that the Debian security team issued a flurry of patches on Oct. 29, 2008, for all versions of OpenOffice.

On my system, this is a relatively huge 101 MB download.

The details are available at Debian.org and in the debian-security-announce mailing list:

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the OpenOffice.org office suite:

CVE-2008-2237

The SureRun Security team discovered a bug in the WMF file parser
that can be triggered by manipulated WMF files and can lead to
heap overflows and arbitrary code execution.

CVE-2008-2238

An anonymous researcher working with the iDefense discovered a bug
in the EMF file parser that can be triggered by manipulated EMF
files and can lead to heap overflows and arbitrary code execution.

For the stable distribution (etch) these problems have been fixed in
version 2.0.4.dfsg.2-7etch6.

For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems have been fixed in
version 2.4.1-12.

For the experimental distribution these problems have been fixed in
version 3.0.0~rc3-1.

There are some cases when a security patch will go to Debian's Testing branch (currently Lenny) at the same time as the other branches, but in this case, it appears that the patches will be "tested" in Sid and will shortly flow into Lenny (the usual path for software in Debian.

As always, in a default Debian desktop installation, the updates will be pushed to the system in the Update Manager. Otherwise, you can use Synaptic in a graphical environment, or at a console apt or Aptitude to apply the patches.

While Ryan Naraine of ZDNet says that the vulnerabilities don't affect OO 3.0, but Debian appears to be doing patches to that version anyway.

More on Debian security:

• Debian User Manuals (and the Securing Debian chapter)
• Debian security FAQ

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I've been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I've taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs' swiftness when connected to the Internet, I'd much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq's hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user's files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux's many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy's favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I've had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I've taken it's RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch "standard," with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian's "standard" install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn't have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian's Xfce just didn't offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don't run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn't install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as ... any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can't be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I'd really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you're running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don't think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and ... sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could 'll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I'll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I'll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it's not imperative.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog has quickly become a must-read. His post on The Killer Apps of Academia is well worth bookmarking for future reference.

He mentions quite a few apps I use every day, from the obvious (Firefox, OpenOffice) to the less-so (Notepad++, Audacity).

Among the ones I hadn't heard of but want to try immediately are LogMeIn Free, which, if the description is correct, is like GoToMyPC, letting you control a Windows PC from a remote location, but without the costs involved. There is a "Pro" version with more features, but the fact that there even is a free version warms my cockles considerably.

I've probably written a dozen or more times about how I think that OpenOffice is the killer app of free, open-source software, and is the software suite that most worries the folks at Microsoft while empowering more and more regular people every day ... but that I have little call to use it myself.

That has changed.

Since I've been writing a weekly print column for the Los Angeles Daily News called Tech Talk (on Page 2 of the B section on Saturdays), our editorial production system likes to see files in Microsoft Word's .doc format.

And I've been generating those files with OpenOffice 2.4's Writer application.

My "requirements" for a word-processing application are pretty minimal:

I like to see typographical "smart" quotes. OpenOffice does that.

Easily accessible word count. No problem there.

And on my Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM) under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, OpenOffice 2.4 starts quickly and runs quickly.

I still use the Gedit text editor to work on things like blog posts when I'm offline, or the Geany editor when I have it installed (which I have yet to do in this particular Ubuntu setup), but anything I've ever had to do in Microsoft Word — which for a regular writer is ... just writing — I can do in the no-cost-to-me OpenOffice.

A project sponsored by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice also has spreadsheet, presentation, database, drawing and mathematical-display applications. There are versions for Windows, and most Linux and BSD systems.

And the now-in-beta OpenOffice 3.0 now works without the addition of X11 in the Mac's OS X. All that means is that you really don't need to pony up for Microsoft Office on the Mac — or any other platform — ever again. You don't have to pay for upgrades ever again, either.

Everybody from students to office workers to professional writers can do everything they need to do in OpenOffice.

Along with Firefox, it's the best thing ever to happen for you and me — the computer user who hates to be taken for a ride by huge software companies.

Meall Dubh is the blog of John McCreesh, marketing guy for OpenOffice, the free suite of software available for Linux, BSD, Windows, and sort-of-kind-of-but-for-real-soon-enough-for Mac.

I'll be checking there for news, views and all of that on OpenOffice and the doings in and around the project.

(Sorry about the old OpenOffice picture; It looked too cool not to use).

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL).

The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

When it comes to the up-to-date applications, RHEL purposefully stays behind the curve so as not to break anything, especially on servers. But for desktop users, having to run Firefox 1.5 for-freakin'-ever is a bit of a bummer. Same for OpenOffice; the version I last used (probably in CentOS 4) didn't even have ODF compatibility.

Users of RHEL 5.2 will enjoy the following newish applications:

• Evolution 2.12.3
• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice 2.3.0
• Thunderbird 2.0

This is one of the parts of the release that makes me eager to try RHEL 5.2:

We also significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow us to certify more laptop systems.

Also, many graphics drivers where updated, including a backport of the "intel" graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Bottom line: These improvements make RHEL/CentOS much more attractive on the desktop (and especially for laptop users).

Could this mean a greater push from Red Hat on the desktop, even though the company has stated recently that it will not focus on that very market?

I say yes.

Red Hat 5.0 (OK, in my case the free CentOS 5.0) runs pretty damn well on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), except that Suspend/Resume doesn't work ... and if it did, I would be very happy about it.

The Red Hat release didn't mention the fact that RHEL didn't suffer from the same OpenSSH vulnerability that has affected Debian-derived Linux distros, but the CentOS team does point it out while also telling CentOS users to check suspect keys from users of Debian-based systems that have had SSH contact with your RHEL/CentOS box.

It's in Boston. Here's how it's being described:

The three-story, 20,000-square-foot store sits smack in the middle of the posh Boylston Street shopping strip. The glass-fronted store is sandwiched between a pair of older stone buildings, a juxtaposition described by one Gizmodo commentator as "a diamond in a rock pile."

More from:

• Wired


• Techsuperpowers (who supplied the photo)


• Gizmodo

If there are two things Apple is really, really good at, they are design and marketing. I can't think of another corporate entity that even comes close. From the products to the stores, the packaging to the advertising, I don't know how they make it happen at such a high level. But they do -- and have done it for decades at this point.

I'm not an Apple partisan, although I do have a few under my wing, as it were. I don't agree with Apple's "mission," or its propensity to fill a few niches very well while ignoring or slighting larger segments of the public (who are free to overpay for hardware and software that does, for the most part, work great but remains overpriced).

Anyhow, my petty annoyances aside, there are so many elements of pure genius in almost every move Apple has made in the past decade. From abandoning an old architecture for the sake of technological advancement and clarity (from "Classic" OS to OS X, from PowerPC to Intel) to opening up new consumer-focused territory (iPod, iPhone) while not being too afraid to fail (AppleTV, Mac Cube, even the lamp-style Mac).

My greatest regret about Apple is that when they did have a "lower-priced" line -- most recently the eMac -- it wasn't that low in price. Now they only break the $1,000 price point with the nearly neglected MacMini. That's why there was such a clamor when the Psystar Mac clone came out a few weeks ago. People out there want a desktop Mac that can easily accommodate additional RAM, hard drives, video cards, etc., that costs well under $1,000. Apple can do it but chooses not to. I like the iMacs, but I'm not so comfortable with their disposability or their cost.

And while I acknowledge that the world of proprietary software is still with us, the software landscape has been totally remade in the past 15 years, and the reality is that free, open-source applications and operating systems offer almost all of us more functionality and security that what we've been paying many hundreds of dollars for, over and over again ... or stealing, which is what many do when faced with yet another costly, unproven upgrade.

But as I say each and every time I write about Apple, who am I to criticize one of the most successful tech companies in history? I could go on about how iTunes is both great and evil at the same time (they lock you in, they're locking everybody in), why nobody but Apple has the stones -- and the expertise -- to create the iPhone, and how OpenOffice 3, which is in the testing stages, will change the Macintosh game for good. But I'll leave all that for later.

It's been a year and a half since I started using Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) for much of my day-to-day computing, but the past week or so marks the first time I've had to support another user -- in this case my wife, Ilene, whose Macintosh iBook G4 is awaiting the end of the semester at California State University Northridge, where she teaches.

Coincidentally, that semester ends today. Soon I will try to image the iBook's drive to a Firewire-connected external hard drive (picked up for $99 at Fry's) and then have her boot from that drive until I can a) get a new laptop hard-drive to replace the currently dying one, and b) go through the arduous process of removing and replacing the internal drive (thanks to ifixit.com for the instructions on the procedure.

But back to Linux and supporting a new user.

It has been a lot harder than I thought. We don't think like our users. But we need to learn.

Ilene does things differently that I do, and as the person doing the installation and support, I needed to recognize that and tune the system accordingly.

I started with Ubuntu 8.04. That worked well enough, except I couldn't get the HP Laserjet 1020 USB printer to work, and I couldn't manage to get USB flash drives mounted.

I also didn't have a lot of time with the machine.

I quickly switched over to Debian Lenny, the other OS on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450 that I got for free and resurrected from the premature death it suffered due to a busted power plug). With Lenny, we can now use USB flash drives, except that to write to the drive, the current user has to be the person to plug the drive in. If I plug it in and log out, Ilene can't sign in and write to the drive. So between logins, the drive needs to be pulled in order to get the permissions right. Before that, I added Ilene to the disk, plugdev and floppy groups. I don't know if that helped or did nothing, but since I saw that sda1, the flash drive was owned by the floppy group, I added her to that last.

I haven't checked if a full reboot allows Ilene to sign in and have write permission to the flash drive without re-plugging it, but I'll try that soon.

So we had the flash drive -- which had all her essential files from the Mac -- working fine.

Ilene was as amused as she should be (i.e. very) at Firefox being renamed Iceweasel. She had no problem using OpenOffice Writer and Calc, and she's eager to test Impress (she uses PowerPoint quite a bit for her classes).

I don't know how she stumbled upon AbiWord (probably because it's the first app with the words "word processor" in the menu), but she used it to write a bit and liked it, except for the small size of the type. I will soon tell her that OpenOffice Writer might be a better choice when it comes to formatting documents that will look better when she returns to her Mac and MS Word.

She liked Pidgin a lot. The open-source instant-messaging app enabled her to use her Yahoo! Messenger account for IMing, and it also notified her about new e-mail coming in to her Yahoo! Mail account.

Pidgin works very well. I use it in Windows, too, where it keeps track of my Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM accounts.

Two things Ilene needed were the ability to print to PDF from any application (Macs do that) and print ... to an actual printer. Ubuntu, I think, ships with PDF capability (though don't quote me), but in Debian, you have to add the cups-pdf package, which I did through Synaptic. Then I added the PDF printer with the GNOME printer utility and made it the default.

But I still had one hope for getting printing with the HP Laserjet 1020 working. In both Ubuntu and Debian, the systems had no problem finding the USB printer, they just wouldn't print.

In one of my recent entries, reader Natxo Asenjo pointed me to the foo2zjs project, which offers a different Linux driver for the HP LaserJet 1020 and quite a few other printers. There are even detailed instructions for most of the major distros.

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the files, then added the printer via CUPS. I don't know if it was the driver itself or this instruction that did it:

# make install install-hotplug cups

... but I finally got my HP printer to work in Linux.

Again, this shouldn't have been so hard. The utilities in Debian and Ubuntu, or the CUPS interface itself, should have properly configured this USB printer.

Why have I never run into this problem before? Because I only use networked printers at the office, and this is the first time I've tried to print via USB. I thought it would be easier. Much easier.

At any rate, I have this fine project to thank for helping me with this problem. They accept donations, and I was happy to give one.

So now I have a fully working system here for Ilene, myself and the 4-year-old.

And with the semester ending today, it's just about time to get to work on the iBook's ailing disk drive.

But Linux will have at least a few more days as this home's primary desktop.

And I've learned quite a bit about what "normal" people (i.e. not Linux geeks) need when they make the move from the proprietary OS they know to the FOSS OS they don't.

One last thing: I began this installation with Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted as easy a transition for Ilene as possible, and I thought that Ubuntu provided that. It also had suspend/resume, which I wanted to have, since the laptop would be on for most of the day.

First off, suspend/resume works way better on the Mac, where you hit the space bar to bring the computer back. On the Gateway, you hit the power button, and the whole thing takes quite a bit longer.

Secondly, while Debian is a bit more "locked down" than Ubuntu (and I wanted to do as little manual "unlocking" as possible), I had limited time in which to get the installation working as well as possible, and that pushed Debian Lenny over the top. If the USB flash drive had worked immediately in Ubuntu, and had I figured out the printing problem (which spans all Linux distros), I would've stuck with the new 8.04 LTS.

But since things came together just that much quicker in Debian, that's what we went with. Ilene even told me that once she got started in Debian, she wanted to stick with it. It's just too jarring to continually switch distros (although many of us do it all the time because we've got other problems ... and I think you know what I'm talking about).

Final words: I know that the Gateway is a bit more than five years old, and the HP Laserjet 1020 is at least three years old. But a big-time Linux distribution like Ubuntu -- which has positioned itself as the distro for the rest of us -- shouldn't install without the ability to immediately read and write to USB flash media and should be able to print without resorting to a third-party driver project. Debian did the flash drives well but also couldn't output to this printer. In the case of the printing, I lay the blame on CUPS and not the individual distros.

But we're at the point where more things need to work out of the box for more people, more of the time (feel free to replace "more" with "most").

I still recommend Ubuntu to new users, especially because most of the third-party how-to books out there focus on it, and I wouldn't cast a new user adrift without a hefty book that might at least answer some of their questions.

And it's not like Windows and Mac users don't have their share of driver problems. I remember this very HP printer being somewhat of a pain to get working in OS X, too (I had to download a driver from HP ... for a different printer), but Linux had to be better. It already is, in may respects, and I think we're almost there. The key word is "almost."

I won't hesitate to set up others with Linux, but I know that supporting any OS -- be it Windows, OS X or Linux -- for someone else can entail quite a bit of work.

And I did enjoy seeing Ilene gets some hands-on time with Linux.

(Begin cliche mode)

From a cost, functionality and non-thievary perspective, open-source software isn't just the best game in town, it's the only game.

(End cliche mode)

When I told Ilene that I could probably fix the USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu and could then switch her back from Debian Lenny, she told me it would be better to stick with Debian for now, since there are enough little differences between environments to make it confusing, and she was and is doing well with Debian.

She did say she liked Ubuntu a bit better, but for the sake of productivity, Debian was doing more than well enough to keep until I fix her iBook G4.

Among the problems I'm having with Lenny that I don't have with Ubuntu are lack of control over the Alps touchpad by individual users. I can turn the touchpad's tap-to-click function off as the primary user, but my other users can't use the Touchpad configuration feature in GNOME. When they do, a dialog pops up about SHMConfig not being enabled in X.

Except that it is. That's how I am able to control the touchpad in my primary account.

I wouldn't care if all the users had their touchpad tapping controlled by me, the main user, but every once in a while, it seems that the tap-to-click turns on for a split second in Ilene's account.

Since we're using a USB mouse more than 95 percent of the time, this isn't much of an issue, but it is annoying.

This could be a GNOME bug that doesn't allow for different Xorg configurations in each account, but this is nothing more than conjecture on my part.

Otherwise, Ilene is quite amused by Firefox being renamed Iceweasel due to the copyright restrictions imposed on the Firefox name and logo by the Mozilla Foundation. It's one of those things that really confuses new users to Debian.

I remember seeing Iceweasel in Knoppix and having no idea why it looked exactly like Firefox but had a different name. Now I know about Debian's reluctance to use copyrighted material, and while I agree with it, I do acknowledge that it's awkward and confusing to those who don't know the story.

One thing that I did do for my three users is customize their desktops to some extent. In this case, that customization is limited to putting icons for each user's favorite applications on the upper task bar.

Since I use Epiphany a lot, I kept that there, but added Iceweasel (which I use sporadically) along with all the text editors I'm testing or using (Geany, Bluefish, Gedit) the terminal, the root terminal and the network-configuration app.

In Ilene's, I have Iceweasel and the OpenOffice apps she needs (for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets).

The little girl's account has Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating here: Another reason for keeping Lenny over Ubuntu is the fact that all the children's educational games we use work better in Debian than in Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, sound is spotty on all three apps, and Chidsplay is hobbled by a woeful lack of games. Maybe those additional games are available as packages in Ubuntu, but I'm not sure. All I know is that they are all there in Debian.

Before the rant is over, let me add that all three of these education packages are also in great shape in OpenBSD. You don't normally think of OpenBSD and "the education distribution," but it works very well for us in this regard. All I need is some additional memory on the 1999-vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt to make the experience that much better.

I've been wondering if and when OpenOffice 2.3 would give way to version 2.4 in the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta. It finally happened with one of my recent updates of the system.

Like I said in my review of the 8.04 beta, I rarely use OpenOffice, preferring a plain ol' text editor or more-fancy "development" editor (Geany, Bluefish, Scite, Mousepad, Nano, even vi) for most writing, using a lighter-weight word processor (AbiWord, Ted) on occasion.

But for "fancy" writing -- i.e. stuff that needs to see print in a certain, specific format (which for me means "smart" or "typographical" quotation marks), OpenOffice is essential. It's one of free, open-source software's killer apps -- and the fact that it runs on Linux, all the major BSD projects, Windows and sorta, kinda on the Mac (depending on whether you run the X11 environment or Mac's normal Aqua interface) only adds to its power.

And since Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has a desktop life of three years (beginning on April 24, 2008), and at that point the package versions will, to some extent, be locked in, I'm glad that the Ubuntu team continues to front-load 8.04 -- nicknamed Hardy Heron -- with the most recent packages. It'll make the prospect of sticking with 8.04 for a year, two or three (remember that Ubuntu issues a new release every six months, and the non-LTS releases receive 18 months of desktop support) becomes more palatable with every new version of an app that Ubuntu offers.

To that end, the Firefox 3 Beta in Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't been performing as well as I'd like. For one thing, whenever I quit Firefox and then try to reload it, a screen pops up telling me that I'm already running FF and should close that process before starting another. I click OK on the box, then start FF again, and all is well, but it's still annoying.

And the bigger issue is Flash. As I said in my review, Ubuntu has tied the implementation of Firefox plugins to Ubuntu's own package management system. That's a good thing. In both Ubuntu and Debian, I've had more success adding plugins like Flash through the browser itself than by installing them through the systems' respective package management utilities (Synaptic, apt or Aptitude).

First I tried the newish, open-source Gnash, which is an attempt to offer Flash compatibility in a package that is not controlled by Adobe. And while Gnash installed fine, it didn't work on any of the Flash-equipped pages on which I tried it. Even YouTube. And if it doesn't work on YouTube, then what the hell is it good for?

So I removed Gnash with Synaptic and installed Flash through the browser. But after that, the browser ran as if Flash was not installed. When I got to a page with Flash, Firefox would offer to install the plugin, but when I clicked the "install plugin" window, Firefox would say it was already installed. Be that as it may, I still didn't have Flash capability in Firefox.

I removed the Flash plugin in Synaptic (I still can't figure out how to do it through Firefox itself) and reinstalled from the browser a few times. It still didn't work.

But today I decided to reinstall the Flash plugin in the Synaptic Package Manager. The package was already on the system, so I didn't even have to download it from the repositories again. It reinstalled, I started Firefox, and I finally have Flash capability.

I still see a little hinkiness in the graphics in the Firefox 3 beta. My test system doesn't have the best graphics chipset, but still, that's a few too many blurry boxes for my taste.

I'll probably install the Epiphany Web browser -- a key component in the GNOME desktop -- to do a comparison. I've grown quite fond of Epiphany through using it in Debian, and those running Ubuntu should know that they have a Mozilla-like counterpart to Iceweasel/Firefox.

Soon I hear that Epiphany will be built upon something called Webkit instead of Mozilla, and at that point Epiphany will diverge from Firefox in a major way, I predict. It could be better, could be worse. Whatever happens, I'll certainly be following it. Browser diversity, such as it is, is a huge deal for me because I -- and I suspect many of you -- spend most of our time in the Web browser. For that reason alone, it's probably the most important application on the desktop. It is for me, at any rate