Agileview

This press release from Novell’s Brainshare Conference 2006 caught my eye today. A great example of SUSE Linux and Lotus Domino in action.

The Ministry’s decision-making processes, correspondence and e-mail communications run through a central Lotus-based process management and documentation application. All correspondence is scanned into the application and initiatives are reviewed and approved through the system. Moving off an existing UNIX* deployment, the Ministry turned to a version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server specifically optimized for Lotus Domino* environments. The Ministry is also using SUSE Linux as the basis for the Ministry’s new Intranet portal, which holds key organizational information and workgroup applications such as facility reservation and notice boards for ministry employees.

Tom Francese, president, Novell EMEA. “Novell’s technology and its comprehensive service offering have enabled the Ministry of Defence to seamlessly migrate existing systems to Linux and smoothly and securely run critical applications on an open source platform.”

Read more of the press release @ novell.com/brainshare

The 5.10 release of Ubuntu and Kubuntu was delivered with the 1.195 release of the Open Office package, which was the final Beta before the 2.0 release. It works fine and is much more stable than many other commercial Beta software I’ve trialled from “reputable” vendors. There are been a number of point releases since OoO release 2 and these include some additional features/bug fixes (or “enhancements in Microsoft speak”) which are of benefit.

So how do you upgrade your Open Office in Ubuntu? There are two ways to do this, from the command line or using Adept or Synaptic. The entire process takes about 15 minutes to download and apply all the updates.

Updating Open Office

From the command line:

1. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Add the line: deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
3. Save and close the file, ctrl-x and y to save changes.
4. sudo apt-get update
5. sudo apt-get upgrade

From theopensourceweblog and the Ubuntu Forums.

Using Adept:

1. Launch adept and enter your password when prompted
2. From the Adept menu, select Manage Repositories
3. In the new repository text box add the line: deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
4. Click the Add button. You should now see that the people.ubuntu.com repository has been added
5. Click the Apply button
6. Note: On some systems (like mine) the repository will be added, but there will be some weird characters after the ./ in the Distribution column. If this happens on your system then just left-click on the ./ which should cause the column to go into edit mode and simply remove the weird characters. Click the Apply button.
7. Click the Close button
8. Click the Fetch Updates button (to get the new OoO packages)
9. Click the Full Upgrade button (to apply all of the available upgrades)
10. Click the Commit button to start downloading

Now go get a cup’o Tea as this may take a few minutes to update. After your cupper, you can happily launch OoO and if you check the About OoO box it should state release 2.0.1 (or higher).

How easy was that?

Performance Tip

There is also a tip posted in the Ubuntu Forums to enhance the overall performance of Open Office.

1. Goto Tools -> Options > Memory.
2. Increase graphics cache to 64 MB and memory per object to 8 MB.
3. Exit and restart OpenOffice a couple of times (it takes a few openings before it helps).

Andreas Pleschek, from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM. Andreas was presenting at the Linux Forum 2006.

At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM’s new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers.

Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.

Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.

What can I say, This is *very good news* for Linux, Open Source advocates, Open Office and of course, Lotus Workplace. Way to go!

More information from Groklaw.net.

Via The OpenOffice Blog.