Checked the Novell website looking for some other information and behold! The SUSE 10 announcement is there on the home page, available now for free download - SUSE 10 Enterprise Server and Desktop. Woo hoo!
We should have the DVD ISO’s downloaded by tomorrow and will be handing them out to our clients and anyone else that wants them.
If you live in Canberra and within driving distance to our Mitchell office - Unit 17/160 Lysaght Street, then pop-in for a free DVD.
]]>The meeting will be held on Friday, 4th of August at 1pm at Hotel Kurrajong in Barton
By the end of this meeting I would like to achieve at least the following:
And of course, it will be a chance for everyone to meet and provide input on the overall objectives and structure of the user group.
I would appreciate an email RSVP if you intend on coming (justin [at] agileware DOT net). That way, I do not feel like an idiot if I’m the only one there!
Feel free to forward this invitation onto anyone else you believe may be interested in participating.
Hope to see you there!
Justin
About BLUG = Business Linux User Group
Business Linux Users Group or BLUG for short:
Linux and open source are deliverying serious business solutions today and this is happening everywhere.
Here’s the problem. No one is talking about it, raising the awareness or sharing these stories. Or if they are it is limited to within the confines of their own organisation. And if a solution is implemented for a particularly hard problem, again is this shared? And even if they wanted to share this knowledge where would they do it?
Business people (ie. people working in all sectors: Private, Government, Health, Education, Not For Profit etc. enterprises) need a regular forum where these type of topics can be discussed, where business problems and solutions can be discussed. And where the challenges of open source in business today can be thrashed out. It will be a open and *inclusive* forum for end users, implementors, ISVs, decision makers, developers, policy makers from all sectors. Basically, anyone that has an interest in the topic and being a part of a wider community.
Hence the idea of a BLUG = Business Linux User Group.
We already have a CLUG = Canberra Linux User Group. But that’s for sandals, board shorts, tank-tops and pizza. The grassroots guys.
BLUG is for business*
*Business being: Private, Government, Education, Health, Not For Profit etc. All possible enterprises where FOSS is used today. Non-exclusive membership. Inclusive.
For more details and some comments on the idea of forming a BLUG then please read the original BLUG post.
]]>In other news, we’ve all been pretty busy at Agileware. We landed a number of big projects and new clients which have been occupying our time. Hence, we’ve been pretty quiet on the Blog, apologies but work demands y’know.
Our focus has been to deliver a range of open source solutions to our customers. This has been met with amazing success, huge cost-benefits to the customer and incredibly reduced time-to-delivery. Here are some of the FOSS we have been working with:
As you can see this is a diverse range of software.
In the pipe-line we’ve got:
Seems that the IBM developerWorks team agrees too!As part of our work with FOSS, we are increasingly giving back to the FOSS community. Although we are a pretty small team, our contributions, no matter how small will benefit someone, somewhere else in the world. And that’s the whole point.
So we have been contributing back Drupal patches and even a custom module - Signwriter. With further modules on the way, contributing to the overall value of the Drupal project.
In addition, we have been developing a Drupal Training Workshop for end users (strictly non-technical users). The workshop has been run 3 times now for our customers. Feedback from attendees has been positive and encouraging. Everyone leaves the workshop fired up about what they can do with their new Drupal system. So that’s great affirmation. There is a dire need for Drupal training materials for end users, so we will also contribute this back to the community soon too.
Podcasts (and Videocasts to some extent too) have really taken off at Agileware and we’ve been listening to a diverse range of sources. My personal favourites being:
We plan on making some big changes to the public Agileware website and getting back into the groove of regular blogging. Our company has come a long way in the last 6 to 8 months, in fact almost a complete transformation. So as a consequence it will be time to change our website to do justice to our capabilities and talk more about what real solutions are being delivered using FOSS.
BLUG is firmly on my list of things to kick-off (OK, so it’s been 4 months from idea to action). There is a need and an interest in having a regular meet-up of BLUG-type people. So I’ll be sending emails and making calls to get this going soon. Can’t wait!
Signing off, Justin
Interesting interview on searchopensource.techtarget.com with Rob Miller. I particularly like this quote:
Miller: One [IT manager] I know told people: ‘This is the latest office update.’ He said no more than that and just put it on their computers. One day they came in, and they found it, and that was it. Nobody complained.
Miller compares OpenOffice 2.0 and Microsoft Office in this interview. He also calls for the open source community to come down from its IT ivory tower and deliver personable and usable training options for first-time OpenOffice and open source software users.
Review of KOffice 1.5
linux.com: KOffice is not rushing its development by trying to be all things to all users. Instead, KOffice seems to be gradually perfecting existing functions a little more with each release. This tactic is particularly evident in the steady improvement of the user interface. To many free software users, this approach will probably be reassuring, because in the long run it promises to produce a dependable suite of programs.It is definitely worth reading the first-look review of the KOffice to find out how good the alternatives are:
Where Can I Download OpenOffice Templates?
The other complaint I’ve heard about OpenOffice is that there are not enough templates available. Well, if you are looking for OpenOffice Templates then you will be pleasantly surprised by the collection of templates available for OoO and Koffice on kde-files.org.
Where Can I Find Out More About Linux?
I found these great articles via the newly discovered linuxfilter news service, cool!
]]>]]>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.â€
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.
From the command line:
- sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
- Add the line: deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
- Save and close the file, ctrl-x and y to save changes.
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
From theopensourceweblog and the Ubuntu Forums.
Using Adept:
- Launch adept and enter your password when prompted
- From the Adept menu, select Manage Repositories
- In the new repository text box add the line: deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
- Click the Add button. You should now see that the people.ubuntu.com repository has been added
- Click the Apply button
- 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.
- Click the Close button
- Click the Fetch Updates button (to get the new OoO packages)
- Click the Full Upgrade button (to apply all of the available upgrades)
- 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?
There is also a tip posted in the Ubuntu Forums to enhance the overall performance of Open Office.
]]>
- Goto Tools -> Options > Memory.
- Increase graphics cache to 64 MB and memory per object to 8 MB.
- Exit and restart OpenOffice a couple of times (it takes a few openings before it helps).
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.
]]>
Since our office entirely moved to a Linux desktop environment, we ceased using the Lotus Notes client for email as it does not run natively under Linux (well, not yet at least…).
Instead we use the Mozilla Thunderbird Email (just a standard SMTP, IMAP, POP3 mail client) using SMTP/IMAP and SSL to send/retrieve email. The switch has been almost completely painless, with a few minor gotchas:
Depending on your level of sophistication on using Lotus Notes these may or may not be major problems. For us these were really minor.
After using IMAP email for a few weeks, we noticed that all of the IMAP sent email appeared differently in the Lotus Notes mail client:
Some investigation revealed that the problem was caused by Domino stamping all IMAP sent email with a DeliveredDate field, which had the same value as the PostedDate.
Therefore, you would think that simply removing the DeliveredDate field from the IMAP sent email would solve the problem. Yes, this approach works when you know where the IMAP sent documents are all located, ie. the “Sent” Folder. Deleting the DeliveredDate field causes the document to be displayed in the “Sent” View and also display the correct value for “Who”.
But what happens when those documents are not in a known folder, how do you locate those? You need to search the Email database and locate all the IMAP documents, not a simple task.
So to identify a document created by a IMAP email client connecting directly to your Domino server, the following rules are used:
Document must not have the following fields set. As these indicate that the document was routed too, not created directly in the database.
For Mozilla Thunderbird, document must have the following fields set:
For Microsoft Outlook, document must have the following fields set:
If the document meets the above criteria, then (I believe) it is a document created by a IMAP client. And the DeliveredDate can be removed.
You can then wrap this logic up into a simple scheduled Notes Agent that parses your email on a daily basis, fixing all of the IMAP sent email so that they display correctly within Lotus Notes. See below for an example.
Function localImapSentDocument(docTarget As notesdocument) As Integer
'This function determines whether or not the target document was sent directly from a local IMAP client
'When this is performed Domino automatically assigns a delivereddate value which then interferes with the display of the "Who" column in the Inbox
localImapSentDocument = False
If Not docTarget.HasItem("Received") And Not docTarget.HasItem("RouteServers") And docTarget.HasItem("DeliveredDate") And docTarget.HasItem("PostedDate") And docTarget.HasItem("$SMTPNotFromNotes") then
'Check for email sent by Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook client
If docTarget.HasItem("User_Agent") or docTarget.HasItem("$Mailer") Then
localImapSentDocument = True
End If
End If
End Function
Note: our internal system execution and error logging has been commented out:
Sub Initialize
'Dim syslog As New mylog(cAgent)
'sysLog.FunctionLocationA="Initialise"
'sysLog.FunctionDescription="Removes the delivereddate from imap documents"
'syslog.LogGeneral ("Starting")
On Error Goto errHdlr
Dim ns As New notessession
Dim dbCurrent As notesdatabase
Set dbCurrent = ns.currentdatabase
Dim colEmail As notesdocumentcollection
Set colEmail = dbCurrent.UnprocessedDocuments
Dim docEmail As NotesDocument
Set docEmail = colEmail.GetFirstDocument
Do While Not(docEmail Is Nothing)
'Check if this is a local IMAP document
If localImapSentDocument(docEmail) Then
'If so then remove the DeliveredDate
Call docEmail.RemoveItem("DeliveredDate")
Call docEmail.Save(True,False)
'syslog.LogGeneral ("Updated: " + docEmail.subject(0) + "; UNID: " + docEmail.UniversalID)
End If
Set docEmail = colEmail.GetnextDocument(docEmail)
Loop
'syslog.LogGeneral ("Completed")
Exit Sub
errhdlr:
'sysLog.ProcessError Err, Error$, PROCESSERROR_LOG
Exit Sub
End Sub
Technorati tags: lotus notes, show-n-tell thursday
]]>There just doesn’t seem to be a good way of having this work in all browsers using only CSS. I wanted it to work though, so I did what every frustrated web developer does, and used javascript. My solution looks at the height of the browser window, and the size of the content, and then stretches an invisible div within the content to change the size of the content.
In the html just above my footer I added:
<div id='spacer'></div>
Then in css I added:
#spacer {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
height: 1px; /* don't set to 0 or moz and konq have problems */
}
And finally the javascript:
function elem(id) {
if (document.getElementById != null) {
return document.getElementById(id);
}
if (document.all != null) {
return document.all[id];
}
if (document.layers != null) {
return document.layers[id];
}
return null;
}
function height(id) {
var e = elem(id);
if (e) {
return parseInt(e.offsetHeight);
}
return 0;
}
function windowHeight() {
var height = 0;
if( typeof( window.innerHeight ) == 'number' ) {
//Non-IE
height = window.innerHeight;
} else if( document.documentElement && document.documentElement.clientHeight ) {
//IE 6+ in 'standards compliant mode'
height = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
} else if( document.body && document.body.clientHeight ) {
//IE 4 compatible
height = document.body.clientHeight; }
return parseInt(height);
}
function stretchPage() {
var spacer = elem('spacer');
var newheight = windowHeight() - (height('page') - height('spacer'));
if (newheight < 1) newheight = 1; // set to 1 because there are bugs in moz and konq when setting height to 0
spacer.style.height = newheight + 'px';
}
window.onload = stretchPage;
window.onresize = stretchPage;
With all of these put together you have a page which will grow to fill the height of your window in firefox, konqueror, opera, and IE, provided javascript is enabled.
]]>From Whiteman Park in Perth, Western Australia. Photo courtesy of my brother in law.
And no, the Roo is not dead.
]]>