Creating Business Cards with OpenOffice.org

From the article:

Exchanging business cards is a rudimentary form of networking (the people, not the server kind). However, to get the most out of the exchange, you need a card that attracts attention and reflects the image or values you want to project.

Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org Writer’s tool for producing business cards does such a poor job of realizing both these goals that it is better avoided. However, if you know where to look, Writer also includes other tools that make designing business cards as easy as possible.

More here.

RossB

 

3 Ways to Take a Screenshot in Linux

There are plenty of instances when it would be handy to take a quick screenshot… maybe you’re working on some technical documentation, or maybe you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, or maybe you just want to prove to your buddies you got the “high score”…  Whatever the reason, here are some quick tips on how to create a screenshot in Linux — well, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop with GNOME desktop at least…

(1) Entire Screen – Press the [Print Screen] button to take a snapshot of the entire screen. You can also add to your desktop panel this little icon  () for “Take a screenshot of your desktop”, or you can find it in the Applications menu under System (in GNOME), or maybe right-click the icon in your Apps menu to add it to your Favorites.  Either way, one click of the icon and it’ll take a screenshot… go figure.

Example screenshot: 

(2) Current Window – Press [ALT] + [Print Screen] to take a snapshot of the currently chosen window.

Example screenshot: 

(3) Random Area Selection – Press the [Windows key] (aka, the “super” key) + click-and-drag yourself an area using the left mouse button.   I didn’t know this method even existed until this afternoon when I ran across it by chance.  How cool is that?!?

Example screenshot: 

 

What Wine Goes With Photoshop?

The excellent Wine Review blog has an article about Photoshop running on Linux using WINE (WIne is NOT an Emulator), recommended read for the graphics artists in the audience.

From the article:

Mixed-media professionals such as photographers, Web designers, and graphic designers will not be disappointed in Adobe’s latest incarnation of Photoshop. In this release, Adobe aims hard at addressing the issues of file management, easy photo retouching, and smarter output for the Web. While Adobe manages to successfully address these issues, it also remains true to its photo editing roots.

More from the article.

RossB

P.S.  Skip, don’t even think about using Photoshop on SLED, it’s the GIMP for you…

 

openSUSE 10.3 – new features, now available

openSUSE 10.3 is now officially released and available. Here are some of the highlighted improvements and links to more info:

• Beautiful green artwork
• KDE 3.5.7
• KDE 4
• Gnome 2.20
• GTK YaST
• 1-Click Install
• Multimedia (MP3 support out of the box)
• New/Redesigned YaST Modules
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion
• Virtualization (Xen 3.1, VirtualBox, KVM,…)
• OpenOffice 2.3
• New package management
• Faster boot times
• and more…!

openSUSE 10.3 GM announcement

Novell press release

ZDnet blog mention

Download openSUSE

 

Mono Apps You’ll Love to Use

Jono Bacon, he of Lugradio fame and GNOME developer legend has a nice treatise on why Mono is great for applications on Linux at his blog.

Stop by the Lugradio site, subscribe to the podcasts and visit the forums.  Some of the shows are incredibly funny and somewhat NSFW, so beware and use some headphones.

RossB

 

ATI drivers for Linux – alpha code available

As Skip mentioned in his recent post, AMD has decided to “get it’s act together” when it comes to a Linux video driver.  In fact, AMD is partnering with Novell SUSE Linux engineers to get this project moving.  More info on this here and here.

Well, the first fruits of that labor have hit the street.  Granted, this is only alpha-quality code, but hey – it’s progress and a positive indication of the collaboration to come.  Check it out here.

 

Better ATI drivers for Linux!

I know many of you out there have been complaining about the quality of the proprietary ATI video driver. Today ATI officially announced that it will officially be getting its act together.

“In the second half of 2007 we [ATI/AMD] plan to deliver the most significant enhancements for ATI Radeon graphics ever for Linux and reaffirm our commitment to consumer users and the community as a whole.”

-Catalyst 7.9 software release in September,

-AMD will add Linux support for the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series of graphics processors.

– In addition to expanded GPU support, Catalyst™ 7.9 is being designed to offer a number of major performance improvements across the board with users seeing up to 90 per cent improvement in such popular titles as Doom 3 and Quake 4

-In Q4 2007, AMD’s Catalyst software package for Linux will add support for Accelerated Indirect GLX (AIGLX). AIGLX is an enabling technology that allows Linux users to enjoy a rich visual 3D user interface that provides a more immersive end-user compute experience.

You can read the full release here:

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070904006432&newsLang=en

 

Linux video drivers – proprietary or open source?

It’s certainly one of the hot topics of discussion in OSS circles… should video drivers be open source or proprietary? Ideally two of top three major video chipset manufacturers (namely ATI and Nvidia) could be convinced that they should fully open source their video drivers for the benefit of all. ATI info is here and here.  Nvidia info is here.  Intel already releases open source drivers for at least some of their chipsets, if not all. The general reply to those requests has always been that they won’t because it would expose their secret sauce to their competitors and they would lose their performance edge. I don’t know enough about the techie details to comment on the validity of those claims, but one thing is certain – end users don’t really care. Typical end users just want their video cards to work. That’s why you’ll find SLED 10 offering support for both proprietary and open source drivers out of the box.

Will the proprietary and open source drivers offer the same features and performance? In a word – No. An interesting review (a bit dated now, but still interesting) from Phoronix directly compared the open source driver to the proprietary driver for an ATI video card. Check out the results here to see what they found out.

Clearly, pressure is mounting as Dell and Google have been ramping up the requests/pressure on ATI to get more open drivers for these chipsets. Hey, the more the merrier! This will be an interesting space to watch as things develop…

 

SLED 10 SP1 Fresh install + Lenovo T60p + XGL, 3D Desktop Effects

Just wanted to post a little of my own personal experience… maybe I did something wrong, maybe not.

My laptop is a Lenovo T60p and I just did a fresh install of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 code. I registered with my activation code to get any updates and downloaded them.

The installation automatically detected the right ATI driver for my card. The two packages that got installed were:

• ati-fglrxG01-kmp-bigsmp-8.36.5_2.6.16.46_0.12-1
• x11-video-fglrxG01-8.36.5-1

Looking at my Desktop Effects settings, this is what I see. Following the link for SAX2 runs fine, but ultimately does not help me to get those Desktop Effects working. The “3D Enabled” checkbox is even checked – but it’s grayed out. So how did I fix it?

I entered this single command as root from a terminal session:

# gnome-xgl-switch --enable-xgl

U ATI Technologies Inc Device: pci 0x71d4
DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND2DISK=””
DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND2RAM=””
DISABLE_USER_STANDBY=””
Warning! MD5DIR is not set: you probably called this script outside SuSEconfig…!
Using MD5DIR=”/var/adm/SuSEconfig/md5″…
No changes for /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers
No changes for /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config

After restarting the graphical environment, the Desktop Effects magically works! Here’s what the Desktop Effects box looks like afterwards… I’m a happy SLED user once again!

 

Compiz + Beryl = Compiz-Fusion

A while ago the Compiz compositing manager project was forked to form the Beryl project, but the two are back together again, with amazing new features and capabilities the main result. You can find more about what’s included, all the plugin’s and how to get things working by signing up for the Compiz-fusion mailing list.

The beryl project blog has a nice layout of the new features with a few static graphics, but there is a fun video that shows the new features in action, both are recommended for those who would like to see the latest advances in the cube interface.

Enjoy,

RossB

 

Linux Helix Player Due in June with WMA/V Support

A very enlightening article by liquadat about the new release of the Helix Player from the Helix Project, due out after June sometime and apparently supporting Microsoft WMA/WMV codecs, which a LOT of our customers, (particularly in Education), have been eagerly awaiting.

Will we finally have good support for the MS protocols? Will the Helix Player support DVD playback? Who’s got madder skills, the Professor or McGyver? Stay tuned, film at 00001011.

RossB

 

Need a Cross Platform Desktop Publishing Tool?

A quick answer to a question someone asked me yesterday, which was “What Open Source or Linux publishing apps exist?” Before everyone pings me with how much they LOVE using TeX in emacs, the questioner really meant “What Open Source or Linux publishing apps exist, that can be used by mere mortals who are used to WYSIWYG tools like Pagemaker etc.”

The first app that jumps to mind is one called Scribus, not just because it’s totally free and open source, but also because it’s a great publishing tool and the most cross-platform tool I know of, supporting Linux, Mac, Windows, and some variants of OS/2.

Scribus has a fairly large and useful set of documentation (formal, other) various articles (1, 2, 3, and 4) and comparisons (1)with the usual proprietary desktop publishing applications. Visit the Scribus Wiki for much more information.

Another tool that is not either free or open source, but is cross-platform is Pagestream, available on Amiga(!?), Mac, Windows and Linux. You can see it’s features set, a comparison of it and other offerings, and the product documentation. Linux.com has a very comprehensive article explaining Pagestream here.

If you have other tools you like or use, put in a comment and I’ll look them over and include them with a credit to the contributor.

RossB