passing the time

What do YOU do while you’re waiting for your Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate ISO to download?

I played THIS GAME for quite a while.

(btw, my wife is WAY better at it than I am)

Filed under: Software, linux, the webernets, wifey , 8.10, game, Intrepid Ibex, Release Candidate, Ubuntu

Tired of Giving Microsoft MORE MONEY?

Why not try out the just-released OpenOffice.org Version 3.0?

• It’s a full-featured Office Suite that is fully compatible with documents created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (including the newer .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats)
• It’s FREE!
• It works in Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX (Intel and PPC), and Linux
• It’s FREE!!
• It also supports version 1.2 of the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF).  Microsoft Office does not.
• It’s FREE!!!
• and much, MUCH MORE!!!
• (it’s free)

Infomercial over.  At the time of this writing, their servers were so bogged down by people rushing to download it that they reduced their main page to plain text on a white background.  Anyone who remembers trying to download Firefox 3.0 on the day it was released will appreciate the ingenuity of this solution, as you can at least get to the download (even if it’s not pretty).  Also because of the heavy server load, download speeds are basically at a crawl (getting around 10 KB/s right now).

Speaking from personal experience, OpenOffice has actually helped me on several occasions as it strives to include features that are not available in Microsoft Office (for example, in the past it was things like being able to publish a document to PDF natively, though MS Office now includes this feature).  There were also some times where MS Office could not open one of its own documents (said there was corruption), but OpenOffice was able to open and save the document (saving the person I was helping HOURS of re-creating the document).

I have not been paid or in any way rewarded for telling you about this amazing product.

Filed under: Software, linux , Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org

gOS

If you don’t care about linux, feel free to not read.

I stumbled across a new distro called gOS. No, it’s not the Google operating system, though I think the creators don’t mind the insinuation. It appears to stand for… green? In any case, the idea is to take the extremely stable (and popular) Ubuntu distro, use the enlightenment desktop (FAST!), and put the apps many of us use every day (gmail, facebook, google calendar, google docs, etc.) and make them into …. desktop apps (?). In any case, the linux geek in me has his heart all aflutter with the possiblities.

The downloads page on the official site seems to only have the torrent, but torrents are throttled here, so I searched a bit a came across a download of the ISO. Here’s the link. I’m burning the ISO as we speak, so hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to do a bit of a review of it.

Oh yeah, I guess Wal-Mart started selling uber-cheap PCs with this OS on them. Please don’t let any views you have of Wally-World get in the way of giving it a shot.

Filed under: linux , gOS