Get Ready for LibreOffice 3.4

LibreOffice 3.4 is approaching. The second release candidate for 3.4 was released on May 27, and has improvements for Writer, Calc, and much more. Ready for a look?

The upcoming release of LibreOffice 3.4 is slightly overshadowed by the announcement that Oracle is proposing OpenOffice.org as an Apache Incubator project. What does that mean for the free office suite landscape? It's far too soon to tell, though Apache president Jim Jagielski has reached out to The Document Foundation about cooperation. I'm cautiously optimistic that the projects will find a way to work together and benefit the rest of the FOSS community.

But for now, LibreOffice is the only project with an imminent release — so let's take a look at that and what's in store.

LibreOffice is focusing on more modest, time-based releases. This means that 3.4 doesn't have massive new features, but it does have a slew of performance improvements and minor new features that make life a little better. Let's take a look at some of the highlights.

Sadly, the LibreOffice folks still haven't implemented vi-like keybindings for Writer. (OK, that may only be sad for some of us, but still...) But Writer still has a few minor features that you might enjoy.

If you do a lot of footnotes and bullets, you're going to find this release interesting. LibreOffice now has support for Greek (upper and lower case) letters for bullets — not something that I've had call for yet, but might be of interest to some users. (Testing this feature shows that I'm not, in fact, up on my Greek alphabet...) You'll find this in the Options tab of the Bullets and Numbering dialog.

If you're working on a paper or document that will be printed in color, or distributed as a PDF, you now have the option of defining the style and color of footnote separator. You'll find that one in the Footnote tab of the Page Style dialog.

The LibreOffice folks have also been working on "flat ODF" import and export filters — so if you have a need for the .fodt document type, you might want to check this out. What's flat ODF? In a nutshell, it's uncompressed ODF — the standard ODF document is a zipped file with XML data. Most users probably will want to stick with the traditional ODF — but this is a way to use LibreOffice to produce documents that can be worked with by other programs.

The Pivot Table support in Calc has been stepped up a notch in 3.4, and heavy spreadsheet users may want to look at upgrading to 3.4 right away. You now have support for unlimited fields (as opposed to a limit of 8 fields) using Pivot Table. The Pivot Table feature now allows users to define named ranges as a data source as well.

The 3.4 release also adds support for OLE links in Excel documents — so if you're working with a lot of Excel documents, this means that you won't be seeing import errors from Excel docs with OLE links.

A couple of features have been refined to allow per-sheet support as opposed to global document support. Autofilter and named ranges can now be defined on a per-sheet basis rather than being applied to the entire document.

Are you an Ubuntu Unity user? If so, you now have support for the global menu.

The 3.4 release also has a few features for improved graphite font handling, and for drawing text with Cairo as well as improved GTK+ theme support. This means that LibreOffice should look much nicer than 3.3 as a native Linux app.

Do you do presentations, and want to put them up on the Web? (One of the first — and most annoying — questions I get when doing a presentation is "will the slides be online?") This has been, let's say, not one of LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org's strong points. I tried it out with a couple of my old presentations, and it works like a charm now. So if you need to put a presentation online, LibreOffice 3.4 has you covered.

There's also the usual under the hood improvements, bug fixes, and so on. The 3.4 release is not a big leap forward — but it's an improvement and seems stable enough for most users to dive in.

Remember, the LibreOffice project recommends the .0 releases for more adventurous users. If you're wanting to contribute to LibreOffice, or just like to live a bit closer to the edge, the 3.4.0 release is for you. Odds are, if you're reading this article you like to try new features and want to be running the latest and greatest. But if not, then just hang on until the latest LibreOffice turns up in your favorite Linux distribution or at least wait for one of the point releases (like 3.4.1 or 3.4.2) that have cleaned up any nagging bugs that slipped through in 3.4.0.

According to the release notes, you should be able to install 3.4 side-by-side with 3.3. Of course, I read this after I removed the 3.3 packages from Linux Mint and installed 3.4 — but it should save you some trouble if you want to test 3.4 without removing the older release.

Naturally, you'll find packages for most major Linux distributions — the pre-release page has RPM and Debian packages for 32- and 64-bit systems.

The release plan calls for 3.4.1 to be out in late June, and for 3.4.2 to be released in late July. The next major release of LibreOffice is set for next February. Whether the OpenOffice.org news will impact LibreOffice releases, if at all, is unclear. With LibreOffice ramping up, OpenOffice.org apparently moving to the Apache Software Foundation, and Calligra picking up steam, it looks to be an interesting time for free office suites.

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Github Has Surpassed Sourceforge and Google Code in Popularity

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to backup assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

Black Duck didn't look at language specific forges such as RubyForge, and it excluded shell, XML and assembler commits.

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Google Releases Voice and Video Chat Technology As Open Source

Thursday, 02 June 2011 00:00 OStatic

Among major technology companies, Google open sources many of its own projects at a prolific rate, and now the company has announced that it is open sourcing WebRTC, an open technology for voice and video on the web. The code and API are available here. WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. According to Google: "This first release of WebRTC is mainly targeted at the browser community. It enables browser vendors to integrate the components required for rich communication into their web browsers."

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Linus Jumps Ahead to 3.0

Last week it looked like we were, finally, going to get a version bump from 2.6 to 2.8. Instead, Linus Torvalds has bitten the bullet and tagged the first release candidate of the next kernel to 3.0.

That's right — it looks like the next kernel release is going to go all the way to 11, er, 3.0. If you missed the discussion last week, this isn't because the kernel is gaining massive new functionality (as it did from the 1.x to 2.0.x series), but because "it will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me." Sounds like a good enough reason here, too.

To be clear, 3.0 will not be a radical change. According to Torvalds, "Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years") instead."
Want to test the new kernel, check for it in the /pub/linux/kernel/v3.0 directory, though the git tree is still linux-2.6.git for now.

If we follow the "once per decade" model, it looks like we'll have Linux 4.0 sometime in 2020.

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LibreOffice Progress to 3.4.0

Today we released 3.4.0, there is a great list of new features, specific to LibreOffice available (expertly assembled by Marc Pare and others). Each should also be credited so some of the depth of the (code) developer community is apparent, this is of course in addition to our extensive credits page (kept up to date by a volunteer of course). This is the first major release containing code from many of our new volunteers which is exciting. Of course, there are some great improvements there, I like the named range / data-pilot work that makes it easy to extend the data range you're working on without manually editing perhaps ten data-pilots depending on it but there are a load more. Some of the changes are invisible, and/or behind the scenes - so I thought I'd expand on them here.

The incredible shrinking codebase

First - ridding ourself of sillies - there is lots of good work in this area, eg. big cleanups of dead, and unreachable code, dropping export support from our (deprecated for a decade) binary filters and more. I'd like to highlight one invisible area: icons. Lots of volunteers worked on this, at least: Joseph Powers, Ace Dent, Joachim Tremouroux and Matus Kukan. The problem is that previously OO.o had simply tons of duplication, of icons everywhere: it had around one hundred and fifty (duplicate) 'missing icon' icons as an example. It also duplicated each icon for a 'high contrast' version in each theme (in place of a simple, separate high contrast icon theme), and it also propagated this effective bool highcontrast all across the code bloating things. All of that nonsense is now gone, and we have a great framework for handling eg. low-contrast disabilities consistently. This also reduces run-time memory consumption (we have to cache the .zip theme's directory), and of course binary installation and download size shrinks (we ship several themes to taste) - here is a pretty picture:

The incredible shrinking footprint on Windows

When we first released LibreOffice, in place of the individual install set per language - duplicating the code, artwork, templates, etc. many tens of times on each server we switched to bundling lots of languages (and also the run-time adapted BrOffice branding) into a single package. That shrunk our mirror load from 76Gb down to 11Gb for 3.3, which is now for 3.4 down to 7.6Gb a handy win (of ~70Gb) for mirror admins, making us more agile, and appreciated by our fantastic mirror network I hope. To achieve this, in consultation with the l10n team, Kendy worked hard to split out our help to the wiki - so you can browse it on-line at http://help.libreoffice.org. That of course helps Linux users' space-constrained live-CDs more useful too.
With that work in-place, we managed to cram the top fifty languages into only 225Mb on release, which (sadly) left the remaining languages in a rather larger 265Mb download. In 3.4.0 down to improvements such as the them work above, sharing templates, dropping the BrOffice brand (at the Brazilians request) and more importantly Kami's gret msi packing improvements we've managed to pack all our languages, and many more dictionaries, and more functionality into a single download at 197Mb. That is clearly still too big, but smaller than a MS Office service pack. We are still some 40Mb larger than the original single-lang packaging (which it is our goal to match), but there is plenty more room for improvement (eg. gutting the megabytes of pointless ICU code we ship), and we'd love more help, (cf. scale offset of 150Mb):

Better translation infrastructure

I'm not an expert here, but our fantastic l10n team, swelled to 200 contributors is doing some great work on getting the latest translations into the product. They're using pootle for that, but better (thanks to Andras) we've switched from storing our translations in SDF format, instead using native gettext .po files compiled to various odd other formats during the build. Bjoern has a prototype patch coming to allow run-time .po file translation, to allow post-ship translation and better integration with Launchpad.

Heroic merging

One of the huge, invisible tasks for 3.4.0 was the merging of Oracle's code changes. Luckily, of course we use git - and several split repositories, such that merging should be easy. Then again, we have done lots of widespread changes, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of diff, stripping dead code, translating thousands of comments, touching every single file, as well as more substantial API and code changes.

One of the things that made the merge more tricky, was that (after decades of inactivity), some Oracle developers decided now (post fork) would be a great time to do some long overdue large-scale code cleanups. One of those was replacing every instance of TRUE with sal_True, same for FALSE, all instances of legacy types like BOOL to sal_Bool, for each of UINT16, ULONG, LONG etc. etc. Unfortunately, not an easy 'sed' either, as witness to some of the bogus "sal_True" type strings that popped out of the works. While a valuable, and much needed cleanup, this results in the kind of multi-million-line patch (touching all the dead code too) that has the effect of obfuscating their other valuable changes, and takes a certain determination to merge and reconcile.

The effort, spearheaded by Norbert with many straight days of mindless grunt work from myself, and able assistance from Thorsten, Kendy, Kohei, Noel and others - hopefully highlights a triumph of determination and survival against the odds, the tedium and some RSI. Unfortunately, due to some comic, transient technical hitches (that resulted in having to do much of the work twice) this merge rather delayed the code freeze and our first betas for 3.4.

Tinderboxes / rapid building & QA

With the rush to get 3.3 out, and the stabilisation releases after it, as well as the one-shot fun of migrating many Linux distributions over to use LibreOffice there was not enough spare bandwidth to get many tinderboxes or build-bots building. Unfortunately, this had quite an impact on the QA teams particularly after the merge completed, which was sad. The good news is, that we have mostly fixed this now, and have much more recent (the aim is daily) install-sets for most platforms available for testing - a great way to get involved is to help with re-testing old bugs against the latest stable releases.

A chunk of this is down to better tooling and scripts to drive tinderboxes, though we still struggle with unreliable Windows builds, cygwin's sh.exe, or perl.exe or dmake like to wedge intermittently some hours into the build. On the Mac front, Norbert had a breakthrough to shrink the build time. An all-lang Mac build used to take 15 hours (13 inside helpcontent2) - he managed to get this down to under 30 minutes using a ramdisk - substantially improving our agility and ability to turn around builds quickly: getting the latest code to QA fast. One of many great build performance improvements - with other much appreciated packaging acceleration wins in the tangle of badly written perl by guys like Jan Darmochwal, Julien Nabet and Steve Butler.

Then of course some QA stars like Rainer, Alex, Cor, Andre and many others have been working hard at finding, cleanly filing, triaging, prioritising and marking bugs, critical work.

Time based releases

One of the key features of LibreOffice, from my perspective, is its time based release process. Italo has done a great write-up with several nice pictures of this, one of these is this:




To me - having a predictable, and time-based release is such a key concept, that shipping 3.4.0 as a carefully labeled, point-zero release on time is more important than shipping an incredibly bug-free product, at a future, undefined point. This avoids a deeply political process of deciding when and if to release, and whose pet bug is worth waiting for and why, and why is his worse than mine, and oh ! I just found another one, lets delay another week. The alternatives to a time based release seem to have lead only to long (multi-month) slips.
Clearly, we have learned a lot this cycle, and improved our processes to make future releases even better. Obviously our succession of point releases: 3.4.1, 3.4.2 etc, will incrementally improve quality: indeed we are confident of that, since we already have a lot of fixes in-place for 3.4.1, however the fact remains that 3.4.0 is buggy (in fact all software is, but it is more so than usual, and we found a lot of bugs rather late). The bright side, is that our future point-zero releases, build on our improved infrastructure will be better in future. This is why we are continuing to advertise 3.3.2 (and the soon to be available 3.3.3) as the primary download build for now (thanks Christian for all your hard Javascripty work to make that fly). Please do - check-out 3.4.0 and get stuck into helping us make the Free Software Office world even more fun, fast-moving, and exciting. A great way to start as a developer is to get stuck into an Easy Hack.

Contributors

Of course, lots of people got stuck in already, and continue to do so. We like to graph statistics of commits by affiliation - charting how many people of what affiliation commit at least one patch per month, that gives us a pretty graph like this:



Which (I hope) shows the strength and diversity of the contribitor base, as well as its extraordinary growth since we launched. Sadly, some like to denigrate and despise contributors that only come up with small changes, personally I started off in Free Software as a contributor like that - and we love to help encourage, and mentor contributors from small things - to greater ones.

Other highlights

Well, of course so many others have been involved in making LibreOffice the success it is today, tirelesss work by many Steering Committee members, like Italo and Florian writing and co-ordinating multiple press briefings concurrently, and many helping translate and promote the software. The design team, being patient as we get the basics right before getting too stuck into fixing the UI (while producing some beautiful, much improved artwork), and no-doubt many others I forgot. And please take note - this is just some of the features you can't see, there are plenty that you can"

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Fedora 15 and the Desktop

The Linux desktop is getting very exciting lately. Fedora 15 brings its share of excitement with a stable release of GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell, not to mention a lot of changes under the hood. Should you jump onboard? Maybe. Let's dive in and see what changes Fedora 15 brings on the desktop.

GNOME 3.0 with GNOME Shell has received more discussion than any Linux desktop changes in a long time. Now that Fedora 15 is out, we've finally got a chance to see the final result — and decide whether the desktop has been worth the wait.

Of course, there's more to Fedora 15 than just GNOME Shell. The release has a laundry list of new features, some of which are relevant to desktop users, some of interest to developers, and some that make a difference to system admins. But for the purpose of this feature, I'm strictly looking at the main Fedora desktop release. See our 7.5 reasons to upgrade to Fedora 15 for other features you might enjoy in the latest release.

I do want to point out that Fedora is not just the GNOME release. You'll find several Fedora Spins that have alternative desktops — so if you're a fan of KDE, Xfce, or others, Fedora still has you covered. But we'll focus on the main desktop here because that is the default.

First, let's look a Fedora as a desktop user. Installing Fedora hasn't changed a great deal since the previous release. If you've never installed Fedora before, it's not terribly difficult. The installer is a bit more involved than what users will be used to if they're coming from a distribution like Ubuntu or another OS like Mac OS X. It requires that you have some understanding of Linux and know the difference between a regular user and root, for example.

However, once the install is done you are quickly and painlessly presented with display manager to log into your desktop — in this case, GNOME 3.

 

Let's talk GNOME. For the last few years, I've spent quite a bit of time in GNOME and have gotten quite used to the GNOME 2 way of doing things. This doesn't mean that the GNOME 2 way of doing things is better, but I'm used to it. I'm also open to change if it's for the better. So is GNOME 3 a change for the better, or just change?

I'm going to say it's a bit of both. My take on GNOME 3.0, as delivered in Fedora 15? I think it has promise, but it definitely needs work. The decisions to, for instance, remove the maximize button, are questionable. The decorations on the windows are pretty chunky, and on a small display (I tested F15 on a older laptop with 1280x800 resolution) every pixel counts.

And let's talk look for a second. You can have any color you want with GNOME 3.0 in Fedora 15 — as long as it's black. Well, the outer theme, anyway. The window dressing is a light gray. The black theme is, for me, a bit oppressive. It probably works very well for users who are visually impaired — the contrast is good — but it's a bit goth for me. There's a "myths" page that dispels the myth that older themes won't work with GNOME 3.0. That's true, to a point, but it doesn't change the fact that they don't ship any other themes or tools to change the themes.

 

You can, however, install the GNOME Tweak Tool to change some of the things you used to be able to change via the GNOME Control Center. For example, you can change the themes or add the maximize and minimize buttons to the windows.


That said, I like some things about GNOME Shell. I am not crazy about the panel, but I like the window tiling and the ability to search through windows. I like the way it creates workspaces. I'm not crazy about missing the keybinding (Ctrl-Alt-right or Ctrl-Alt-left, etc.) for switching between workspaces. Obviously, the vi-loving, shortcut-knowing crowd is not the audience the GNOME folks had in mind here.

The application picker needs some clean-up. Instead of choosing an application from the GNOME Menu, you now have a application picker that displays all the program icons in a grid, plus "favorites" on the side. You've seen similar layouts on Android phones and devices running iOS. This looks great mostly — but I find the actual categorization a bit muddled and some of the icons aren't meant to be scaled up as large as they are in the picker, so they look terrible. The favorites need some work as well. There's no obvious way at the moment to change the icons associated with the favorites. I've added the Tweak Tool and System Settings to the favorites, but both have the same icon.

With Shell, you also "lose" the desktop as a place to plop files and shortcuts, and no more right-clicking on the desktop to open a terminal. Yet you still have the Desktop folder to save files to. Not sure this makes sense. I'm disappointed that the GNOME project has never implemented something like the KDE plasmoid for the desktop, which is one of the KDE 4.x features I really like. You can restore this by going into the Tweak Tool and setting "Have file manager handle the desktop."

Compositing Conundrum

The biggest thing that annoys me about GNOME Shell is that it requires compositing, thus requiring supported 3D hardware and ruling out some of my hardware and running GNOME Shell in VMware. Guess who has two thumbs and likes to be able to use distros in VMware when traveling? This guy.

You're not totally out in the cold without supported 3D hardware, you just wind up being dropped to the fallback or having to choose a different desktop. But the fallback option, frankly, isn't as good as either GNOME 2 or GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell.

The panel that ships with Shell has some nice ideas. I like the calendar/to-do integration with Evolution, though I'm usually not an Evo user. I miss the time zones, though. It took me a bit to realize that the mouse and other Accessibility options had migrated to the Panel and the Universal Access control dialog. It initially looked like those options were dropped altogether, but they've just been moved out of the mouse/touchpad settings and into Universal Access. This probably does make more sense, it just confused me because I'm used to the old way of doing things.
We'll call GNOME Shell a mixed bag. It has promise, some obvious nifty features, and a bit of improvement ahead. It will also require that most users re-think the way that they use the computer a bit. This requires a bit of an open mind — but we're creatures of habit. We don't necessarily want to have to re-approach our UI with an open mind.

Software Selection and More

Looking at the default selection of software, Fedora hasn't changed greatly since Fedora 14. They have swapped out OpenOffice.org for LibreOffice, and you have Firefox 4, Empathy for IM and IRC, and so on. No surprises or big new packages, really.

Naturally, the default selection of software is always missing at least one tool that most of us want. How is Fedora 15 when it comes to handling packages? Overall, good. Most of the software I'd want that wasn't installed by default was available from the default repos, and the PackageKit GUI is easy to use.

But not all is perfect in packageland. One of the things I've consistently run into with Fedora over the years is problems installing packages. This run was no different. For instance, I tried to install a package called gnotime and received an error about "An unspecified transaction error," because "gnotime-2.3.0-8.fc15.i686 requires libgtkhtml-3.15.so.19." This wasn't the first error I ran into. I can't recall the last time I ran into a similar error using another major distribution's stable release. Worse, the dialog that tells you that you have this problem doesn't let you fix it. You have to confirm the error and then wade back into the software selection to uncheck the offending package. This kind of error is the sort of thing that annoys the heck out of experienced users, and sends inexperienced users running for the hills — or, worse, back to Windows.

Naturally, Fedora doesn't provide codecs for things like MP3 playback and doesn't ship non-free software like Flash. The project has perfectly valid reasons for doing so, both legal and philosophical — but that doesn't change the fact that this is an additional hassle for users who want or need those things.

After using the final Fedora 15 for a few days, I've gotten used to its quirks and been able to tame it to my liking. So it's suitable for use, if you know what you're doing. But it's not perfect or close to perfect out of the box for my use, like Linux Mint.

Summary

Despite a few harsh words, I actually like Fedora 15 — and I could warm to GNOME 3 and Shell if they fix some of the problems and give the user more control over the desktop.

A big problem for Fedora, and for just about any Linux distribution, is trying to figure out who the audience is. The design philosophy for the default desktop, GNOME 3, seems to focus on new users. The rest of the Fedora distribution is aimed at power users and developers. I feel a bit of a disconnect there. But I plan to spend a lot of time using Fedora to see if I don't warm to GNOME 3 more than I did initially, and writing up a few tutorials on using SELinux tools and so forth.

Should you try Fedora 15? If you're a power user, definitely. If you're a less experienced user, then you might want to try Fedora 15, but not on your main computer. I would not recommend using Fedora as a go-to Linux distro for friends or family that haven't tried Linux before.

If you're a loyal Fedora user who's been on the GNOME desktop, you have a couple of options. If GNOME Shell doesn't appeal to you, there's the option to force the "fallback" mode. You could also sit out the F15 release and wait for F16 and the next GNOME release. I suspect it will fix a lot of the problems (read: restore functionality that was unwisely removed) that 3.0 has.

Another option? Try the Xfce release for a cycle. Xfce is feeling a lot like GNOME 2, and that's not a bad thing.

In a nutshell, Fedora 15 is a typical Fedora release. It's solid, but there's a few bugs and the thrill of living on the edge of development. Sometimes that means exciting new features and sometimes it means being annoyed that something that worked perfectly a release ago is off the table while it's re-implemented. But even if you don't use Fedora on your own machine, the odds are the work that's being done in Fedoraland will ultimately benefit you as a Linux user.

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New!! Updated Intel(r) AMT Linux Drivers

Linux/AMT Developers have no doubt been waiting a long time for this.  Updated MEI and LMS drivers for Linux.  They can be download  HERE.  (and below as well)
Are you a Linux Developer interested in writing tools for supporting Intel AMT?  We would love to hear from you.

Here is what these drivers do:

Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) Linux support includes two components that allow interaction between the Intel® AMT FW and the Linux OS: Intel® MEI (Intel® Management Engine Interface) driver and LMS (Local Management Service) driver. Intel® MEI driver allows application to communicate with the FW using host interface, and LMS driver allows applications to access the Intel® AMT FW via the local Intel® Management Engine Interface (Intel® MEI).

Intel® Management Engine Interface driver:

The Intel® MEI driver allows applications to access the Intel® Management Engine FW via the host interface (as opposed to a network interface). The Intel® MEI driver is meant to be used mainly by the Local Manageability Service (LMS). Messages from the Intel® MEI driver are sent to the systems log (i.e. /var/log/messages). Once the Intel® MEI driver is running, an application can open a file to it, connect to an application on the firmware side, and send and receive messages to that application.

Download the  MEI driver

Intel® Local Manageability Service:


The Local Manageability Service (LMS) allows applications to access the Intel® Active Management Technology FW via the local Intel® Management Engine Interface (Intel® MEI). The LMS is dependent on the Intel® MEI driver. Intel® MEI driver should be installed prior to installing the LMS. The LMS runs as a daemon. Messages from the service will be sent to the syslog. The LMS messages will be marked with a source of "LMS". Once the LMS is running, it listens for incoming connection requests on the following ports:

•  Port 16992 for soap and WS-Management requests.
•  Port 623 for WS-Management requests 

If a secure connection with the Intel® AMT device is enabled (TLS), LMS also listens on these ports:

• Port 16993 for secure soap and WS-Management requests.
• Port 664 for secure WS-Management requests.

Download the LMS driver

Learn how to install the software here - or you can use the RPMs included in the SLED-11, Kernel 2.6.32.12-0.7.
Linux Enablement Guide 



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Six Quick Tips Get You Started with Open Compliance

More and more companies turn to Linux and other open source software for great functionality and competitive advantage in product development.  When they do so, most organizations recognize their responsibility to comply with open source license obligations.  They embrace the responsibility as part of using open source.  Unfortunately, some companies remain unaware of their obligations or choose to ignore them.  Others are simply daunted by the task of putting a compliance program in place.  They needn’t be:  There are lots of resources to turn to for guidance.  The Linux Foundation has created comprehensive training courses on compliance that are delivered confidentially onsite to help companies meet their responsibilities.  We also have instructive white papers and a great checklist of compliance actions compiled from experiences of industry-best compliance programs, and the FOSSBazaar governance community to share thoughts about compliance challenges and solutions.

But those resources may be most useful to companies that have committed themselves to compliance and understand the scope of the task before them.  What about companies that know they have to do something but haven’t even thought about where to start?  To help those companies, we’ve recorded a webinar titled “Six Tips for Getting Started with Open Source Compliance.”   It’s readily understandable, even by someone whose expertise lies outside software development.  The webinar is a great place to start with compliance and lays the groundwork for the more comprehensive Linux Foundation compliance training later.

Who should listen to the webinar?  Whoever will be responsible for establishing their company’s open source compliance program.  This could be someone in product development, or the software engineering department, or the Law Department, or Corporate Compliance, or Supplier Management, or QA.  Whoever it turns out to be, they need to get things rolling and learn enough to designate or recruit the right people to implement a compliance program.

So, check out the Six Tips webinar.  It’s well worth the 15 minutes you’ll spend.  While you’re at it, take a listen to the Introduction to SPDX^TM webinar.  Phil Odence provides a great three-minute introduction to the Software Package Data Exchange project, which will transform the way companies inform their trading partners of the open source content in the software they deliver.  After listening, you’ll want to visit the SPDX webpages to learn more about the project.
It’s time to get started!

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Six Months Of Rocking Ubuntu Events

Education and learning has always been an important part of the Ubuntu culture. It is important to us because we always want to present an environment in which everyone is welcome to participate, whatever your skills, location, or experience. We want to make it really easy to get involved in Ubuntu and be a part of the revolution.


Along these lines we always organize online learning events in each cycle that are designed to encourage people to join our community and help get people up to speed with skills and how things work in the interests in growing more and more people who enjoy contributing to Ubuntu and our community.

Today we finalized a stack of dates for the coming cycle and I just wanted share them:

• Ubuntu Developer Week – 11th – 15th July 2011 – a week designed to help up-skill those who want to participate in packaging, bug-fixing and other Ubuntu-related development activities. This is a great week to get started as an Ubuntu developer.
• Ubuntu LoCo Teams Learning Week – 18th – 22nd July 2011 – in this new event we will be providing a set of sessions that are designed to help get LoCo teams up and running and successful. Topics such as how to get members, build an online presence, organize events and more will be here.
• Ubuntu Cloud Days – 25th – 26th July 2011 – Ahmed Kamal will be organizing another set of Ubuntu Cloud tuition sessions that can help get you up and running with an Ubuntu powered Private or Public cloud.
• Ubuntu Global Jam – 2nd – 4th September 2011 – an essential part of the Ubuntu calendar in which LoCo teams around the world organize local events to get together to meet and greet and enjoy contributing to Ubuntu together.
• Ubuntu App Developer Week – 5th – 9th September – a week of tuition sessions about writing apps for the Ubuntu platform and how to get your apps into the Ubuntu Software Center.
• Ubuntu Open Week – 17th – 21st October 2011 – a week designed to be a good first step for brand-new Ubuntu users, deliberately timed the week after release. This is a great first step if you are a brand new user.

Also, many thanks to the new Lernid maintainer, John S. Gruber, for helping to refine and improve the tool that makes these learning events so simple, fun, and enjoyable to participate in.
More about these events as they happen!

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Puppy Linux Tutorial Files

Tutorial Files 

These files help you perform specific tasks using Puppy Linux.  They have been created using various versions of Puppy Linux so your version may be slightly different, but probably quite similar.
Customizing your Puppy:

• Change the Wallpaper. Play video (463Kb)
• Change icon text color. Play video (552Kb)
• Set up GAIM to connect to Puppy IRC. Play video (1,443Kb) - a bit outdated now.
• Create a desktop shortcut for Open Office 2.0 or any executable file Play video (1,158Kb)
• Change the JWM (Window Manager) themes Play video (646Kb)
• How to create a desktop internet shortcut Play video (608Kb)

Installing and using Applications:

• Install a PupGet Package Play video (822Kb)
• Install a dotpup file Play video (660Kb)
• Navigate the commandline Play video (606Kb)
• Use LinNeighborhood to access Windows network files Play video (600Kb)
  
• Install usr_more.sfs to get Open Office 2.0 Play video (1,601Kb)
• Extract a tarball (.tar.gz file) using guiTAR Play video (943Kb)
• Burn an iso file to CD/DVD Play video (588Kb)
• Rip a music CD to mp3 Play video (712 Kb)
• Download a BitTorrent file with Transmission Play video (955Kb)

Configuring Puppy:

• Speed up booting from CD Play video (921 kB)
• Make an ethernet connection Play video (611Kb)
• Connect to a wireless network Play video (791Kb)
• Resize the Pup001 file Play video (299Kb)
• Backup the Pup001 file Play video (576Kb)
  
• Mount a USB Thumbdrive Play video (293Kb)
• Use multiple workspaces Play video (1,178Kb)
• Setup Google Mail-POP3 using Opera Play video (574Kb)
• Convert a MS Word (.doc) file to PDF(.pdf) Play video (775Kb)
• Register at the Puppy Wiki Site Play video (588Kb) 

source : http://www.rhinoweb.us/

Installing Puppy Linux (Full HDD Install)-Part III

Part 3. Install Time.

Now we will use the Universal Installer to make a FULL install to hda1,
followed by installing GRUB to the MBR

So again RIGHT click the desktop and go to Setup > Puppy universal installer
Image-19
 

Select Internal (IDE or SATA) hard drive
Image-20
 

Then click OK

Next choose which drive to install to (in this case it is hda)
Image-21
 

Then click OK

Next select the partition to install to (in this case it is hda1)
Image-22
 

Confirm your choice, by clicking on OK
Image-23
 

Now tell it where the files are, in this case click on CD
Image-24
 

Click OK again
Image-25
 

Next we will choose FULL
Image-26
 

Now wait, while it copies files to the hard drive
Image-27
 
Image-28
 

Now we will install GRUB
Image-29
 

Select INSTALL
Image-30
 

Click OK
Image-31
 

Choose simple and click OK
Image-32
 

Select standard and click OK
Image-33
 

Accept the default entry (in this case /dev/hda1) and click OK
Image-34
 

Scroll down the list, and select MBR and click OK
Image-35
 

Hopefully you will get confirmation that GRUB was successfully installed
Image-36
 
Click OK

We are now finished with the Universal Installer, so click on NO
Image-37
 

Now REBOOT (REMOVE the CD from the drive first)
Image-38
 

Answer NO when asked if you want to save
Image-39
 
When it reboots, you should see the GRUB boot screen,
(in this case Linux (on /dev/hda1)) is already selected so just hit ENTER/RETURN
Image-40
 

You will need to make your choice of Keyboard Layout, and Xorg or Xvesa once again.

When you get to the desktop, that is it done.

Next time you reboot, after selecting the partition to boot via GRUB you should go straight to the desktop.

I hope this will help clarify the procedure, for those new to linux. 

[BACK] Partitioning and Formatting Drive

Installing Puppy Linux (Full HDD Install)-Part II

Part 2. Partitioning and Formatting the drive.

Now for the main part of this howto.

Right click the desktop to get the menu up,
now go to System > GParted partition manager
Image-6

Next click to highlight where it says unallocated (where it is blue in the picture below)
Then click on New to create a new partition.

Note:
You may already have some partitions created from your previous install,
if so, then for the purpose of this Howto it is probably best to start from scratch.
So select them one at a time (starting with the bottom one) and click Delete.
Eventually you will be left with exactly what you see in the image below, this is the whole drive marked as "unallocated"
Image-7

You will get something similar to this:
Image-8

Make the partition to the size you wish, as you can see below, i left enough space for the SWAP partition.
For Filesystem you can choose either ext2 or ext3.

If you are wondering what the difference is between the Filesystems,
and would like to know more, please check out the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3


Image-9

Click on Add

Once again click to highlight unallocated, then New
Image-10

Now create the SWAP partition (be sure to select linux-swap as Filesystem)
Image-11

click on Add

Next click on Apply
Image-12

And again, click on Apply
Image-13

You will now see it Applying pending operations
Image-14

When it has finished, click on Close
Image-15

Now click to highlight /dev/hda1
then RIGHT click and select Manage Flags.
Image-16

Now click to select boot.
Image-17

when its ready click on Close.

Things should now look something like this.
Image-18

If so, you can now close GParted, we are finished with it.

[PREVIOUS] Booting to Desktop  [NEXT] Install Time

Installing Puppy Linux (Full HDD Install)-Part I

Part 1. Booting to the desktop.

OK then, put your Puppy LiveCD into a drive,
and REBOOT the PC.

It should automatically boot from the puppy LiveCD
If it does not, you may need to press F8 or F11 or similar when the PC
first boots, for the boot menu then select the drive that the CD is in.

The first thing you see will be this:
Image-1 

Next you will be asked to select the keyboard layout:
Image-2

Use the Up/Down arrows on the keyboard to make your choice then press ENTER/RETURN for OK

Next you will be asked to choose either Xorg or Xvesa, make your choice (try Xorg first, if that fails then use Xvesa):
Image-3

If you need to use Xvesa use the TAB key to make your selection then press ENTER/RETURN for OK

If you chose Xorg, you then need to select a screen resolution:
Select an appropriate resolution (you made a note earlier i hope) then press ENTER/RETURN for OK

Now test it:
Again, use the TAB key to select Test, then press ENTER/RETURN for OK

If it works, thats good, if it did not, then try with Xvesa
now do the linux three finger shuffle (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace)

If you chose Xvesa you will then see this:
Image-4

Select an appropriate resolution and click Change

When the desktop comes back up, along with the Xvesa video wizard click OKAY

You should now be at the desktop like this:
Image-5

[NEXT] Partitioning and Formatting the drive.