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Weekend Reads: Office Suites, Command Line Applications and ioQuake 3

Clair Ching — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:38:37 +0000

Eleven is Louder summarizes what office suites are available for us that are open souce software. Of course it has OpenOffice.org in the list. However, it reminds us that Lotus Symphony does exist and that there are other suites like the GNOME Office Suite as well as the KDE Office Suite. I’ve tried using the GNOME Office Suite before but for the sake of compatibility I am using OpenOffice.org especially because I have to collaborate with co-workers on documents. I know that OpenOffice.org is commonly included in various Linux distributions and this blog entry shows you that you have options. No need to feel stuck. Some people think that OpenOffice.org is way too clunky and annoying so other choices could possibly be better for them.

Another blog entry from Eleven is Louder is all about Command-Line Applications and it has an interesting list. It includes the following and more:

rtorrent – for torrent downloads
cdrtools – for burning CDs
cdparanoia – a CD ripper
oleo – a spreadsheet application (I am really amazed that there is one on the command line!)
zgv – a picture viewer with good svga support
hnb – a hierarchical notebook

The last read of the day comes from Tux Arena which talks about the complete guide to configure and customize ioQuake 3 in Linux. For those of you who love first person shooter games, this could be interesting to check out. I was never really into first person shooter games on the computer because I get dizzy just by looking at the screen. Those of you who are fans will appreciate this guide because it has the details on what to do so you could have new maps, weapons, character models, etc. This particular article has screenshots included for better visualization.

I hope you would enjoy these reads!

Post from: New Linux User

OpenOffice.org as an Outliner

Clair Ching — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:48:57 +0000

I was never a hardcore user of OpenOffice.org but I do need it from time to time because of the documents I need to write.

OpenOffice.org

There are a lot of people in my office who prefer to use it for everything. Although one thing I’ve noticed is that they just open it as if it’s any other text editor. But I don’t think they’ve seen it as an outliner before.

Dmitri Popov of Linux Magazine has shared tips for us on how to use OpenOffice.org as an outliner:

The easiest one is to press the Numbering On/Off button in the main toolbar or the F12 key. This turns the current line in the documents into a numbered entry and displays the Bullets and Numbering context toolbar which offers basic outlining tools.
….
Another approach requires a bit more work, but it allows you to use OpenOffice.org Writer as a two-pane outliner. This solution is based on the Outline Numbering feature which lets you specify a hierarchy of heading styles and then manage them using the Navigator. By default, OpenOffice.org Writer uses the built-in heading styles (i.e., Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) for each level, but you can easily change that using the Tools -> Outline Numbering dialog window.

Two options to help us use OpenOffice.org in a different way. I personally like outliners like emacs-org mode because it helps me organize my thoughts better. I also help write training materials so this is a great help to me.

For those of you who like making lists, check this out. These awesome tips might help you work better with an existing application instead of downloading a separate outliner.

Again, thanks to Dmitri Popov for the tips!

Post from: New Linux User

Open docx files in OpenOffice.org

Clair Ching — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:19:11 +0000

Have you been finding it a hassle to open docx files from your co-workers and/or clients? Ubuntu Geek helps us with this: Use the ODF Converter!

There’s a .deb package which you could download and install on your Debian-powered machines. Also, there’s an RPM file for SUSE.

Though the Novell RPM file is said to only work with the latest Novell version of OpenOffice.org, you might as well give it a try. The blog post on Ubuntu Tip also gave a way for Slackware users to convert from rpm to a Slackware tgz file:

Use alien to convert it to a Slackware tgz file:

fakeroot alien -ct odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm

Unpack the slackware tgz file:

tar xzf odf-converter-1.0.0.tgz

Copy three files into your OpenOffice.org directories — note that the usr that you’re copying from is a directory that was inside the tgz file.

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/

Restart OpenOffice.org and start opening those shared docx files
Thanks to Productive Linux for the link to Ubuntu Geek!

Post from: New Linux User