Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Working as I do in a Microsoft Windows-centric IT department has its challenges. None of them technical. Many years of installing and reinstalling Microsoft operating systems and the multitude of other software, patches, updates, workarounds and fixes has become second nature. So much so that I often have waking nightmares involving Office 2007, docx, Eu-fu!*ing-dora, MS-SQL, MSDE, Visual Studio, Service Pack 3, Genuine Advantage and Outlookpst files. When I say not technical, I mean it, all this stuff is just knowledge. When to click, Next, OK or Cancel.

Help! Help! I have purchased a HPC5280 printer and cannot get the following. A Scan program for scan to computer, a Disc Labeler Program. I asked at the retail outlet and was assured that it would work with Linux, and it does as a printer but that is all.

You Got ME Matthew, I don't how long I spent trying to close that window!!!!!!

Gnome fanatics should read no further. (If they have a point, it escapes me.) The release of KOffice 2.0.0 is expected next year. The developers are aiming for cross-platform use and are challenging the dominance of the (free open source ?) office software with no legal name. KWord, evidently, has already run on Windows.

Yours truly has been (and is continuing to be) instrumental in setting up a site for KOffice users. Help of any kind is welcome.

Others may be unaware of this topical issue mentioned on a few forums and a mailing list I happened to visit. See NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.

I signed the petition some weeks ago and in the last few days received an email. I believe I'm not breach of any understanding of confidentiality by quoting from it:

Thanks for signing the NoOOXML petition. 143 Aussies signed the petition so far, pretty good showing, though I think over a thousand people signed in Portugal.

A small group, including my troublesome self, is discussing the formation of "The OpenOffice.org Community' Website" along the lines of The Star Office Users' Portal. The site will serve as a portal but also include a forum and other services. The idea for the project emerged out of a very long thread discussing ways of dealing with some shortcomings of the present, main, English forum for OOo users.

The project will require as much support as it can raise.

After loosing our meeting place with the departure of David Chapman we have not had a meeting of members.

I have been negotiating with the Park Beach Bowng Club and we have been offered a good size, fully air conditioned room with tables, chairs, Phone outlets, TV monitor, White board etc.

The use of these rooms are not restricted to any set time period and may be considered permenant.

I beleive that Matthew is calling a meeting at the Bowling Club so that members can have a look and make a decision. We can have a couple of meets there before we commit.

Personally, I can not see where we would get better for free.

Anybody who's ever seen my desk will not have seen my desk. Rather they will have seen the thick blanket of todo lists which completely cover it. A couple of weeks ago I resolved to do something about this, and installed Tomboy.

Tomboy is a desktop note-taker which incorporates a lot of the features of a wiki, with the additional responsiveness that comes from being a local rather than web-based application.  Linux.com has a review of Tomboy including a feature wish-list to which I have one addition: storage or at least synchronisation of data on a remote machine. Tomboy is designed for managing for the sort of information that you don't want to have to leave at home. If you could keep your notes online, possibly even with an auxilliary web-based interface, this would be a really cool little app.

What is a File Format?

A file format is essentially the set of rules for turning information into zeroes and ones and vice versa.

See Wikipedia's article on file formats.

Proprietary Formats

A proprietary file  format is one where this set of rules is not freely useable by everybody, for one or more reasons such as:

• Trade Secrets
• Software Patents
• DRM/DMCA

Document FormatsRecommended

• ASCII/Unicode text. Most applications will have an option for saving files as "plain text"; some will allow you to specify the character encoding used. ASCII is the oldest, simplest, and most widely supported (which is why it is the standard used by Project Gutenberg), although it's support for languages other than English is minimal. Unicode is a set of different plaint text character encodings designed to address this issue. ISO 8859 is another often-used character encoding that is generally considered to have been superceded by Unicode. Document formats which are based on plain text, such as SGML and XML document types, by necessity use one of these character encodings. UTF-8 appears to be the Unicode variant recommended for most purposes (anybody disagree?).
• PDF. An open standard developed by Adobe Systems. It's often called "Adobe Acrobat format", which creates the misleading impression that proprietary software is required to use it, so please avoid that term. Where in the past it would have been possible to recommend the use of PDF without reservation, it appears that Adobe is up to something with regards to licensing either non-standard extensions to PDF, or ideas in the standard PDF specification which may or may not be covered by patents.