I INSTALLED the first beta version of Ubuntu 12.04 – otherwise known as Precise Pangolin – to check out some of the new features the upcoming release would have.
Among the most eagerly anticipated features, the heads-up display, makes its debut in Precise. The HUD is supposed to eventually replace the traditional menu system by guessing the command you want to issue based on the first few letters you type into a search box. In the beta version, you can call up the HUD by hitting the Alt key.
THE MacBook Air is a cool machine out of the box, but a few tweaks can get it working even better to suit your needs. Here are some that I’ve used on my notebook.
LIBREOFFICE, the free and open source productivity suite, is a boon to companies that want to save on software licenses and still get lots of work done.
For years, I’ve been using the program and its predecessor, OpenOffice.org, as a drop-in replacement for MS Office on three platforms – Windows, the Mac and Linux – and have had few reasons to complain.
The latest release, Version 3.5, features a major overhaul of the underlying code that has made the program more efficient and more responsive. Last week, I wrote about some of the new features in LibreOffice 3.5; this week, I’ll offer a few tips to make the most of three of its five core programs – Writer (for word processing), Calc (for spreadsheets) and Impress (for presentations). As I do not use Draw (vector graphics) and Base (database) extensively, I will save these for another time.
ONE of the bugs I’ve found with the new version of LibreOffice is that the Recent Documents entry in the File menu doesn’t work. Fortunately, I found a solution online that worked for me–at least in the Ubuntu version of the program.
THE exciting news last week was the release of LibreOffice 3.5, the latest version of the free and open source office productivity suite.
Like the OpenOffice project from which it sprang, LibreOffice is a completely free suite of applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. Versions are available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X and Linux. On Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora and openSUSE, LibreOffice is automatically installed.
VERSION 2.0 of the versatile, multi-platform media player, VLC, has been released, featuring faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs.
TOM’S Hardware has come out with a head-to-head comparison of Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7, running both operating systems through a battery of 19 tests in six categories (Start and Stop, File Copy, Archiving, Multimedia, System and Gaming). The results are surprising.
ALTHOUGH my main computer is a Linux box, I recently found myself setting up a couple of Windows 7 PCs. Outside of the usual free, must-have applications, I’ve settled on a small toolbox of seven free utilities that I like to install on every Windows computer I prep.
To more efficiently install all the usual goodies – Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC Media Player, Gimp, Dropbox, AVG Free and Skype, to name a few – I turn to the first tool, Ninite, a utility that automates the process of downloading and installing software.
