When I started to use SuSE, GNOME was a second class citizen in the distribution, with very limited support and limited attention from the developers. After the creation of the openSUSE project, things changed positively in different ways, and I think the openSUSE community should consider the GNOME team and the way it grew and make the community grew around it as a model. I will sum up its history, for those that do not know it or just started to take part to the openSUSE community recently. When the openSUSE project was started, only a few developers were involved in GNOME for what concerns openSUSE, and the quality of…
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Compact fluorescent lamp bulbs
I had to replace some lamp bulbs at home, and while buying them, I found out that the price of compact fluorescent bulbs went down quite a bit compared to some year ago. With six dollars I bough four compact fluorescent lamps producing 1600 lumens each, with a power consumption of 23 Watts, compared to the 100 Watts required by a normal incandescent lamp to produce the same light. The quality of the light is good, very similar to the light produced by incandescent lamps. If the energy saving effect is summed up to the longer life cycle of these lamps (one lamp is supposed to last for 9 years,…
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OpenOffice 3.0
OpenOffice 3.0 has been released since a while, with a new set of very interesting functionalities like ODF 1.2 support, Mac Os X support, Microsoft Office 2007 OOXML import filters, new collaboration features, PDF/A support, and a lot more. OpenOffice 3.0 can be installed on openSUSE 11.0 directly from the openSUSE Build Service. You simply need to add the OpenOffice:Stable repository to your installations sources with: zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/OpenOffice.org:/STABLE/openSUSE_11.0/ OpenOffice:Stable and then open YaST -> Software -> Software management, search for “openoffice”, and update all the OpenOffice installed packages by clicking on them, and by selecting the appropriate option when conflicts appear. Extensions to the base OpenOffice 3 installation can…