Ever since I first starting using Linux seriously 16 years ago, KDE has always been my preferred desktop environment.
I’ve dabbled with GNOME and other desktops, but always come back to KDE for usability, customisability and good looks.
Now known as Plasma, the KDE desktop will soon be reaching the release of its 5.21 version.
Below is a sneak preview of what can be expected when the new version is released, together with a tribute at the end to Gustavo Carneiro. a KDE developer who unfortunately passed away from Covid-19 in January and whose work concentrated on KDE’s Konsole terminal emulator.
This 5.21 release of Plasma is dedicated to Gustavo’s memory.
Today The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, celebrates its 9th birthday.
On 17th February 2012 The Document Foundation was registered in Berlin as a German charitable foundation (Stiftung).
TDF had been created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, partially out of fears that Oracle Corporation would cease development of OpenOffice.org after its takeover of Sun Microsystems, the custodians of the OpenOffice.org project. The original OpenOffice.org project is now curated by the Apache Software Foundation.
The TDF’s goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support in a development environment free from control by an individual company.
This goal has been achieved too. LibreOffice is now on release version 7.1, is included as the standard office suite in many GNU/Linux distributions and been downloaded millions of times.
GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a great free and open source graphics creation and editing suite suite, which comes as part of the standard software installation package for many GNU/Linux distributions, although it is also available for other operating systems.
My main use for GIMP is for dealing with graphics containing text in files submitted for translation, as well as tweaking digital photographs.
Nevertheless, every now and again the urge strikes me to learn a bit more to make the most of the software installed on my systems.
If, like me, you have ever wondered how to add a speech bubble to an image using GIMP, help is at hand in the form of the handy video tutorial below.
Now you too know how to put words into other people’s mouths . 😀
Occasionally in recent weeks, this blog has provided information on keyboard shortcuts for unusual characters (unusual for English that is. Ed.) on a Linux keyboard.
The last of these took the umlaut (diaresis) as its subject (posts passim).
German road sign for Schloßstraße in Erfurt
Today, attention turns once again to German and the s key, which can produce two characters, depending upon the combination of keystrokes.
Depressing the AltGr key and s produces “ß“, the German sharp s or esszett, usually transcribed in English as ss.
The other character that can be produced is “§“, which can be produced with the AltGr, Shift and s keys.
Known as the Section sign, it is believed to originate from the Latin signum sectionis, meaning section sign and usually turns up in with reference to legal documents.
Where more than one section of a legal text is involved, the sign is repeated, i.e §§.
Some weeks ago, I blogged about the keyboard shortcut for guillemets – French quotation marks – on a Linux keyboard (posts passim).
My attention in this post is on the German umlaut, also known as diaresis (or in French as a trema. Ed.) the two dots placed over a vowel modifying its pronunciation.
Once again, one could always use the character map to insert a specific vowel with an umlaut.
KCharselect with an upper case A umlaut selected
However, the keyboard shortcut is much quicker.
To produce the letter a with an umlaut – “ä“, follow these steps.
Depress AltGr key and the left-hand square bracket “[” followed by “a“.
The AltGr and left-hand bracket symbol plus the vowel of your choice will give you that character plus an umlaut.
For the upper case version, I find the easiest way to avoid knotting your fingers is to turn on the CapsLock key before the AltGr key and the left-hand square bracket “[” plus vowel sequence.
Yesterday The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the release of LibreOffice 6.2, a significant major release of the free and open source office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface – based on the MUFFIN concept – and provides user experience options to meet all users’ preferences.
The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual versions. Each one has a different approach to the menu layout and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from suites such as MS Office and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.
The design community has also made substantial changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga.
LibreOffice 6.2 new and improved features
The help system offers faster filtering of index keywords, highlighting search terms as they are typed and displaying results based on the selected module.
Context menus have been tidied up, to be more consistent across the different components in the suite.
Change tracking performances have been dramatically improved, especially in large documents.
In Writer, it is now possible to copy spreadsheet data into tables instead of just inserting them as objects.
In Calc it is now possible to do multivariate regression analysis using the regression tool. In addition, many more statistical measures are now available in the analysis output and the new REGEX function has been added, to match text against a regular expression and optionally replace it.
In Impress and Draw the motion path of animations can now be modified by dragging its control points. In addition, a couple of text-related drawing styles have been added, as well as a Format Table submenu in Draw.
LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite, includes many improvements too. On mobile devices, the user interface has been simplified, with better responsiveness and updates to the on-screen keyboard.
As with every major and minor release of LibreOffice, interoperability with proprietary file formats has also been improved for better compatibility with Office documents, including old versions which have been dropped by Microsoft. The focus has been on charts, animations and document security features. To assist with interoperability, LibreOffice 6.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project.
LibreOffice 6.2’s new features have been developed by a large community of contributors: 74% of commits are from developers employed by companies on the TDF’s the Advisory Board, such as Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as the City of Munich. Individual volunteers account for 26% of commits.
In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing the help pages and documentation.
LibreOffice 6.1.5 for commercial deployments
The Document Foundation has also released LibreOffice 6.1.5, a more mature version which includes some months of back-ported fixes and is better suited for commercial deployments, where features are less important as individual productivity is the main objective.
Companies wishing to deploy LibreOffice are advised to seek assistance for such matters as software support, migrations and training from qualified professionals.
LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organisations.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are encouraged to support The Document Foundation with a donation.
My first experiences of computing took place before the widespread use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
Consequently, I use a lot of keyboard* shortcuts.
These can also be used to create individual characters and, if known, represent an alternative such as using a visual character map, such as KCharSelect, the character map on the KDE desktop environment on my Linux machines.
KCharselect with the left-hand guillemet selected
So what’s the keyboard shortcut alternative for French quotation marks?
On Linux, most special characters can be inserted into a text editor or office package using the AltGr key plus one or two other keystrokes. If you have the patience to learn them, they can save a lot of time.
For the left guillemet, AltGr+z produces «.
For the right guillemet, AltGr+x produces ».
As you can see, it’s a lot quicker than using a GUI-based alternative.
* = I’ve always used a standard EN-GB keyboard layout.
The first bug hunting session for the forthcoming LibreOffice 6.1 release will be held on Friday, 27th April, The Document Foundation blog has announced.
LibreOffice 6.1, the next point release of the free and open source office suite which emphasises the use of open standards, such as the Open Document Format (ODF), is due to be made available in August this year.
To help ready the software for its release date, the LibreOffice Quality Assurance community is organising an initial bug hunting session this Friday to find, report and triage bugs. Details of the event can be found on the dedicated wiki page.
This first Bug Hunting Session will involve the first Alpha version of LibreOffice 6.1, which will be available on the pre-releases server on the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM package formats), macOS and Windows. Users will be able to run the Alpha release in parallel with their production version – thus enabling testing without affecting users’ existing stable installations.
According to the release plan, the LibreOffice 6.1 office suite will enter beta stages of development at the end May, with a second beta planned for mid-June. After that, there should be about three RCs released between the first week of July and the first week of August with the final release being available in mid-August.
On Thursday, The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source Libreoffice productivity suite, announced the release of LibreOffice 6.0.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 6 family.
Compared to the previous release, LibreOffice 6.0.3 around 70 bug and regression fixes.
LibreOffice 6.0.3 represents the bleeding edge in terms of features and as such is targeted at early adopters, tech-savvy and power users, while LibreOffice 5.4.6 – provided as an alternative download option – is targeted at more conservative mainstream users and enterprise deployments.
As per usual, technical details about LibreOffice 6.0.3 bug and regression fixes can be found in the change logs for RC1 and RC2.
Professional support
TDF advises mainstream users and companies to deploy LibreOffice with the support of certified developers, migrators and trainers.
Several companies on TDF’s Advisory Board provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migration and training.
Donate to help LibreOffice development
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge and fund attendance at events like LibreOffice Conference, which this year takes place in Tirana.
During my first visits to France in my teens one frequently saw blue-enamelled signs mounted on gates and walls and bearing the words “Chien méchant“, the French equivalent of “Beware of the dog“. However, we used to translate it literally and, as the only other creature we’d come across which could also be described as “méchant” (= naughty*) was children, we settled on “naughty dog” as the accepted definition or translation and had a good chuckle. However, as time progressed and language studies reached higher levels, one gradually came to realise that literal translation is often unreliable, as exemplified by our French four-legged friends.
The classic French “Chien méchant” sign from yesteryear
Yesterday afternoon in Sainte Marine when out walking with my sister we came across the sign below.
The alleged four-legged friend to which the sign refers is clearly a canine which has strayed well beyond being merely “méchant“, is clearly mentally unstable and would – if human and resident in England and Wales – be admitted to hospital against its will under the Mental Health Act.
However, for we open source enthusiasts, “mad dog” – or in this case “maddog” – has other connotations. “Maddog” is the nickname of programmer Jon Hall, the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organisation established by computer professionals with the aim of supporting and promoting Linux-based operating systems.
Finally, any mention of mad dogs by an Englishman would be incomplete without a passing nod to Noel Coward, so here it is. 😀
* = With enhanced vocabulary knowledge one subsequently became aware of other meanings of “méchant“, such as nasty or spiteful, which although laden with anthropomorphism are particularly pertinent to dogs and their bite. 😀
Today 
