Daily Archives: Saturday, January 12, 2013

  • LibreOffice 4.0.0 RC1 available for download

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoToday the first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been made available for download for evaluation, quality assurance (QA) testing and the like.

    The developers do nevertheless stress that they do not recommend the use of LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. Information about QA testing can be found on the LibreOffice QA testers page.

    The developers also suggest reading the release notes.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice meets all your office suite needs

    If you’re interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development, check out the nightly builds. However, these are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and not QA-approved in any way. Caveat emptor.

    To download LibreOffice 4.0.0.0 RC1 visit the pre-release page. To download the right package for your particular system, you’ll need to select the right package from the two dropdown lists on the page; there is an automatic detection system to help, but this might not work in all cases. The release candidate is available for GNU/Linux (rpm and deb-based package management systems), Mac OS X (both Intel and PowerPC versions) and Windows.

  • More dodgy spam comment script coding

    Steve WoodsTech

    I’ve blogged in the past about blog comment spam (posts passim).

    Today another badly coded spam comment script misfired, leaving the comment below in the moderation cue:

    I Live THESE {fendi moncler bag|moncler mens clothing|moncler gamme bleu jacket|moncler paris boutique|moncler lucie jacket|moncler 2011 collection|moncler jacket women 2012|men moncler hats|moncler ski|moncler boots uk!!!

    Leaving aside the abysmal English – ‘live’ instead of ‘love’ – can you spot where the coding error? That’s right! The missing curly bracket at the end. As Homer Simpson would say: “Doh!”

  • Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    the LibreOffice logo
    The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the northern Greek Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki is in the process of installing the cross-platform LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

    According to the press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

    It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money (and getting increasingly shorter thereof in many cases. Ed.), to say the least, this is a very smart move.

    GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.