Linux

Abiword is a powerful free cross-platform word processor program with the features most people need with the bloat and complexity of all the features few people ever use. The focus of the latest 2.8x version of Abiword is on improved collaboration features.

Here are some of the new features:

Improved Collaboration support

I've been running Ubuntu as my primary operating system since the Fall of 2007. I ran Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) as my primary OS while running Windows XP SP2 in a VirtualBox virtual machine running in seamless mode to use the Windows program I just could not live without. (Seamless mode displays the Windows desktop and the Ubuntu Gnome desktop at the same time making it look like both Linux and Windows programs are running on the same machine -- no switching between the virtual desktop and the real desktop.)

.CHM files are the "compiled HTML" files used for most Windows Help files. If you use Windows, they are easy to read. If you use Linux, it is not so easy. While there are several programs that will read and display CHM files, none of the work all that well for me. So I was very happy to discover CHM Reader for Firefox today.

I've posted about TrueCrypt before (here and here). Encryption software like TrueCrypt has become even more important with all the reports of stolen laptops full of private business data, not to mention new government powers to snoop into computers many governments around the world are giving themselves. Everyone needs a way to keep their (or their employer's) private data private.

Go-oo is a fork of the free Open Office office suite with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office formats and a number of other improvements and tweaks, including speeding up the startup time. That along makes this branch worth looking at for anyone already using Open Office.

* OpenXML / DOCX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .docx (MS Office 2007) import filter.
* OpenXML / XLSX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .xlsx (MS Office 2007) import filter.
* OpenXML / PPTX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .pptx (MS Office 2007) import filter.

AutoHotKey is one of the few windows programs I have really missed using Linux. While it had a lot of power, I used it mainly for its "hot string" abilities. I'd type =btw and AutoHotKey would replace "=btw" with "by the way." Linux didn't seem to have anything that could easily replace that feature of AutoHotKey. That was annoying, but I learned to live without it.

After waiting for just over a week to allow others to discover if there were any major issues upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04, I finally bit the bullet Tuesday afternoon and decided to upgrade my system to Hardy Heron. This was my first distribution upgrade since moving to Ubuntu last fall, so I will admit that I was a bit nervous as to how it would go.

I decided to upgrade by downloading a alternate install disk as I could download it via bittorrent and not add extra load to the distribution package servers for the standard packages.

Ever since I moved to Linux, I've been looking for a RSS reader that I like as much as Great News. I have finally found one that comes very close in Brief. Brief is a Firefox extension that adds a very simple, Great news-like feed reader to Firefox. It even stores the feeds locally for as long as you like, and just like Great News "as long as you like" can differ with each feed. It does not have some of the whiz-bang features of Great News, but if has most of the ones I regularly used.

From the Brief web description on addons.mozilla.org:

I posted about Truecrypt back in 2006 on the old version of this blog. A few days ago, Truecrypt version 5.0 was released with a number of nice improvements, including the ability to encrypt the boot drive. From the announcement:

Sometimes you just want to open or execute a file in a directory you use a lot. Opening a file manager, browsing to and opening the file and then closing the file manager is a lot of work if you have to do it often enough. The Menu File Browser Applet is an applet for the GNOME Panel. It lets put one or more directories of your choice on the GNOME Panel as menus. You can browse and open files in these directories (and their subdirectories) directly from the panel, without having to open a file manager.