OpenOffice.org is the reference office suite for the open source community, and its adoption has been increasing (see here and here, for example) thanks to its complete implementation of the standard ISO OpenDocument format and the good compatibility with commercial formats. OpenOffice.org offers the possibility of extending the functionality of the suite through extensions, which can be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org extensions website. A few extensions are very useful to authors and scientists: OOoLatex allows LaTeX equations to be inserted in your Writer and Presenter documents, without any limitation. The LaTeX installation of your system is used to compile the LaTeX source, and the equation is added to the document…

Alda Merini was a very prolific Italian writer and poet. You can read more about her on her website, wanted by her daughters to remind of her.

Happy holidays to everyone reading my blog! 😀

Today I’m stuck at home, since there are no buses and the university is closed due to inclement weather. In these pictures you can see how much snow it came in one night! 😯

Skype is provided pre-packaged for openSUSE for 32 bit systems. However the RPM can be used without difficulty also on 64 bit systems, since openSUSE transparently manages bi-architecture packages. Unfortunately the 32 bit RPM does not install all the dependencies it needs to work correctly, and you have to fix them by hand as follows: Install the skype rpm by typing in a root terminal: rpm -Uvh skype-2.1.0.47-suse.i586.rpm Open YaST software installer Search and select the following packages xorg-x11-libXv-32bit libqt4-32bit libqt4-x11-32bit Accept the additional dependencies proposed by the installer and proceed with the installation At this point, you should be able to run skype without any difficulty. Enjoy

The lastest version of openSUSE has just been released today. The list of updated packages can be found on DistroWatch. The release candidates of this release were extremely promising, and hopefully will be able to make me forget the bad experience had with openSUSE 11.1. I’ll try it during the next weekend, so, stay tuned In the meanwhile, you can get it yourself from the openSUSE software portal. Note: Users with nVidia cards can find the packaged drivers using this repository ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.2/ Enjoy 😀

Last week my DELL® XPS M1330 broke: all of a sudden I could only see a white screen with vertical lines, and soon after only a grey screen, without any boot activity. The problem was that the nVidia 8400M GS video card broke. I bought this laptop in Italy, and I have a 3 years on-site warranty which ensures the system is repaired within five days, but I thought it would have taken longer to repair it, since I’m not in Italy but in US. Well, I was wrong! I contacted DELL technical support on Wednesday evening, and after about 50 minutes of tests the problem was diagnosed and the…

Ekee is a graphical LaTeX equation editor that allows the typeset equations to be dragged and dropped to OpenOffice.org or saved as high quality images to be used in other word processors and presentation softwares. Packages for openSUSE 11.1 are available in my home repository on the openSUSE buildservice and soon they should be included in the science repository too. Enjoy 🙂

I have recently seen Home, a film about our planet and what is happening with climate change. I think it is worth to share, since it is very beautiful, independently of what our ideas on climate change are. You can also visit the YouTube channel, with additional videos and information.