Jason Brooks

OpenOffice.org 3.1 Is a Worthwhile Upgrade by Jason Brooks Calc Speed Increase Some of the most dramatic enhancements in OOo Version 3.1 involve the performance boosts that the project’s developers have managed to wring out of the suite’s spreadsheet component, Calc. In particular, the team addressed the so-called “Zaske Case.” Better Sorting Part I Another […]

It’s been less than a year since Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice.org hit its major 3.0 release, but the next version of the open-source, cross-platform-friendly productivity suite is already available, complete with a slate of feature enhancements and performance tweaks. After testing OpenOffice.org 3.1 on both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux systems, I found Version 3.1 a […]

Last month, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will include an XP Mode, which combines the company’s desktop and presentation virtualization technologies to serve up applications that won’t run properly on Windows 7 from a virtual XP SP3 instance. When I heard about XP Mode, I was immediately struck by the marketing benefits that the feature […]

Office 2007 SP2’s Full ODF Support Checks Out Well in Labs’ Tests Microsoft Update With the Microsoft Update option enabled, Windows Update offered to upgrade my Office 2007 installation to SP2. Tipping the Scales On another system, I downloaded the service pack, which weighed in at a considerable 290MB, from Microsoft’s site. Clicking Through the […]

‘Jaunty Jackalope’ Ubuntu 9.04 Sets Out to Conquer Cloud, Netbook Territory Exchange Support in Evolution Ubuntu’s GNOME 2.26 desktop environment brings with it support for Microsoft’s MAPI Exchange messaging protocol. Ext4 File System Jaunty includes Version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and offers support for the Ext4 file system as an option. New Notifications Ubuntu […]

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.04 hit the world’s FTP mirrors on April 23, bearing a modest collection of software updates and enhancements and an ambitious road map for expanding the popular Linux-based operating system’s reach. The new release, which is also known as Jaunty Jackalope, contains a technology preview edition of Eucalyptus, an open-source project out of […]

eWEEK Labs Puts CentOS 5.3 Through Its Paces by Jason Brooks Virtualization Focus Many of the enhancements in CentOS 5.3 focus on virtualization. Spartan Tool Set As with the Xen implementation that ships with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, CentOS offers a more Spartan feature set compared with purpose-built virtualization products such as VMware’s […]

CentOS, the popular community-supported clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, reached Version 5.3 in March, some three months after its parent distribution, RHEL 5.3, began shipping. CentOS is based on Red Hat’s freely available Enterprise Linux source packages. The CentOS project strips trademarked logos and other branding from the packages before building them into a […]

On April 20, weeks of speculation over a possible IBM-Sun Microsystems merger came to an end when Sun executives announced that it would indeed be acquired-by Oracle. As with the rumored IBM-Sun deal, the pending Sun and Oracle matchup will have a major impact on enterprise IT: Overlapping product lines will collide, and complementary technologies […]

Recently, I wrote about the need for Linux operating system providers to expand the range of ready-to-install applications available for their distributions by pooling their software packaging efforts, perhaps with the help of Novell’s OpenSUSE Build Service project. I was pleased to learn that the Linux Foundation, an industry consortium aimed at fostering the growth […]