Microsoft Office may be the dominant productivity suite in much of the computing world, but it's not for a lack of alternatives.

Two free and open source contenders have already achieved particularly widespread acclaim for their strength and usability--LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org--but this week saw the launch of a third.

Read the full thing at http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/253738/try_calligra_24_for_a_new_microsoft_office_alternative.html

After some discussions between the Mageia Council and the Packagers’ team, we’ve decided to make some changes to the Mageia 2 release schedule.

There are a couple of reasons for this, the main one being that we feel that the list of important bugs still remaining to be solved needs more time and attention before we release.

Read the full announcement at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2012/04/05/revised-release-schedule-for-mageia-2/

LibreOffice has breathed new life into the stagnated open source productivity suite. Under The Document Foundation it is moving ahead aggressively. We talked to Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder & Director, The Document Foundation, to understand the development process of LibreOffice, the current status and future plans.

Read the full thing at http://www.muktware.com/news/3509/libreoffice-online-will-be-real-competitor-microsoft-office-365

We the Cacti Group are proud to release the following:

Cacti 0.8.8
Spine 0.8.8

The Plugin Architecture is now part of the official Cacti release!

Full announcement: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=46926

This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users. I say contrary to popular belief because 'reverse tunneling' and tunneling http traffic through SSH can bypass firewalls and content filters. But this article isn't about how to violate your corporate internet use policy, it's about how to create SSH tunnels to make your life just a little bit easier.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ssh-tunneling-poor-techies-vpn

People ask me why on Earth would I subject myself to such dreadful text editor as vim. With it’s weird mode system, nonstandard keyboard shortcuts and all kinds of strange quirks it is not what you would call a user-friendly piece of software. Most users new to this particular editor hit a brick wall at step one: entering text. When you open vim and try to type into it will do strange things. It will mostly beep at you, or display some messages in the status bar but not type. Unless of course you happen to hit a vovel lie a or i or o, in which case it will suddenly come alive and let you type.

Read the full thing at http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/03/21/why-vim/

Only one and a half months till the final release of Mageia 2. A week ago we entered the version freeze and everybody is focused on fixing bugs.

All Mageia contributors have been working very hard and we are all anxious now to finalize this second version. We need your tests more than ever. Download it and enjoy!

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2012/03/15/mageia-2-beta-2-near-the-goal/

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has found some encouraging statistics on Ubuntu adoption for public-facing Web sites powered by Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Shuttleworth has taken a single data point and tried to suggest that it's an indicator that companies are choosing Ubuntu over Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for "enterprise computing." In reality, the stats from W3Techs about Web site usage are not a particularly useful tool for divining what companies are using for "large-scale enterprise workloads."

Read the full thing at https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/03/reality-check-on-ubuntus-enter.php

Gaming on Linux? A few years ago this would only be said as a joke. Thankfully for us, linux gaming has evolved offering some mature open source games, as well as some very nice commercial games. Let’s try and find out what are the best 10 games a linux gamer must play this year

Read the full thing at http://www.unixmen.com/10-must-play-linux-games-for-2012/

NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don't break out the champagne quite yet.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA2NzI