One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject.

Writer is, without a doubt, the most frequently used application in the OpenOffice.org suite. It offers many advanced features that can help you to create anything from a simple letter to a book with a complex layout. But, as with any powerful application, you often have to dig deep in order to get the most out of Writer.

Freebsd is really a great distro. FreeBsd can be also considered the mother or father of all the other BSD derivatives you can find over at Distrowatch. Classified as the unknown giant among free operating systems, Freebsd 8, which was recently released, is really a great and stable operating system.

Continuing the series of trying to come up with reasons for choosing an operating system, FreeBSD will be discussed. Although FreeBSD is not Linux, it is Unix-like, nonetheless. I have never used FreeBSD and all things discussed here are second-hand knowledge.

My first exposure to Unix was ULTRIX from the Digital Equipment Corporation, a former employer. ULTRIX was Digital's version of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, Unix) that ran on VAX computers. FreeBSD, also descended from BSD, is a robust operating system for x86 and other architectures.

As was mentioned in last Friday's article, Which Is Faster: Debian Linux or FreeBSD, tests of FreeBSD atop the ZFS file-system (rather than UFS2+S) are currently underway and those results are expected to be published in full later this week as the ZFS disk performance is compared directly to UFS2+S, UFS2+J, and also Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems.

The purpose of this section is to provide the reader with a 5 minute review of Writer’s most used aspects to get you going as quickly as possible. The Writer area is simply where you will perform most of the real work in creating a document. Writer provides help for the user in intuitive icons on the toolbars.

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well. I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

The Introduction says the goal of the book is “to help you improve your understanding of device drivers under FreeBSD”. OK, that is exactly what I wanted to do as I am currently working on several projects that use FreeBSD at deeper levels of understanding.