When my faithful Linux machine silently died under my fingers, I knew I had a lot of work to do. I need a lot of different software and installing and configuring it takes quite some time. A job I'm particularly "fond" of is installing the cross compilers I need for my 4tH compiler. Yes, although I'm a dedicated Linux user, I create MS-DOS and MS-Windows packages as well.

Florian Effenberger is co-lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project. Our sister publication Linux-Community asked him how the deal between Sun and Oracle would affect OpenOffice.

"I fully intend to use everything I have learned thus far, and create the next generation of The Moon Books Project. It will be faster, easier to use, more professional and all around much more groovy! In the planning stages I have had the fortunate experience to find Packt Publishing.

"Mark Pilgrim is an important software freedom advocate, famous for his blog posts about switching from Mac OS X to GNU/Linux (nb Gruber’s reply) and from MovableType to WordPress. So I’m happy to see him championing web fonts, since this little feature of CSS3 that is going to ship in all major browsers this year hasn’t got enough press I think..."

New features include:

1) Gnome 2.26 desktop environment, which includes the following new features:

a) brasero, an all-in-one CD burning application.
b) Improved multi-monitor handling.

2) X.Org server 1.6,

"I use the Getting Things Done system to keep track of what I'm doing. It works very well for me. My personal stuff I keep track of in paper in a Filofax, but I have a lot more detail to track at work at York University, so I use text files. Here's my system..."

How (and why) the American secret services rely on Windows