LibreOffice History

Wow Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been far too long. I doesn't seem like a month ago since I last posted. Anyways, the show must go on.

What have the GuysOnFOSS been up to lately? Not too much actually. Individual projects rumble onwards, and the new semester has brought more schoolwork... For most of us.

Recently I switched my office suite from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Our readers will probably be familiar with the course of events which prompted the creation of LibreOffice, but if you missed it I will reiterate it here:

Sun Microsystems was the company which owned OpenOffice and it's closed source sibling StarOffice. When the data base giant Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, they also acquired StarOffice and OpenOffice, as well as OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris was killed and many feared that OpenOffice was going the same way. Fans of Sun were horrified. Oracle published this to the Sun Facebook page:

Hi, everyone! Just a quick heads-up: Now that the acquisition has gone through, we will be phasing out the Sun Facebook page over the coming weeks. Please join the official Oracle Facebook page to stay on top of Oracle/Sun-related news, connect with peers etc. Thanks!

Not surprisingly the comments went mostly like this:

"Do not want." -Jeff Dudley

"Im not joining Oracle anything... Sun Rulez. Oracle Sucks." -Anthony ' Alby' Williams

"PLEASE dont kill that name an Logo!! PLEASE!!!!! Im devasteted, its actually a part of my life just disappearing.Please!!!For have many years havent I stared at the beatiful blues and greys of SUN? Many! It allways felt so comforting, and now? BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! -Magnus Nystrom

The feeling of impending doom was so strong that several devs started "The Document Foundation" built from the code of OpenOffice. Origonally the plan was to include Oracle in the new buisness by contributing code back; however, Oracle wanted nothing to do with it and threatened to fire the devs. 33 devs left Oracle and in September 2010, LibreOffice was born.

Thats the story, it's a relevantly old story, but hey, we haven't posted in a couple months so just pretend we posted this in January and you missed it. Next time I'll go into what I've found so far with LibreOffice.

Until then,

-The Thoth-

A Quick Primer to SSH

A quick guide to SSH:

Have you been at work and think "Hey I can do this so much faster with x on my computer at home!" Well, SSH will solve your problem. SSH - Secure SHell - is a protocol for calling a remote system and controlling it via the shell. Designed in 1995, it has been put through the tests of time and now in version 2 it is one of the best ways of remote shell access.


"Wait. I want to use Firefox (or any other graphical program). This only gives me shell"

SSH offers x forwarding, enabling you to use programs with GUI.


"The Internet says that remote control is insecure"

SSH is secured by a public key system with a choice of another symmetric cipher (invoked by -c)


"Ok, it seems cool, how do I use it?"

Setting up the client is easy. For Linux and Mac users this is already built in. For Windows users, there are many clients available such as PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

Linux/Mac:

0. Make sure that you have an account on a remote system with SSHd running.
1. Open a shell session.
2. Type: ssh user@ip
(replace user with your username on the remote system and ip with remote ip)
3. It will prompt for a password, type it in
4. Use normally, but remember, you are in the remote system.


Windows:

0. Get PuTTY
1. Type in your credentials
2. Login!


For more info, use man ssh