LibreOffice 4. Best Alternative to MS Office.

 LibreOffice 4 is the most recent and stable version released of LibreOffice with new features and several important changes and updates. Its an office suite free to use and with source code availability. There is a large number of LibreOffice users across the world and its available for all leading platforms be it Windows, Linux, Mac. 




LibreOffice is considered among the tenchos, the best open source and free Office suite. Here's why. 

• Free and open source.
• Availability for over 30 languages.
• Stable since its been in development phase since 20 years. 
• Users involvement in its development and testing. 
• Simple to use and powerful user interface. 
• Easy import of office documents from MS Office, or OpenOffice. 

What's included in the LibreOffice 4 Suite: 

• Writer. Its a word processor. With features like auto-completion, auto-spelling check and auto formatting, its no less than its competitors in the market. Its powerful enough to handle desktop publishing and creating brochures and newsletters.

•  Calc. Analyzing data and presenting it to charts and pie diagrams is its main function. With the capability of importing data from Oracle, SQL databases, its much more powerful than you can think and with full documentation and help, you will not find it any difficult to work with it. 

• Impress. Its the fastest and easiest way of creating presentation. With a rich set of in built multimedia animation and effects will let you create something that's different and more attractive in comparison to MS Office. 

• Draw. Its a drawing tool. You can draw anything from a plane simple line diagram to 3D diagrams. its strength depends on the purpose of your use. 

• Base. Its the front end database tool which gives you the option of either integrating your existing database structures with LibreOffice components or creating a stand alone interface to the database.  Queries and Databases from Ms Access to SQL, PostgreSQL can be easily imported. Supports a wide range of Databases. Most of them are in-built. If not, they can easily be integrated. 

• Math. Its an equation editor used to create complex mathematical formulas in standard notations. 

So, you wanna give it a try? 

You can download LibreOffice versions according to your system, versions you want, and languages you are most friendly with. 

LibreOffice_4 Download. (Main website).
It comes with direct downloads, or through torrents. There is an option of downloading it as a portable software without the need to install.
If you are an existing MS Office user, giving it a try is not a bad idea.

Source Code:  You can download LibreOffice Source Code here. 

System Requirement:   
System requirements for Windows, Linux, Mac OS. 

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Is Linux completely virus free?

According to Wikipedia:

 A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another.

People working on Windows spend quite a money in buying and renewing anti-virus for their systems to remain protected. However, a not so sophisticated Linux user never really needs an anti-virus for the system. Why? What are the reasons that people consider Linux as virus free. Lets discuss.

Is Linux completely virus free? 

The answer is NO. Although there is no such threat as Microsoft Windows, but there are malwares found for Linux. There has been viruses, trojans, worms and other kinda malware like rootkit which has been detected and the number of these malwares has been rising in the past few years. 




Linux is Not Virus Free. Its more Immune to Viruses. 

• Small number of users. Linux is less widely used all across the world in comparison to windows. The groups or individuals behind the viruses and other malwares develops them with the aim of hitting maximum systems and causing maximum damages. Since, there are less Linux users and there are less Linux programmers, the number of such malwares is low. 

• Multi-user environment. Linux implements multi-user environment. That is, users are granted specific privileges only and to cause any serious damages to the system, malwares would have to get access to root account. 

• Open source. Linux is open source. The vulnerabilities are fixed very rapidly by programmers all over the world as soon as it is discovered. Chances are that when a virus is detected, it will be patched sooner than windows. 

Keeping all these in mind, we surely can say that "Lnux is more immune to virus and malwares". We cannot say that its completely virus free. However, an average user will never require any sort of anti-virus program to remain safe. There has been some attacks in the past like rootkit attacks, but they have been fixed. Enjoy your personal Linux experience without any worrying. Enjoy Linux. Enjoy open source. 

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Some basic Linux and Unix vi commands

The vi editor is a very powerful tool to edit text, programs in Linux / Unix. VI editor is the standard text editor for all the UNIX systems and is used extensively. Commands in vi editor are input from keyboard only and no switching to mouse is required. 

• Moving through the Text can be performed using Arrow keys. 

Basic Operation: Some Popular vi commands

• :q exits the editor
• :w saves the file
• :wq save the file and then exits
• :n moves to line n of a file
• x will delete the character on which the cursor is positioned
• n dw wil delete n characters to the right of the cursor
• n dd will delete n lines from the current position of the cursor
• :q! exits a file even if you have unsaved changes, can be referred as force exit
• :w newfile will save the text in editor to the newfile
• :wq! overrides read-only permission, only if you have access to change the read-only permission. Generally for root accounts. 
• yy will copy a block of text
• n p will paste it for n number of times
• :recover recovers a file from any unexpected interruption

Switching the editor to insert mode. 

• i to insert
• a to append
• o insert a blank line next to the cursor position and moves the cursor to that line

Learning all these commands is an easy job and any one using vi editor has to go through these all the times. If you are a Linux/UNIX newbie, these are must to get used to. 

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Some interesting facts about Linux

Well, if you are a Linux user, you must be familiar with these points. These interesting facts about Linux may seem obvious to you but for beginner these must be known. 

• All files are case sensitive. In Linux unlike windows, all files are case sensitive. File, FILE, FiLe or file are completely different things in Linux. 
• etc/folder and etc/Folder are different too. Don't get messed with these case sensitive things. 

• Everything is a file. In Linux, everything is a file. A directory is a special kind of file which stores more files, but its still a file. Anything from a terminal windows to a hard disk partition, everything in Linux is represented as a file in file system. 

• file types. The file utility determines the file type. Linux doesn't care about the extension to determine the file types. The editor will treat a file of either a .doc or .txt extension as same and don't even care about it. As a system administrator, you can use the file command to determine the file type. 
• file pic33.png
• pic33.png: PNG image data, 3840 x 1200, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
• file /etc/pass
• /etc/pass: ASCII text

If you have any other basic yet useful Linux thing in your mind, just share it up in comments. They will be our next posts with your name as contributor. :) 

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Drupal: Open source Content Management

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

According to wikipedia: Drupal is a free and open-source content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

Standard Release and its Features.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

Drupal Core's main feature includes:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search
• Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance
• Descriptive URLs
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• OpenID support
• RSS feed and feed aggregator
• Security and new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (triggers and actions)

Drupal is now developed by a community, and its popularity is growing rapidly. From July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year. As of December 2012, more than 808 000 sites are using Drupal. These include hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media & publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. Drupal also won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100 three times in a row.

                          

Future of Drupal

Drupal is playing an important role beyond its traditional base of small companies, government and non-profit organizations. It has also hit — and hit hard — with the larger organizations of the world. Drupal growth is clear, along with the disruption it is causing for Enterprise CMS. That could be one of the reasons for the growth in its activity.

                             

                                  

         

Conclusion

Drupal’s growth is steady, well-sustained and on the right track to continue disrupting the small, medium and Enterprise CMS world, its future is potentially bright to a good extent.

                                   

The Drupal mantra, “Come for the software, stay for the community,” is really true in all senses. Once you join a Drupal camp or conference you can really see what is underneath that software — an unbelievable ecosystem.

Startups, small and medium companies deploying a few or several sites using Drupal are excellent situations for this platform success. Large deployments of Drupal sites by global corporations, up to hundreds of websites for a single company, are the key to bringing Drupal to the next level and establishing it, once and for all, as the leader in the enterprise world. Future is RestFull. Future is Bright.

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Python Application Domain areas

You may like to read  Python: Introduction and features first.

Python as a programming language is clean and fast. It is new enough to be well designed and high-level. It is mature enough to be very useful and well-behaved. Coding in Python is easy, fun and going fast. The code volume you need to get something done is usually much less than in other programming languages (and this is not just about typing stuff, having less code means also less bugs, less maintenance costs). You can easily debug code. You can try code in the interactive interpreter. No need to compile the code, just run it. However, there are some lacking features in python like Python lacks popular high-level concurrency support. There is no high level interprocess communication library, no lightweight processes, no transactional memory etc. Python also lacks a macro or similar facility. Despite these flaws, python is an practical language for getting work done in a timely manner and having a maintainable codebase when finished.


Application Domains

Serving the Web using Python

Python offers a wide range of choices for web development:

• Writing basic CGI scripts.
• Frameworks such as Django and TurboGears.
• High-end solutions such as Zope.
• Advanced content management systems such as Plone.

For custom web solutions and other internet-based applications:

• Extensive support for HTML and XML.
• E-mail processing.
• Processing RSS feeds.
• Support for many other Internet protocols.

Database Access

• Custom and ODBC interfaces to MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SybODBC, and others are available for free download.
• Standard Database API.
• Object databases such as ZODB and Durus.

Desktop GUIs

• The Tk GUI development library is included with most binary distributions for Python.
• wxWidgets
• GTK+
• Qt via pyqt or pyside
• Microsoft Foundation Classes through the win32 extensions
• Delphi

Scientific and Numeric

• Python is widely used in scientific and numeric computing:

Bioinformatics

• Python course in Bioinformatics
• Physics

Network Programming

• In addition to the web and internet support described above, Python also provides support for lower level network programming:

Easy-to-use socket interface.

• Twisted Python, a framework for asynchronous network programming.

Python is often used as a support language for software developers, for build control and management, testing, and in many other ways.

SCons for build control.

• Buildbot and Apache Gump for automated continuous compilation and testing.
• Roundup or Trac for bug tracking and project management.
• Roster of Integrated Development Environments.

Game Development

• PyGame and PyKyra are two of the game frameworks available for Python.

References: 

• Python official website
• Wikipedia

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Python Open source programming language

Introduction 

Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. Learning to use Python can result in immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs.

Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and has been ported to the Java and .NET virtual machines.

Python is free to use, even for commercial products, because of its OSI-approved open source license.

Python is a remarkably powerful dynamic programming language that is used in a wide variety of application domains. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Ruby, Scheme or Java. Some of its key distinguishing features include:

• clear and easy to read syntax
• easier debugging
• object oriented programming language 
• modular programming language
• supports exception handling
• very high level dynamic data types 
• extensive standard libraries and third party modules for virtually every task 
• extensions and modules easily written in C, C++ (or Java for Jython, or .NET languages for IronPython) 
• embeddable within applications as a scripting interface 

Python is powerful... and fast

Python lets you write the code you need, quickly. And, thanks to a highly optimized byte compiler and support libraries, Python code runs more than fast enough for most applications. The traditional implementation of CPython uses a bytecode virtual machine; PyPy supports just-in-time (JIT) compilation to machine code. Also, Jython and IronPython (see below) support JIT compilation on their respective virtual machine implementations.

Python plays well with others

• Python can integrate with COM, .NET, and CORBA objects. 

• For Java libraries, use Jython, an implementation of Python for the Java Virtual Machine. 

• For .NET, try IronPython , Microsoft's new implementation of Python for .NET, or Python for .NET. 

• Python is also supported for the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) and many other integration technologies. 

Python runs everywhere 

Python is available for all major operating systems: Windows, Linux/Unix, OS/2, Mac, Amiga, among others. There are even versions that run on .NET and the Java virtual machine.


Python is friendly... and easy to learn

Python comes with complete documentation, both integrated into the language and as separate web pages. Online tutorials target both the seasoned programmer and the newcomer. All are designed to make you productive quickly. The availability of first-rate books completes the learning package.

Python is Open

The Python implementation is under an open source license that makes it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use. The Python license is administered by the Python Software Foundation.


Development environments

Most Python implementations (including CPython) can function as a command line interpreter, for which the user enters statements sequentially and receives the results immediately. In short, Python acts as a shell.

Other shells add capabilities beyond those in the basic interpreter, including IDLE and IPython. While generally following the visual style of the Python shell, they implement features like auto-completion, retention of session state, and syntax highlighting.

In addition to standard desktop Python IDEs (integrated development environments), there are also browser-based IDEs, Sage, (intended for developing science and math-related Python programs), and a hosted IDE, pythonAnywhere.

You can read the next part Python application domains in real world.

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