The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy is ready to unplug for the weekend. But before our resident blogger heads home, here are the nine most read channel partner news stories from our blog network — The VAR Guy, MSPmentor and Talkin’ Cloud — for the week ending January 6, 2012.

The “year in review” pieces that proliferate old and new media alike around this time of year get tedious pretty fast. But because I’ve yet to see a good compilation of the major developments — and there were plenty of them — that affected desktop Linux in 2011, I couldn’t think of any better topic for my last post of the month. That may make me a hypocrite, but if you can forgive a personal flaw, keep reading for a look at how the Linux world has evolved in the last 365 days or so.

It’s been nearly a month since I started testing the Teo Pro netbook, and the verdict is in: well-rounded, well-balanced and girlfriend-approved. What gives this machine such high marks? Read on for the full details …

Lest anyone complain that the free-software world doesn’t offer enough choices, there are now two major open source office suites vying for the hearts and minds of choosy end users. But since both of these products — OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice — derive from the same codebase, what actually sets them apart? Here we take a look at a few features unique to LibreOffice.

It would be great if all PDF files could be easily manipulated without relying on bloated, proprietary, update-obsessive applications (I’m looking at you, Adobe).  But the fact that that’s not the case doesn’t mean Ubuntu users are out of luck when it comes to editing PDFs.  Here’s a look at some of the PDF editors available for Linux, and how well they work.

This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade.

Stuart Crawford, a long-time IT consultant who is fluent in all things Microsoft, claims OpenOffice isn’t ready for business. The VAR Guy agrees with many of Crawford’s points — but our resident blogger sees a bigger problem with OpenOffice that Crawford failed to mention.

At first glance, Google Apps and Microsoft are the horses to beat in the online software suite race. But The VAR Guy remains preoccupied with a dark horse called Zoho, which just launched Writer 2.0 and continues to gain moment across multiple software as a service (SaaS) fronts.

I wanted to view the Wikipedia article on OpenOffice recently, so I googled ‘openoffice’, correctly assuming that the link I was looking for would be near the top of the results.  While doing this, I noticed that a Google query for OpenOffice also turns up a couple of paid ‘sponsored links’ on the right side of the screen leading to websites offering dubious downloads of what purports to be OpenOffice, or something close to it.  Here’s a screenshot:

It’s paper-writing time again, which means I’ve spent many long hours lately with OpenOffice Writer (for now, I’m still using version 2.4).  Writer is a great application and a useful tool for getting work done.  But there are some components that I continue to find endlessly frustrating, namely…

Is IBM gearing up to disrupt Microsoft Office? Apparently so. In fact, Big Blue is bringing Lotus Symphony 1.2 — an open source application suite — to the Mac. (Lotus Symphony already runs on Linux and Windows.) And IBM is recruiting channel partners to back Symphony. Here’s the scoop.

If you’re like me, your Ubuntu machine is on a network that is dominated by Windows machines. Fortunately, Ubuntu comes with some very easy and quick tweaks to help you get along nicely with your Windows counter parts. Here’s how.

Google vs. Microsoft is always a fun topic. Throw in open source software and Sun Microsystems, and the discussion gets even more fun. Apparently, Google is quietly offering Sun’s StarOffice to customers. That’s suite … er, sweet! StarOffice, the big brother to OpenOffice, will certainly benefit from the Google exposure. And in my experience, OpenOffice is a great, free, reliable replacement for about 95 percent of all Microsoft Office users.

Sorry for this belated post. Here is the final part of our five-part countdown, highlighting 50 trends and takeaways from the 2007 Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Oregon. Some of the items are closely related to earlier portions of the list. Here we go…

Here’s part two of our five-part countdown, highlighting 50 trends and takeaways from the 2007 Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Oregon. Items 40-31, with more to follow soon…

I’ve finally had a chance to run my Ubuntu PC from Dell. I can see why the systems aren’t quite ready for all users. But I’ve got to tell you, folks. It’s clear to me that Ubuntu will be able to serve a large segment of the consumer population. In fact, Ubuntu is better than Windows in at least five areas. Here they are.