Notes from ODF Plugfest in Granada, Day One
The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to...
View ArticleFinal Notes from the ODF Plugfest in Granada
The second day of the Plugfest followed the same general scheme of the first one (covered in a separated page): a non-technical introduction followed by lots of hacking, feature analysis and product...
View ArticleHow to check if your email server looks like a spam source
Taking full control of your own email, that is running your own email server, is a must if you really care about privacy, security or maximum customization.
View ArticleHow to import multiple pictures into a text document with OpenOffice or...
This is a way to import multiple pictures into an empty text with OpenOffice Writer, one picture per page, with a database report. install the Sun Report Builder extension create a database in the same...
View ArticleHow to extract audio from a VOB file in Linux
A VOB (Video Object) file is a container for audio, video, subtitles and other content, normally used in DVDs. Here are two of the many possible ways to extract a song or other segment of audio from a...
View ArticleWhy and how the OpenDocument format can save you a lot of time!
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an internationally recognized open standard for digital office documents whose importance has also been acknowledged by Microsoft. ODF is good for a lot of reasons I...
View ArticleHow to automatically create OpenDocument invoices without OpenOffice
Articles on how to create OpenDocument invoices already exist but almost always they require you to start and use OpenOffice manually each time. Here, instead, I’ll show how to have your computer to do...
View ArticleWanted, Virtual Personal Email Servers
(update 2010/05/29: here’s another article about VPES legal, management and economics issues)The way email is normally used today has several serious limits that I recently explained in another...
View ArticleComments to, How to automatically create ODF invoices without OpenOffice
(Note: these are the comments appended to my original article, which I had to put in a separate page when I switched from Drupal to WordPress)Just came to your site…Just came to your site following a...
View ArticleComments to, Wanted, Virtual Personal Email Servers
These are the comments I got when I wrote Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers:(me:) Today this article was announced on LinuxToday and this is the first comment it got:
View ArticleHow to quickly apply color schemes to a spreadsheet with OpenOffice or...
How do you quickly create a spreadsheet where, for example, every other line has a background of a different color? Here are a couple of methods.The first one is faster (and works even in controlled...
View ArticleHow to generate and update ODF spreadsheets without OpenOffice
Sooner or later, many of us need to process some numeric data in plain text format, be they system logs or sales totals, and to generate reports and charts out of those data. Scripts and utilities like...
View ArticleVirtual Personal Email Servers, legal, management and economics issues
After I published Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers I got lots of feedback. This is an edited summary of a particularly interesting one, from John of JDPFu.com, reproduced with his permission. My...
View ArticleHow to make OpenDocument slideshows out of plain text files
Slideshows are extremely popular as presentation and educational tools, but have a couple of serious problems. The first is readability: let’s admit it, many slideshows are almost unusable. One of the...
View ArticleHow to support this website
How to support Free Software tips and tricks at Zona-M (or any other website!) Keeping up and running a good website, regularly adding original, useful and easy to use content, is a difficult task that...
View ArticleWhat would you like to do with Free Software?
Tell me and I may write about it Computers and software should make life easier and help us to save time (and money), not waste it. Many commercial programs are (or look) much more polished, complete...
View ArticleOpenOffice.org Conference 2010, preparing the next ten years
The OpenOffice.org conference celebrating the tenth birthday of OpenOffice.org started in Budapest yesterday morning. Here are some first notes from the field.
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Create OpenDocument invoices and other documents with Rexx
After my talk about ODF scripting at OOoCon 2010 I got,by another OOoCon speaker, Rony G. Flatscher another script for automatic generation of OpenDocument invoices, or any other ODF text with a fixed...
View ArticleGenerate OpenDocument spreadsheets from DB2 (or any other) database
DB2 pureXML is IBM software for management of XML data that eliminates much of the work typically involved in the management of XML data.The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an open international standard...
View ArticleHow to transform (almost) plain ASCII text to Lulu-ready PDF files, part 1
Many people write far more now that they are constantly online than in the pre-Internet age. Most of this activity is limited to Web or office-style publishing. People either write something that will...
View ArticleHow to transform (almost) plain ASCII text to Lulu-ready PDF files, part 3
This is the core script I used to transform a set of plain ASCII files with the Txt2tags markup in one print-ready PDF file. Part 1 of this tutorial explain why I chose txt2tags as source format and...
View ArticleHow to transform (almost) plain ASCII text to Lulu-ready PDF files, part 2
This page gives a general overview of a flow for transforming ASCII files in print-ready PDF books. The reasons for setting up such a flow in this way are explained in the first part of this tutorial.
View ArticleHow to automatically print or convert to PDF, MS Office or other formats...
The script and tricks in the ODF scripting section of this website show how to create office-ready texts, presentations and spreadsheets automatically, in the OpenDocument format, which is a worldwide...
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Create your Web database applications with DaDaBIK
Dadabik is Free Software that you can use (writing little or no code by hand!) to create PHP-based Web applications that even users with little previous experience can use to manage several types of...
View ArticleHelp request, why is my Linux so damn slow?
I’ve discovered Linux in 1995 and I have been using it as my only home/work operating system since then. I still love it and want to continue to use and promote it, but in the last 2⁄3 weeks it’s...
View ArticleUpdate on, Why is my Linux so damn slow?
About three weeks ago I became so fed up with the disgusting performances of my Fedora computer to make a public Help request: why is my Linux so damn slow?. I got plenty of help (90 comments to that...
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Flash/nVidia horrors, Gnome/KDE fights in my Fedora 14
. Just a few days after I had brought back my Fedora computer to life, the last updates in kernel, nVidia driver from RPMfusion and what not did to my Fedora 14 box (the same that was damn slow three...
View ArticleMCG, the eMail Configuration Generator for procmail and mutt
Many U*nix users with advanced email needs, a high load of email, and possibly a lot of addresses to keep separated, invariably come to procmail and to Mutt (but the MCG concept can be easily adapted...
View ArticleReview, Linux E-Mail,set up, maintain, and secure a small office e-mail server
(this is a review that i originally posted somewhere on Slashdot, IIRC)
View ArticleHow to post content to a Wordpress blog from the command line
Wordpress is a great publishing system, but managing it manually can be a very time consuming process. This is especially true when you want to upload lots of posts, or if you would like to write...
View ArticleHow to create stacked area graphs with Gnuplot
Gnuplot is a really great plotting utility, that can be used either interactively or automatically, from inside scripts of all sorts. However, sometimes it can be quite difficult to use simply because...
View ArticleHow to reject spam from certain countries (if you must really, really do it)?
Every now and then, a question like this pops up on some email server management forum: I'd like to be able to reject connections from remote IP addresses if they're from certain countries.
View ArticleDbmail? A great Open Source email system, especially for LAMP/MySql...
A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a...
View ArticleHow to automatically replace files when updating WordPress
WordPress is quick and easy to install and update, but the quicker you can make these operations the better, right? If you have shell access to the server where your WordPress copy is installed, it is...
View ArticleMajor gaps of Open Office Impress versus Microsoft Power Point, what do you...
Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.
View ArticleHow to download RSS feeds with a simple script
BackgroundRss is a wonderful system to get headlines of online news from many independent sources and browse them as quickly as possible, without subscribing to any website, giving away personal...
View ArticleTwo questions about (Free) software development, copyright assignment and...
update 2012/07/13: I have realized only today that from March 2012 Scratch is also available with a GPL v2 license.Recently there have been two separate discussions on two italian Free Software mailing...
View ArticleReview, The CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook
The CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook is a Packt Publishing title first published in April 2013. You can buy it in paper format (about 370 pages) or as an ePUB or PDF file (black and white only, whereas...
View ArticleReview, CentOS System Administration Essentials
I just finished to read a copy of “CentOS System Administration Essentials”, written by Andrew Mallett, which I got from the editor for review. Here is what I found.
View ArticleHow to restore a Drupal website too old for manual upgrades
Owners of websites that remained frozen for a year or more, because the _projects _they represent also were closed, or greatly slowed down their activity, face a big problem when those projects...
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Why can't Ubuntu 16.04 LTS shut down?
update 2016/07/01 6pm: SOLVED. Details here (but DO read anyway the whole post, because the cause of this problem on your computer may still be one of those below!)
View ArticleWhat is this website?
This is a website by M. Fioretti, freelance author specialized in Free as in Freedom software and digital rights issues, co-author of the Open Government book and board member of the Free Knowledge...
View ArticleHow to digitize a CD collection with Free Software
A few tips and tricks, from a thread in the Fedora Users mailing list, on how to “to digitize several hundred music CDs” under any Gnu/Linux distribution (read below WHY I put this post together).
View ArticleHow to recover a post that is not even in Google's cache anymore
Did you ever cancel by mistake a post on some website, only to find out that you had no other copy of it anywhere, not even in Google’s cache? I did. Here is how I recovered it.
View ArticleHugo: a GREAT website generator with a couple pieces missing
Static websites are great. Hugo is a really great static website generator. Except for a few things (some not even Hugo’s fault!).
View ArticleDNS glossary and tricks
Just a few notes on the purpose, structure of DNS, with some really basic configuration procedures and tricks for DNS on Linux
View ArticleFour ways to take DNS services in your hand and WHY do it
DNS is a complex system. What you have read so far is just the tip of… the tip of the iceberg. I hope it is enough, however, to help you decide if any of these “DNS hacks” could be useful for you, and...
View ArticleNextCloud 16 review
In May 2019, Linux Journal asked me to write a review and tutorial for NextCloud 16, and so I did. Then they shut down, so I decided to publish it here instead. Please use it!
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