Calligra team has announced the 1st ever stable release of Calligra suit formerly known as KOffice. It is combination of office suite, graphic apps and management app. There are many improvements over time and the transition was made in the mean time from KOffice to focus on a separate product. There are two touch computing apps for mobile platforms. Calligra mobile and Calligra active are added to this suite, which itself are useful tools. It is light weight and goes easy on system resources. Complete apps are listed below,

Office applications:

• Calligra Words – Word processor
• Calligra Sheets – Spreadsheet app
• Calligra Stage – Presentation app
• Calligra Flow – Flowcharts and Diagram app
• Braindump – Note taking app
• Kexi – Visual database creator

Graphics applications:

• Krita – Drawing app
• Karbon – Vector graphic app

Management applications:

• Calligra Plan – Project management app

Mobile applications:

• Calligra Mobile – Nokia N900 smart phone
• Calligra Active – targeted for plasma active devices

Read detail announcement here.

If you are on openSUSE, installation will be quite easy. Just open terminal and become root by su - , type:

zypper in calligra calligra-braindump calligra-flow calligra-karbon calligra-kexi calligra-krita calligra-kthesaurus calligra-plan calligra-sheets calligra-stage calligra-words

That’s it, use it, explore it and then review it.

When we talk about Linux, comes to mind that there are many ways to go around with many stuff. Like to be more specific we can install skype through many ways. The way which i will show today is may be not different but will be easy and at the end you will have skype running. As we know, there are always errors like segmentation fault, skype cannot run etc etc. To avoid all these hazels, lets go through a very easy and step by step method. 1st download skype rpm from skype website, choose openSUSE 11+.

Now create a directory on your hard drive(anywhere) which you think is safe(means, directory to be there after new installation(OS) in case you don’t want to download it again). I put it in my backup drive,  /backup/Applications/openSUSE/RPMs.

Now lets start the process of installation,

1- Open YaST, choose ‘software repositories’, click on ‘Add’ button, choose ‘Local directory’ from the list, click next and browse for the directory where you put the RPM files. Give a name of your choice and done.

2- Now open ‘software management’ from YaST, and search for skype word. Ok, now just mark it for installation. It will automatically resolve some of the important dependencies but not all(to my knowledge). Don’t worry we are coming to the missing one in a while.

Hint: If you are installing it on 64bit system, as of now(till now) skype is 32bit so we need all the 32bit libs it need to work with, some of them it will pull automatically while installing it, and the missing one we will figure it out.

3- We are almost done, try to run it from the menu. Nothing happened, open terminal and type skype and hit enter. Got some clue, it will throw the error and tell you what is missing. Just open software management and install the missing dependency from there. Remember to install 32bit version of the lib.

Some of the missing libs i would like to mention here: (all you need to do is install 32bit libs for the following).

libqt4 , libqt4-x11 , libasound , xorg-x11 .

That’s it, i hope this time you will have the working copy of skype integrated with your OS.

Hi folks,

Some interesting news we have here, that Oracle halting commercial interest for OpenOffice. And at the mean time we have beta 1 for LibreOffice, this is now great news. Some of the features are listed below for this release:

• added navigation buttons to writer
• Replaced unhide text button by icon buttons
• Mouse wheel scrolls whole slides
• Updated slide sorter icons
• allow ‘select as you type’ aka ‘quick selection’
• new ‘animated images’ for Throbber controls
• enable human icon theme
• treat Excel number format ‘General’ as standard format in Calc
• change the default sheet print option to “print entire sheet” in Calc
• don’t toggle the calc formula bar when activating and deactivating a chart in Calc
• Allow unused master pages to be deleted in master pages control in Impress
• enable full width by default for ‘Default’ style in Impress

Download it from here.

openSUSE users can follow these instructions, but i would recommend to read in openSUSE forums 1st and install from any beta repos.

More read at linuxjournal.com

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Note: 11.4 by default have LibreOffice, but one can use the repo below to get the stable updates.

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Hi folks,

As we know, LibreOffice stable release is available for use. I guess, you still have OpenOffice installed and using it. Why not lets try LibreOffice. It’s quite easy to install, lets go through step by step.

1- 1st add the following repo for your distro(11.3 or 11.4). Just open YaST and click on the software repositories, click on the Add button and the rest is self explanatory.

openSUSE 11.4 repo :

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_11.4/

openSUSE 11.3 repo :

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_11.3/

Give it any name of your choice like ‘LibreOffice Stable Repo’, Done? ok now lets go to next step.

2- Now open software management from YaST, and choose Repositories from the drop down menu if it is not there as a tab. Select the newly added repo, and you will see LibreOffice packages. Click on LibreOffice package for installation. At this moment if you already have OpenOffice installed, it will ask for replacing it in a pop up window, just choose to replace it with LibreOffice packages. If you are successfully done, you can click the Accept button. Wait and it will install LibreOffice for you.

Note: If you want to completely uninstall OpenOffice packages, just type openoffice in the search box in software management(YaST) and hit enter, it will give you the packages, if you see any installed packages, just right click,  choose delete and do it for the rest. That will completely remove OpenOffice from your pc.

If every thing goes fine, it will install LibreOffice and you can use it from now.