3 essential Linux cheat sheets for productivity

Linux is famous for its commands. This is partially because nearly everything that Linux does can also be invoked from a terminal, but it's also that Linux as an operating system is highly modular. Its tools are designed to produce fairly specific results, and when you know a lot about a few commands, you can combine them in interesting ways for useful output. Learning Linux is equal parts learning commands and learning how to string those commands together in interesting combinations. With so many Linux commands to learn, though, taking the first step can seem daunting. What command should you learn first? Which commands should you learn well, and which commands require only a passing familiarity? I've thought about these questions a lot, and I'm not convinced there's a universal answer. The "basic" commands are probably the same for anyone...

Make your data boss-friendly with this open source tool

Enterprise Data Analytics (EDA) is a web application that enables access to information through a simple, clear interface. After several years of working for Barcelona open source analytics company Jortilles, we realized that the modern world collects data compulsively but there was no easy way for average people to see or interpret that data. There are some powerful open source tools for this purpose, but they are very complex. We couldn't identify a tool designed to be easy to use by common people with little technical skill.

Slackware Lives! Upcoming Slackware 15.0 Beta is Out. Download and Test Now.

The oldest Linux distribution Slackware 15.0 beta is out, crashing many rumors that the project is dead.

LibreOffice and More

• Dates for LibreOffice Virtual Conference

  Our traditional LibreOffice Conference will be a fully virtual event for the second consecutive year, from September 23 (Thursday) to September 25 (Saturday), 2021. Unfortunately, the uncertainty still surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the conference – coupled with the unpredictability of the current vaccination campaign – are reasons for shifting the event to online also in 2021.

• When online suites go down, we need options not on the cloud

  You could use Office 2019, or the forthcoming Office 2021. But let me offer up a better, more universal suggestion: LibreOffice. LibreOffice is an open-source office suite. It's based on OpenOffice, which it superseded years ago. It includes a word processor, Writer; a spreadsheet, Calc; a presentation creator, Impress; a vector graphics and flowchart editor, Draw; a simple database program, Base; and a mathematical formula editor, Math. If you can use other office programs, you can use LibreOffice. It supports most of today's popular document formats, including Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx); Adobe PDF and the Open Document Format (ODF). Admittedly, its support for Microsoft's formats isn't perfect. But if you ever read Microsoft's Office Open XML File Format "Standard" closely, you'll find even Microsoft doesn't fully support its own standard. Practically speaking, if you're doing very elaborate work in Word or Excel, you would be better off sticking with Office. On the other hand, LibreOffice won't cost you a single cent. It's also available on all major desktop operating systems. And, when I say all, I mean all. This includes Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and even ChromeOS. The last comes from LibreOffice's commercial partner Collabora via the Google Play Store.

• Dependencies to compile modem-manager-gui

  I posted a couple of days ago, that compiled dependencies for LibreOffice in OpenEmbedded, but compile LO itself in a running EasyOS. I am going to do the same with 'modem-manager-gui', as have found it to be cross-compiler-unfriendly. Actually, it only seems to be the usage of po4a that is unfriendly, so I could probably hack on it. But decided to take the easy path and compile in a running Easy. ModemManager GUI is a gtk+3 frontend to 'modemmanager'.

 

• People of WordPress: Tyler Lau

  In this People of WordPress contributor story, we chat to Tyler Lau from the US on his relationship building work in marketing and his WordPress journey. Read on to discover his story which shows it is often what you have learned from negative experiences in your life that can make you a major asset to a product team.