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New versions of Collabora, LibreOffice, KDE Gear released

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Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.

LibreOffice is the highest profile of them, and the project recently put out version 7.3.4, the latest release in the Community version of the suite.

The Document Foundation maintains two versions of LibreOffice; the other is the Enterprise branch.

Both versions are free. The difference is that the Community version is the faster-moving development branch. It's comparable to a free Linux distro, or a short-term Ubuntu release: there's no commercial support, but you may be able to get assistance from other users – in other words, the Community.

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Ditch Office 365: 3 free Microsoft office alternatives for Windows, Linux and macOS

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LibreOffice is the go-to open-source office powerhouse. It has everything you realistically need — word processing, presentation creation, spreadsheet wrangling...you name it, LibreOffice has it — but the user interface is definitely a throwback to Windows XP days. LibreOffice does offer theming and custom layouts, but the default UI looks like something pulled straight out of Windows XP. Subjectively, the somewhat retro look and feel may appeal to some. Objectively speaking, the UI is unoptimised and somewhat messy — with options buried in sub-menus in odd places — which gives the software a bit of a steep learning curve.

User-created extensions expand the functionality of LibreOffice even further, while Collabora Office offers a paid, enterprise-ready, cloud-based collaboration solution based on LibreOffice.

LibreOffice offers support for just about every document format under the sun, including PDF and Microsoft's proprietary formats. If you're not afraid of spending some time setting up the software to your liking and getting used to some quirks, you should give LibreOffice a chance.

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Comparing LibreOffice and OpenOffice

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While LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a shared past, LibreOffice outstrips OpenOffice in contributors, code commits, and features.

A search for comparisons of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice returns over 8.3 million results. That number comes as no surprise, given that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the best-known open source office suites and share a common past. However, what is surprising is how shallow many of those comparisons are. Many offer only a superficial glimpse at either office suite from the viewpoint of an unsophisticated and undemanding user. Often, the comparisons are obsolete. Even more importantly, many comparisons strive for a false sense of objectivity by declaring that any differences are minor. However, by every possible standard, LibreOffice outshines OpenOffice and shows OpenOffice to be outdated. To pretend otherwise is a distortion of the truth.

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LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 and OpenOffice Users

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  • LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 is available for testing

    The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 is available for testing!

    LibreOffice 7.3 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 7.3 started in mid June, 2021. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.3 RC1, 117 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 65 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

  • OpenOffice users: Getting messages about documents being made in a newer version? - The Document Foundation Blog

    Many OpenOffice users are seeing warnings when trying to access files in the OpenDocument Format (eg .odt, .ods).

Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

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OOo

ODF is the OpenDocument Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files.

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LibreOffice on Chromebooks and Apache/OpenOffice

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  • How to install LibreOffice 7.2 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install LibreOffice 7.2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

    If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

  • Apache Month in Review: September 2021

    Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community. Here's a summary of what happened in September [video highlights available]...

  • This Week In Security: OpenOffice Vulnerable, IOS Vulnerable, Outlook… You Get The Idea | Hackaday

    We start this week with a good write-up by [Eugene Lim] on getting started on vulnerability hunting, and news of a problem in OpenOffice’s handling of DBase files. [Lim] decided to concentrate on a file format, and picked the venerable dbase format, .dbf. This database format was eventually used all over the place, and is still supported in Microsoft Office, Libreoffice, and OpenOffice. He put together a fuzzing approach using Peach Fuzzer, and found a handful of possible vulnerabilities in the file format, by testing a very simple file viewer that supported the format. He managed to achieve code execution in dbfview, but that wasn’t enough.

    Armed with a vulnerability in one application, [Lim] turned his attention to OpenOffice. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and found vulnerable code right away. A buffer is allocated based on the specified data type, but data is copied into this buffer with a different length, also specified in the dbase file. Simple buffer overflow. Turning this into an actual RCE exploit took a bit of doing, but is possible. The disclosure didn’t include a full PoC, but will likely be reverse engineered shortly.

    Normally we’d wrap by telling you to go get the update, but OpenOffice doesn’t have a stable release with this fix in it. There is a release candidate that does contain the fix, but every stable install of OpenOffice in the world is currently vulnerable to this RCE. The vulnerability report was sent way back on May 4th, over 90 days before full disclosure. And what about LibreOffice, the fork of OpenOffice? Surely it is also vulnerable? Nope. LibreOffice fixed this in routine code maintenance back in 2014. The truth of the matter is that when the two projects forked, the programmers who really understood the codebase went to LibreOffice, and OpenOffice has had a severe programmer shortage ever since. I’ve said it before: Use LibreOffice, OpenOffice is known to be unsafe.

  • All Your (d)Base Are Belong To Us, Part 1: Code Execution in Apache OpenOffice (CVE-2021–33035) [Ed: How many still use OpenOffice instead of LibreOffice]

    Venturing out into the wilderness of vulnerability research can be a daunting task. Coming from a background in primarily web and application security, I had to shift my hacking mindset towards memory corruption vulnerabilities and local attack vectors. This two-part series will share how I got started in vulnerability research by discovering and exploiting code execution zero-days in office applications used by hundreds of millions of people. I will outline my approach to getting started in vulnerability research including dumb fuzzing, coverage-guided fuzzing, reverse engineering, and source code review. I will also discuss some management aspects of vulnerability research such as CVE assignment and responsible disclosure.

ODF 1.3 is an OASIS Standard

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OOo

The Document Foundation is pleased to announce that LibreOffice native document format – Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) 1.3 – has been approved as OASIS Standard with 14 affirmative consents and no objections. ODF is a free, open XML-based document file format for office applications, to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical elements. ODF 1.3 is an update to the international standard Version 1.2, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 26300 (2015).

The OpenDocument Format specifies the characteristics of an open XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. It is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.

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The Best PowerPoint Alternatives for Linux

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If you are a Linux user and looking for the best PowerPoint alternative (either desktop or web-based), you have come to the right place. In this article, you will find a brief overview of some interesting presentation applications that can be natively installed on a Linux distribution or used online via the browser.

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The Best Free Office Suites for Linux in 2021

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LibreOffice is the most favored office suite app in the Linux community and this is not just due to the fact that it works as an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office Suite but also that it is completely free and open source.

It has successfully branded itself as more than just an app to be a community of culture, collaboration, and sharing. If you ever have any use issues or encounter platform-specific bugs be rest assured that your situation can be taken care of.

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Hiri – A Linux Email Client for Exchange and Office 365

Apache OpenOffice Recommends upgrade to v4.1.10 to mitigate legacy vulnerability

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Security
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Who: Apache OpenOffice, an Open Source office-document productivity suite comprising six productivity applications: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. The OpenOffice suite is based around the OpenDocument Format (ODF), supports 41 languages, and ships for Windows, macOS, Linux 64-bit, and Linux 32-bit. Apache OpenOffice delivers up to 2.4 Million downloads each month.

What: A recently reported vulnerability states that all versions of OpenOffice through 4.1.9 can open non-http(s) hyperlinks, and could lead to untrusted code execution.

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Also: Apache OpenOffice Vulnerable To One-Click Code Execution

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digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

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The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.