Using Open Office has saved our company thousands in licensing fees. Everyone in our organization uses it and we have yet to run into a compatibility issue when sending files to our clients. Sometimes we’ve found that the spell check doesn’t install properly initially and it is necessary to manually set it up. You’ll need to install the dictionaries and ensure spell check is enabled.

Here’s what we did to get it going. Note: You will need to be connected to the Internet so the dictionaries can download.

1. Go to File -> Wizards -> Select your language -> Click the “Start dicOOo” button.
2. Now follow the prompts until it asks you to restart Open Office
3. Once restarted go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings
4. Under Writing Aids verify/modify the settings and click OK.
5. Under Languages verify/modify the settings and click ok.

You should be good to go. I had to modify mine in one more spot because my Locale is different (long story).

1. Under Format -> Character -> Font the “Language” setting should match what you set in your Language Settings -> Languages

Now any new document you start will have spell check enabled.

We referenced this forum post, spell checker in openoffice.org, to get us started on the right path.

Download a copy and give it a try! OpenOffice.org

Hope this helps!

Another board that works reasonably well for Ubuntu Hardy is the Asus M3n78 Pro. This board costs quite a bit more money, but it is a full ATX sized motherboard instead of the Micro ATX boards I discussed in a couple of previous posts. Some of the more notable features of this board are the four Memory slots, 3 PCI Slots, 2 PCIe 1x slots, a 16x slot and an integrated Gigabit NIC. This would not be a bad board for a MythTV backend server that you wanted to stick a bunch of disks and recording devices in. In fact, this is the exact board that I rebuilt my home server onto. Everything worked out of the box with this board except for the video which required that I install a newer video driver. The server now runs headless anyway now though.

-Kirt

For the guys that have been building systems with the Asus M2N68-VM, you will notice that inventory has been drying up. Even newegg.com does not have them sale anymore. One possible replacement for a low end workstation is the Asus M2N68-AM SE2. It has a similar, but scaled back feature set. They drop HDMI connector, drop from two to one PCI slot, drop the gigabit nic to a 100 Mbit nic and also drop down to two SATA ports from four. The video is a similar 7000 series chip that is compatible out of the box and it does have the same Nvidia nForce 630 Southbridge that just works with Ubuntu Hardy, 8.04. This is the Linux version that we prefer to roll for our Spokane based customers that need computers that just work for their standard web applications and word processing chores. This is another one of those board where everything just works out of the box.

-Kirt

We installed a remote backup server running Debian Linux in a client’s home. The backup server is also a firewall to protect the home’s Personal Computers. The home network also had a Twonky MediaServer to manage the components of a home theater.

Due to the way the home is wired (and other reasons) the Denon receiver sits outside the firewall in a DMZ behind the internet modem on a separate LAN. This caused the Twonky MediaServer to not be able to connect to the Denon receiver without opening some ports on the firewall. We typically run a closed outbound policy and open ports as needed.

We spent some time trying to research what ports the Denon was using. Unfortunately documentation was lacking so we had to resort to the old fashioned method. Here was the steps we took and the results.

The DMZ network where the Denon resides is on the 192.168.0.0/24 network.

First step was to port scan the network with nmap to find any responding IP’s. The Denon as you can see was kind enough to identify itself.

firewall:/$ nmap -sP 192.168.0.0/24
Results:
Host 192.168.0.102 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (Denon)

We found the Denon so let’s see what ports are open.

firewall:/$ nmap 192.168.0.102
Starting Nmap ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2009-01-19 16:19 PST
Interesting ports on 192.168.0.102:
Not shown: 1673 closed ports

PORT     STATE SERVICE
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
443/tcp  open  https
5000/tcp open  UPnP
5001/tcp open  commplex-link
6666/tcp open  irc-serv
8080/tcp open  http-proxy
MAC Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (Denon)

Ahh, looks like UPnP, so open it up and test connectivity.

firewall:/# telnet 192.168.0.102 5000
Trying 192.168.0.102…
Connected to 192.168.0.102.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
HDMODE ANALOG

We install a lot of outdoor cams for various reasons. Security cameras for construction sites, Several ski resort outdoor camera solutions, and in store security camera systems to name a few.  One of the fun things we’ve done here was a job to play a multi-media loop in a ski lodge. The resort wanted pictures, videos, and live shots from the camera on the hill.

We found an easy solution to playing the live video in mplayer. We used an Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy install on a laptop to drive the presentation that was programmed in python.

mplayer -fps 25 -demuxer lavf -user <cam username> -passwd <cam password> http://<cam ip or dns name>/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?0.mjpg

This will connect to web based video cams; axis and stardot netcams have been tested.

If you have any questions regarding outdoor cameras for your business or location please call us at 509-465-1234 or visit our main site at http://www.interlinkadvantage.com/all_weather_security_cameras.php

We recently set out to find hardware that is compatible, out of the box, with Ubuntu’s latest Long Term Support (LTS) release 8.04 also known as Hardy Heron. This proves to be a bit more challenging than you might think since many of the motherboards sold today hit the market after Hardy, as geeks like to call it, was released. Most motherboard and their respective component manufacturers are on a fairly rapid release schedule these days. So the challenge is to find a motherboard built from components that are at least a couple of months older than the release of the the Linux operating system you wish to run.

One of the standouts that we found was the Asus M2N68-VM socket AM2+ based motherboard. It has integrated an nVidia 7050 video chip with analog VGA and digital DVI based connectors. The video chip is supported out of the box on Hardy both with the open source nv driver and nVidia’s proprietary but functional nvidia driver. Nvidia supports X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) on hardware up through the 7000 series so this chip should be supported with possible MPEG 2 assisted decoding. This has not been tested yet though. Coupled with the built in HDMI connector it seems like it would be part of an ideal solution for a low cost MythTV / Mythbuntu machine especially when coupled with one of AMD’s low wattage processors.

The board uses an nVidia 630a chipset which seems to be well supported so other boards based on this chipset may be supported as well.

Every component that has been tested including Cool N Quiet and CPU frequency scaling work out of the box. If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments section.

-Kirt