Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

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Tag Archives: Openoffice

So you got a Netbook, what now?

advent-4211-msi-wind-mini-laptop-small You take it home, do the unboxing, get it powered up and running and now what?

1. Get comfortable with the Linux install that you may have inherited or swap it for Windows XP. If it came with XP, then settle in.

2. Get Firefox 3.0 running, OpenOffice 3.0 onboard, get hooked up to WiFi, and get yourself a 3G card unless it is already built in.

3. If you have a netbook with a 2 or 3 cell battery – get out and buy yourself the 6 cell battery as quickly as you can – you do need it.

4. If you have the HP2133, scour the Internet for instructions on how to get it running Linux or Windows XP because that beast is damn slow with Vista.

5. Get yourself setup with Delicious from Yahoo and add its plug-in to your Firefox or Internet Explorer install so that you can have all your cloud bookmarks tagged and running with you and/or get Foxmarks with the password sync – now you will have your bookmarks and passwords synchronised across all of your machines as long as you spread the love a little.

6. Migrate your email over to IMAP4 based services unless you already have it…or better move the whole domain over to Google Apps and use their facilities. This way, your email is always going to be available and not locked to a single machine.

7. Get yourself some web storage like box.net.

8. Sign yourself up to Skype – with that webcam in your machine, you have an ideal tool for getting into VoIP/Video Conferencing and this is on most of the netbooks by default. Share your Skype ID out.

Now assuming that you have progressed to Windows XP on your netbook…

1. Do all the above but in XP of course.

2. Think about Hosted Exchange for business use…it is slightly better than IMAP4.

3. Get Microsoft Mesh on the netbook and all of your other machines, and share the important folders across all of your machines in Peer-to-Peer mode.

4. Make sure that you setup that Skype install.

5. I know it is my preference, but get yourself a Google Reader setup running and make sure all your textual RSS feeds are setup there.

6. Install Juice for podcast downloads and Miro for vodcast downloads, I always find it comforting to have my text/graphics RSS separate to my audio and video feeds, but you could have it all in Miro.

7. Download Windows Live services such as Live Messenger, Live Photo Gallery, and of course Live Writer for blogging.

8. Optimise your netbook setup to maximise battery life when on battery, and run as fast as possible on mains. Use additional power management tools like Notebook Hardware Control to manage the switch automatically.

And then scour the internet for sites that service the optimisation of your particular netbook for those interesting new tweaks.

Oh, and stay with this blog.

Openproj – Project Management software without the cost

OpenProj_big

We have all heard of Openoffice, as a replacement for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint but the replacements for other tools that people are really comfortable with has been a little more difficult – and in this I am mainly talking about MS Project. MS Project is a very costly product, particularly for the small business or independent contractor, costing upwards of £500 for the most basic version. If you do not have it, then it really impacts you when that client sends you a project plan to follow, or if you needed to create a project plan for a particular customer, so you used to have to just buy it. You could of course use the various software as a service free/low cost systems out there like Basecamp and a number of others and hope that no-one wanted to have all that information available in the MS Project file format.

Now though, there is an open-source piece of software available that offers the 80% features that people use out of MS Project including the ability to open the MS Project file format – this is Serena Software’s Openproj. It is pretty basic and, shall we say, a bit ugly in most eyes but it does the job and there is no outlay. Openproj has advanced significantly since the version 0.90 that I started using to what is now version 1.4. It has become more stable, and slightly prettier. It also has one other major advantage – it works on multiple platforms, so if you are not a Windows fiend then you can actually fire it up on Linux/Unix and on Apple systems. One weakness it has is in the filesaving capability as it saves in the MS Project 2003 XML format, which needs to be imported into Microsoft’s product rather than simply opened but that is relatively simple to do. It does also have its own file format for those who do not need to keep files always in a Microsoft compatible format.

I am sure this is going to continue to develop, and the recent purchase of the Projity company by Serena Software, shows that the product has some legs.