Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users. On the one hand, users are vaguely aware of Scribus as a first-rate application that can hold its own against proprietary counterparts like InDesign.

Some people insist that OpenOffice.org should be called an office application instead of an office suite. The distinction that they are trying to make is that the programs in OpenOffice.org share a common code base, instead of being separate programs that are simply bundled together, the way that Microsoft Office's are.

Ever been working in a VM that is command line only and wished it wasn’t so small? Well, that was how I felt constantly until now. Step on past the break to see how to change the resolution in an X-less install by utilizing uvesafb. Let’s look at this from two points of view: Ubuntu and Gentoo. Ubuntu with Grub2:

Man pages have been the primary source for UN*x documentation for a long time. Whenever I create a script that's going to be around for a while, I create documentation in the form of a section 1 man page. This stops my cell phone from ringing on the weekends when the junior sysadmins are looking for my notes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a web interface to the logs on your central log server? Well, dream no more because this one is a reality thanks to LogAnalyzer (aka phplogcon). Let's take a look at how to setup both it and its suggested syslog variant, rsyslog, on a central log server.

Most users interact with OpenOffice.org on the desktop. But what if you need to do a selective restore on the files that store custom gradients or colors? Troubleshoot why an extension won't install? Share resources with other users? For these kinds of tasks, you need to know a bit about where OpenOffice.org stores its files, and what you can do with them.

If you've used the command line much at all you know about I/O redirection for redirecting input to and/or output from a program. What you don't see all that often or that you may not be familiar with is redirecting I/O inside a bash script. And I'm not talking about redirections that you use when your script executes another command, I'm talking about redirecting your script's I/O once it has already started executing.

OpenOffice.org's tools for creating diagrams are easy to ignore. For one thing, their controls are extremely small. For another, they are pitifully under-documented in the online help, which plods through the options without explaining what they are or why you want to use them.

For those of us lucky enough to use Linux on all of our computers, Canonical's Ubuntu One is a great way to keep files in sync between computers. Unfortunately, most of us are stuck using other operating systems throughout the day. We all have our own ways of managing such things, but I thought a glimpse into my “world of sync” might help others synchronize their lives. Files

Cloud services are all the rage today, although some of my fellow Linux Journal staffers may scoff when they hear me say that. Cloud services is a nebulous term that can mean anything from completely hosted services (like Gmail) to virtualized, leased servers, such as those provided by Amazon's EC2 service. And, the latter is the subject of this article.