SpringPublisher is a freeware desktop publishing application for Windows. The application lets you easily create business cards, flyers, postcards, letterheads and other artworks within a few minutes.

Quality free software for creating business cards, flyers, postcards and letterheads are very sparse. Professional desktop publishing applications are normally very costly. But SpringPublisher comes here to fill in the void. With its powerful multilayered editor and lots of templates, your desktop publishing task becomes easier.

Spring Publisher desktop publishing software is small in download size (2.13 MB to be exact) and requires less system resource. When installed, it lets you easily create various artworks fast. You can use it to create professional looking business cards, letterheads, flyers, postcards, etc. You can start from scratch and use your imagination to design or use templates that came with it. Insert or edit shapes, text, logos, and vectors in your artworks to get them completed quickly.

You can simultaneously work on different artworks using its tabbed interface. It lets you save your work as a project to later edit it. You can save your artworks as image if you want to send it to professional print shops. You can also directly print using your own printer. SpringPublisher Free do have a limitation of 96/180 dpi output quality. It is more than enough for normal usage. If you are looking for high quality 350 dpi output quality, you have to go for SpringPublisher Pro. One more limitation is that using the free version you will not be able to download templates from the publisher’s website.

• Enables you to add images, texts, vector shapes, logos and arrange them as you like;
• Provides various image effect: shadows, opacity, rotation, etc.
• Makes it easy for you to print your artworks either with your own printer or in professional print shops.
• Generates high-resolution artwork with a maximum output of 180 dpi.

You can download SpringPublisher Freeware version from the official website.

Oracle has recently announced that they are donating OpenOffice.org‘s assets to the Apache Software Foundation.

Oracle continues to demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities, said Luke Kowalski, vice president, Oracle Corporate Architecture Group, in the press release. He continues The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development.

Welcoming the move, Jim Jagielski, president, The Apache Software Foundation said, We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing.

Everyone seems to be winning through this move but still there is one vital question. Why not The Document Foundation instead of The Apache Software Foundation?

After Oracle acquired OpenOffice.org, many of the leading OpenOffice.org contributors formed The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation requested Oracle to join them and donate the name “OpenOffice.org” to the community. But Oracle instead asked them to leave OpenOffice.org.

The developer’s then went on to fork OpenOffice.org to form LibreOffice. LibreOffice has been very successful and most of the major Linux distributions have switched over to LibreOffice as the default office application suite.

We have received an official statement in our email from Italo Vignoli, who is one of the co-founders and a member of the steering committee of The Document Foundation, in response to Oracle’s decision to ignore them and go to the Apache Foundation instead.

Below you can read the official statement:

The Document Foundation
Statement about Oracle’s move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation

The Internet, June 1st, 2011 – The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.

Today we welcome Oracle’s donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation. It is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.

On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.

Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which – as always – remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.

TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.

Finally, TDF continue executing on a time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on the bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for the 3.5 release.

If you go through the second last paragraph of the email, it is clear that The Document Foundation is willing to co-develop with the Apache Software Foundation. If this happens, it will be beneficial for OpenOffice.org’s future. After all, at this moment it is in the hand of completely new team of developers.

BleachBit is an open source cross-platform system clean-up and privacy application for Windows and Linux operating system. Windows users do have the option of CCleaner, which recently got updated to support Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4. But what about Linux users who need to clean their Linux machine? Well, that’s where BleachBit comes in to fill the void. And the good thing about it is, it’s also available for Windows users alike.

BleachBit has added several new features to its latest version that make it an even better utility for removing unneeded/unnecessary files from your computer. On Linux systems, BleachBit can now remove swap files (in addition to swap devices). The Windows version has added the option to remove Windows Update uninstaller including hot fixes and Internet Explorer patches. It’s well worth checking out the full list of features.

Latest features introduced are as follows:

• Add command line option --preset which selects all the cleaners previously selected in the GUI.
• Specific to Linux
  • Support Thunderbird on openSUSE 11.3 thanks to Manfred Schwarb (LP#668231)
  • Fix wrong button label when adding folders for overwrite disk space and for whitelist (pointed out by jtarin)
  • When cleaning localizations, show warning to point user to configuration
  • Packagers: BleachBit will try to use the built-in json module on Python 2.6+ instead of simplejson, which is still required on Python 2.5.
• Specific to Windows
  • Import winapp2.ini files: the CCleaner community maintains winapp2.ini files with about 450 cleaner definitions. Just download a winapp2.ini file and place it in one of the BleachBit cleaner directories.
  • Internet Explorer: delete autocomplete passwords
  • Support registry keys in the HKCR (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT) hive

Use BleachBit to:

• Free disk space
• Reduce the size of backups and the time to create them by removing unnecessary files
• Maintain privacy
• Improve system performance (by vacuuming the Firefox database, for example)
• Prepare whole disk images for compression (common for “ghost” backups and virtual machines) by wiping free disk space

How to use BleachBit to clean up the system?

Ubuntu users can simply click here to install it. Other Linux systems users can easily find BleachBit in their respective repostories, or download specific version made for your Linux distribution available at the official BleachBit’s website. Windows users can download standard installer version or portable version from here.

Ubuntu users will find it in their applications menu under “System“.

By default only the programs installed in the system will show up. You can now check the things you’re interested in deleting. BleachBit will inform you about the consequences of everything as you check items for cleanup. Once you’ve selected everything, click on “Preview” to see how much disk space you can save.

After being satisfied with the result, do check settings one last time before clicking on “Delete“.

So, in a sentence: read the descriptions, check the boxes you want, click preview, and click delete.

Advanced cleaning options provided are:

• Clear the memory and swap on Linux
• Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
• Delete the Firefox version 3 URL history without deleting the whole file–with optional shredding
• Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don’t use.
• Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
• Find widely-scatted junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
• Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
• Delete Windows registry keys–often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
• Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
• Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
• Vacuum Firefox, Google, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
• Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files with deleting the whole file

BleachBit is a program that can save you a lot of hard disk space quickly, but be sure you know what you’re doing.

Do you have any tips for using this program more effectively or use any other app with similar or better functionality? Share them using comments below with us!

LibreOffice is a fork of the popular open-source office suite, OpenOffice. LibreOffice is a free power-packed Open Source personal office productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. It provides six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. LibreOffice is a free software office suite developed by The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation maintains LibreOffice release schedule thanks to a growing and vibrant community of developers. Its developers’ goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. The name is a hybrid word with the first part Libre, which means free (as in freedom) in both Spanish and French, and the English word Office.

The Document Foundation has recently announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.2, the second micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity. The latest update improves the stability of the software and sets the platform for the next release 3.4, due in mid May. The community of developers has been able to maintain the tight schedule thanks to the increase in the number of contributors, and to the fact that those that have started with easy hacks in September 2010 are now working at substantial features. In addition, they have almost completed the code cleaning process, getting rid of German comments and obsolete functionalities.

“I have started hacking LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, just a few hours after the announcement of the project, and I found a very welcoming community, where senior developers went out of their way to help newbies like me to become productive. After a few hours I submitted a small patch removing 5 or 6 lines of dead code… enough to get my feet wet and learn the workflow“, says Norbert, a French developer living in the United States. “In a short time, I ended up removing the VOS library – deprecated for a decade – from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process“.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 Final release notes:

• This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 3.3.2 Release Candidate 2, so you don’t need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.
• The distribution for Windows is an international build, so you can choose the user interface language that you prefer. Help content is available via an online service, or alternatively as a separate install.
• For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, we advise uninstalling that beforehand, because it registers the same file type associations.
• If you run Windows 2000, you may require this update before being able to install LibreOffice.
• If you run Linux, the GCJ Java variant has known issues with LibreOffice, we advise to e.g. use OpenJDK instead.
• LibreOffice contains all the security fixes from OpenOffice.org in 3.3.0, and perhaps more as a side-effect of the code clean-ups.

There are a few non-critical issues still contained in this release, which will be addressed soon with upcoming bug fix versions:

• If you install third-party extensions that bring their own help, you may only be able to view that after installing the separate help packs on Windows.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000-euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euros. All additional funds will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for community development expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material.

Italo Vignoli, a founder and a steering committee member of The Document Foundation, will be keynoting at Flourish 2011 in Chicago on Sunday, April 3, at 10:30AM, about getting independent from OpenOffice and Oracle, starting The Document Foundation, raising the capital and the first community budget, organizing developers and other work, and outlining a roadmap for future releases and features.

Recently, LibreOffice have been accepted as a Google Summer of Code 2011 organization.

You can download LibreOffice from the official website.

My regular readers knows how much I am fond of portable applications. After all why I will not? See, there are many advantages of portable apps. You can easily carry them around in your USB flash drive or portable hard drive and use them even if the computer does not have them installed. Till now, I have mostly talked about Windows compatible portable apps.

Thankfully, I have found a website known as “Portable Linux Apps” or PortableLinuxApps.org for satisfying my thirst for Linux platform compatible portable apps. Portable Linux Apps is a free web service that hosts a collection of many useful Linux applications.

The collection of portable Linux applications includes almost all the useful apps (see screenshot above) like media players, instant messaging clients, chat clients, graphics and drawing tools, compression utilities, note taking tools, console applications (Terminator, etc) audio editors, system tools and many more.

You just need to download your favorite apps from PortableLinuxApps.org and save them to your USB flash drive. Carry it around and run from any Linux machine you have access to!

According to PortableLinuxApps.org,

“These Apps have been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) 32-bit, OpenSUSE 11.3 (GNOME) 32-bit , and Fedora 12 (GNOME) 32-bit. Just Download, Make Executable, and Run!“

What are your favorite portable Linux applications? Share below through your comments, I will love to hear about them!

I triple boot my system with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu but I also like to test other Linux distributions. Most of the time, to test the other operating system and distributions, I use VirtualBox or VMware to virtualize them. But for those Linux distributions that offers Live CD/DVD option, I use my USB flash drive to test them live. This saves me time as I don’t have to first configure the virtual machine and install the Linux distro to test it. In my previous articles, I covered two softwares, UNetbootin and Multiboot USB Menu that helps me to make the distros ready to be booted directly off my USB flash device.

Another, very good utility that helps me create persistent storage on my flash drive is Pendrive Linux’s Universal USB Installer. What I meant when I said “persistent storage”? It means that you’ll actually have some permanent storage space in your flash drive to save things like your files and preferences, instead of having a clone of your disc image in your flash drive.

Universal USB Installer at this moments supports a huge number of Linux distributions, including both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and sysadmin or technicians favorites like Backtrack, GParted, DBAN, Clonezilla, OphCrack, and System Rescue CD. It even supports Dr.Web Live CD Scanner, SliTaZ Cooking, Ultimate Boot CD, and more. The updated full list of supported distribution is available at the developer’s page.

The Universal USB Installer is very easy to use. Simply choose any one of the Live Linux distribution ISO file that is now supported by it, grab your USB flash drive and, click on Install. If you run Universal USB Installer from the same directory containing an installable ISO, the script will auto-detect the ISO and install it on your flash drive.

Universal USB Installer at this moment does not support installing and booting from multiple Linux Distributions, but the developer’s are promising addition of this feature soon.

[ Download Universal USB Installer ]

Multiboot USB menu developed by PendriveLinux.com helps a user to easily boot into multiple ISO files from a USB flash drive. Multiboot USB is a very easy to use application that helps you format and prepare your USB drive to boot into multiple supported ISO disk images.

At present Multiboot USB supports a number of Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, DSL, etc. and other ISO that helps in carrying out administrative and system tasks like Memtest86+, Parted Magic, Ultimate Boot CD, etc. The complete list updated by the developers is available at this page. The page also provides direct download links to the ISO it supports.

The application uses Syslinux and loads GRUB4DOS to present you with a nice GUI MultiBoot menu when booted from the configured USB.

The basic requirements to create a MultiBoot USB Flash Drive are:

• FAT32 formatted USB Flash drive with a minimum space of 512MB (The size of the drive will decide how many ISO’s you will be able to use at a time).
• MultiBootISOs.exe setup file to set up your USB drive.
• Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows 7 host machine to create the Bootable USB.
• The ISO files which you want to boot to.

How to use MultiBoot USB Menu to Boot Multiple ISO Files from USB?

• Download and run the MultiBootISOs.exe setup.
• Follow the wizard carefully to configure your USB flash drive and setup the drive for multi-boot.
• Download the supported ISO Files (A complete list is available here) and simply place them on your USB Flash drive.
• Restart your PC, setup the first boot device as the USB device from BIOS settings. (Please refer to your motherboard manual to configure this if you don’t know how to set up the first boot device.)
• After booting from the MultiBoot USB drive, select the Linux distribution or Administrative tool you want to boot from.
• If you face any difficulty or any problem, just comment below with the details about your problem, I will try my best to troubleshoot and help you out!

Note: If you don’t have a floppy drive and get fd0 errors while booting, simply add floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 to the kernel line for that menu entry.
While trying to run an ISO from USB, If you get a Boot error saying:

Error 60: File for drive emulation must be in one contiguous disk area

You’ll need to defragment your ISO using one of the following tools:

• contig – Command line tool to defragment ISO files.
• wincontig — GUI tool to defragment ISO files.

Update from the developers:

[box type="alert"]IMPORTANT: Starting version 2.0, the tool copies your select ISO to the drive and adds the menu entry (in order) based on the Distro you choose to install each time the tool is run. This enables each user to create a custom Multiboot USB Flash Drive containing only the Distributions chosen.[/box]

[box type="note"]NOTES: ISO Downloadeds are stored in an ISOFILES Directory created where the tool is run. Any matching ISOs placed there will be autodetected.[/box]

[box type="info"]MultiBootISOs-2.1.2.3.exe — September 3, 2010 — Changelog: Now uses fbinst.exe to paritition and format the drive and then embed grldr when MultibootISOs is first run on the chosen drive. Added System Rescue CD and Trinity Rescue Kit.[/box]

[box type="tick"]Here is another good third party guide that explains how things work.[/box]

Mozilla Thunderbird is a very popular desktop email client. Thunderbird email software was recently updated by its developers, Mozilla, to version 3. The update brought many new features and notable changes like better email account integration and configuration options, global search option, etc.

The next version of Thunderbird will be version 3.1 and the first alpha release, codenamed “Lanikai Alpha 1” confirms this. Mozilla has asked interested users to test the new alpha release version of the email client and give their opinion. The developer has also warned anyone from installing the email client in a productive environment as it is an alpha version that can contain bugs and other performance issues.

The most notable changes, according to the release notes, in Thunderbird 3.1 alpha are as follows:

• Several improvements to IMAP.
• Several fixes for Smart Folders, message filters, and attachment handling.
• Several design improvements and corrections to the user interface.
• Download Manager is now accessible as a menu item (Tools > Saved Files).
• Stability and memory improvements.

Bugzilla lists a total of 147 bug fixes and changes in Thunderbird 3.1 alpha of which 2 have been rated as blockers (highest rating) and 14 as critical. Several of the critical bugs fix issues when updating from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. Others fix crashes and fix other issues.

If you are interested in trying out Thunderbird 3.1 alpha then you can download the email client from the official Mozilla Messaging website.

Before installing, make sure your computer meets the system requirements. Please note that Lanikai Alpha 1 no longer supports versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 (e.g. Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT) and Mac OS X versions prior to 10.4 Tiger. Linux requirements have also changed. Do make sure that compatibility mode for unsupported Windows platforms is disabled for the Thunderbird executable in Windows.

This article is a compilation of the 40 must have tools for any system administrator or power users. These tools are all freeware and comes very handy in those nightmarish situations to save our lives!

Picture courtesy Javier Aroche

[ Additional information courtesy Sunbelt Blog ]