Turmoil in the free-office-suite world has led to the formation of the Document Foundation and its forking of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, and much if not most of the Linux world has declared its support for the more-community-oriented LibreOffice.

Just about every major (and most minor) Linux distribution that used to ship OpenOffice.org is now either already shipping or pledging to ship LibreOffice instead. I get the feeling that some will continue to offer OpenOffice in their repositories, but when it comes to the default office suite going forward, LibreOffice will fill that roll.

If I’m not incorrect, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora are already shipping LO.

And LibreOffice has been available in Debian Sid and Wheezy for awhile.

But what about Debian Squeeze, the project’s Stable release? Stable Debian releases traditionally don’t get new packages in their core repositories. That means LibreOffice will be included in the next Stable release, the current Testing release (Wheezy). Wheezy will be declared stable sometime in the future. I’d say a year from now.

Read the rest of this post

Yes, I do use Windows. XP and 7, depending on the hardware.

So what software and services do I bring along for the ride?

• Notepad++
• IrfanView
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• FileZilla
• Dropbox
• Avast! Free Antivirus
• Google Chrome
• Pidgin
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• Audacity

I'll write more about each of these applications in the future. They're sort of in order of most valuable to least. The Notepad++ text editor and IrfanView image viewer/editor are definitely my top 2 applications in Windows.