chrisbray.co.uk

I know I've promoted the use of OpenOffice.org the Open Source competitor to Microsoft's Office 2007, citing anecdotal experience of lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and equal functionality for a long time, but now it's official!

The Copenhagen Business School has just released a study into using OpenOffice.org vs Microsoft Office 2007 and it would appear they agree with me!

The article itself is written in Danish but the executive summary at the start is in English and explains three TCO analyses for implementing OpenOffice.org in a local hospital, a national hospital and the entire public service.

I think the figures do the talking themselves:

Two other quotes hold particular significance to me:

Sadly showing how closed source software still dominates the Danish public sector by way of long term "agreements" and "partnerships", even with proven cost benefits and functional equality Open Source software still has to fight against an uneven playing field.

Open Source software has made big gains in developing markets such as South America and Eastern Europe with this report proving massive cost benefits I can only hope we start to see some more open minded thinking from the people with power in the wider European and world IT industry.

Real credit for this discovery must go to Erwin Tenhumberg for his post entitled "OpenOffice.org Study by the Copenhagen Business School" where I found this report.

I use Gmail as my main email account I thought it'd be real nice to be able to get Gnome to launch Gmail in my default browser when I pressed the email button on the toolbar. Well, a bit of googling and here's the answer.

Create a script with the following content in /opt/gmail-integration/sendmail, chmod it 755 and chown it root:root

#!/bin/sh
# gnome-gmail - a script that passes gnome mailto links to gmail in your browser
# Copyright (c) 2006 Matthew C Ruschmann
# Version: 1.0
BROWSER=`gconftool-2 --get '/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command' | cut -f1 -d' ' `
if test -z "${*}"
then
${BROWSER} "http://www.gmail.com"
exit
fi
TOMAIL=`echo "${*}" | sed -e 's/mailto://g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/?/\&/g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/&subject=/\&su=/g'`
TOURL="https://gmail.google.com/gmail?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&to="
echo ${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"
${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"

Register it as the default email handler, and turn off the un-required console window with the following code at the console...

gconftool-2 --set --type string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command "/opt/gmail-integration/sendmail %s"
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/need-terminal false
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled true

If you're scared of the command line you can go to System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Preferred Applications and it's listed in there in the GUI.

But there you go, clicking on the "Email" button will now launch your browser and load Gmail.
It also works for "mailto" links for emailing people from web pages.