With a good percentage of the networked world letting their sites go dark tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act and the chilling effect they would have on free speech and expression (with corporations in the U.S. able to remove the rights of individuals from other countries), I decided to join the protest and let my personal site, http://stevenrosenberg.net, redirect for the day to http://americancensorship.org

I give much credit to the developers who, early on, brought LibreOffice to Debian Backports. Once you add Backports to your sources.list, you can install LibreOffice, which just happens to remove OpenOffice from your system at the same time.

I've been using LibreOffice extensively in both Windows XP and Debian GNU/Linux, and for my work, the killer of killer apps in LO (and OO for that matter) is LibreOffice Draw. And I don't use it for drawing.

Instead I use Draw to import PDFs, JPGs and other kinds of content into a single document, re-arrange them, edit them, add to them, and then either print out a completed report, or export it as a PDF.

Think if it as an MS PowerPoint/LO Impress-style presentation, except optimized for paper or PDF. It's extremely powerful. And did I mention I use it all the time?

Anyhow, the secret weapon, of sorts, in LibreOffice Draw (and OpenOffice Draw) before it is the ability to open PDFs in LibreOffice Draw, then either copy/paste them into your main Draw document and edit the text and images in the PDFs to help you "tell your story" better. I gave up all my PDF-arranging apps for LO Draw, it's so good.

But ... the PDF import function for LibreOffice Draw in Debian Squeeze, if you're using the libreoffice-pdfimport package from Debian Backports, is broken. Doesn't work. LO wants to open PDFs as text files in LO Writer, not as editable PDFs in LO Draw.

So how do you fix this? For me, I needed the PDF importer function to work immediately (today, in fact).

When you think "free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," I bet CentOS comes to mind.

But a look at the CentOS project over the past few years shows a considerable lag between when RHEL releases and CentOS catches up.

That lag continues, and it's at 200+ days, according to this recent Phoronix article. My question is more basic: Is CentOS keeping up with critical security patches along the way? I hope they are.

I've been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10's GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16's GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.

They're more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.

They look and work more alike than you'd think.

I find it puzzling. But in a way it makes sense.

The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it.

I'm not at the point where I can say, "Oh, it's totally better than GNOME 2," but I'm increasingly able to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.

I will refrain from comparing how things work in Fedora 16/GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu 11.10/Unity until I spend more time in the latter. But this comparison is at the forefront of my thinking about which direction my Linux desktop use will go in during the year ahead.

Responding to Rob Reed's Google+ post on the dark side of huge corporate entities -- read: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube -- controlling what we see and don't see on the Internet, I wrote a couple of responses (instead of one because you can't edit an existing post or comment on Google+'s Android client), which I will repeat here because, a) they're not bad and b) I'm against "giving away" content to social networks and c) the irony of us having this discussion about Facebook on the newest, shiniest corporate-created social network, Google+ is particularly rich (and I acknowledge my part in it).

Here is what I wrote:

The whole idea that blogging, the phenomenon, had its year in the sun, and now the idea of regular people writing things on the web is all about Facebook and Twitter, is terrible.

That so many abandon what they're doing for another thing because that other new thing is posited as the solution to all of life's problems speaks to our society's continual fascination with the new.

I've traditionally used stand-alone FTP clients like FileZilla and gFTP to interact with the servers I use.

Only recently have I decided to start using the GNOME Nautilus file manager's FTP/SFTP capabilities to manage the content in some of my servers.

Including my Ode server (a shared hosting account). Rather than write up text files in my favorite editor, save them, then start up FileZilla and transfer those files into the proper Ode documents folder, I've been using the file manager as my "window into Ode."

I try to automatically send links to my blog entries to all the social networks on which I maintain accounts (the exception being Google +, which I'm still updating manually).

Over the past couple of years, I've had a thicket of services set up to do this. Some work along, others work together. Some social networks themselves will push their entries to other social networks.

It can all be extremely confusing.

So over the last week or so, I went about disconnecting every helper app I could from my accounts at Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook.

I did this because I had another service in mind to handle all of this.

Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are "hybrid" images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it.

I've spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded "I ran the live CD of Project X and here's what happened" posts.

But I'm in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those "I ran the live CD for an hour" reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it's worth.

My earlier tests of GNOME 3 (in OpenSUSE) were a bit of a bust, and while my tests of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04's live environment went well, I wasn't sufficiently moved enough to take the next step (which I suppose would be throwing over good ol' Debian Squeeze and GNOME 2 for Ubuntu with Unity).

Today I decided to give Fedora 16 and its GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktop a try.