Writing mathematical equations in OpenOffice

I was writing a report which contained some quite intensive mathematical equations. Naturally, my first options would have been the good old LaTeX. But this time my team-mates decided to go with OpenOffice, as they initially thought it would take less time (because of whatever reasons - GUI etc.). Now here I am, writing a part of a report that is filled with some pretty tough-to-write-in-tex equations, and trying to write it in OpenOffice. After a little Googling, I figured that using Lyx to convert my part of the document to OO format would not be easy.

Just for sake of it, I visited the OpenOffice extensions website and searched for latex. Found OOoLatex !!

After downloading from sf.net, installation was simple. In OpenOffice word:

tools -> Extension manager
choose add and add the downloaded file (version 4.0 beta2 at the time of writing).
and restart ooword.

A new toolbar was added.

Since I am working on Linux, I already have latex and ghostscript installed, so I can freely use the 'Equation' mode which makes a png of the equation and saves the LaTeX in the image properties. Although not as easy as plain LaTeX, it certainly saved me from the pain of inserting all the weird Greek symbols and dealing with subscripts and superscripts, with summations and big matrices :D

Nice utility (or better put - bunch of macros) to keep!

Installing Picasa on Windows Server 2008

Normally, if you try to install picasa on winows server 2008, you would get "current user not authorized to install" error. This happens because of some strange reason and seems to work when these steps are done-

Start->Administrative Tools->Server Manager (as admin)
Select "Features" from the list and then click the "Add feature" link.
Select "Desktop Experience" and restart.

After this, I could install picasa and also got a bunch of other regular desktop utilities.