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Why do you need an article on building slide shows in Impress? You don't, in one sense, because the application is simple enough for anyone who has ever seen a slide show to figure out. If you want, you can just plunge in and learn by doing. However, if you take the time to learn, you'll find that OpenOffice.org has two tools to help you organize and automate the process -- and, ultimately, to help you save time.

At my college, I have volunteered to teach faculty, staff, and students the advantages of using Linux. After doing it for a couple of years, I have come up with a few tips that others might find helpful when showing new Linux users the ropes. Here's a look.

A Gartner study from earlier this year suggests that a skills shortage will leave companies scrambling in vain to find qualified help. However, open source developers say there's an adequate supply of potential employees with the skills they have. "The difficulty is not so much if they exist. It's finding the right people," says Jon Masters, a Red Hat Linux kernel engineer who also works on the real-time kernel team and helps support third-party drivers on Enterprise Linux distributions. He says that the supply of competent Linux and open source software types will be enough to meet the demand.

Developers have created an easy way to load Android, Google Inc.'s mobile phone operating system that is still in the works, on Nokia Corp.'s N810 open-source handheld devices. The development is of interest to people who are trying to build applications for Android rather than to general users. "So, from the point of view of someone who just wants to use his N800 and doesn't necessarily want to experiment for the sake of experimenting, what does running Android get me?" one person asked on the Internet Tablet Talk Web site that is sharing the technique for loading the software on the devices.

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today issued the following statement in response to Carl Icahn's latest open letter to Yahoo! stockholders:..

Previously, I introduced my theory of the Difficulty Divide. Itâ??s a concept that Iâ??ve used for several years when talking about why I use Linux, and why some people may give up on it. I also promised that I would present on how Iâ??ve modified it in recent years to reflect the current state of things. Before I do that though, I think some clarification is in order. Take a look.

You probably know the open source 3-D modeler Blender for its animation tools, which have brought audiences short films Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. But Blender can create realistic 3-D models for any purpose, as Allan Brito's Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery (Packt Publishing, $45) presents. This book approaches Blender as an architecture visualization tool, detailing the features built in to the editor and the techniques that make architectural modeling differ from crafting game or video effects.

You may find this useful to rename MP3 or image files in a directory, so they will all look the same. The following script will work on directories with less than 100 files of the same type, and will rename all of them to file01, file02, file03, ... and so on.

Sometimes, you can learn things by watching your Linux system perform an update. A few weeks ago, I was updating one of my Ubuntu systems, when I saw that "lshw" was one of the items that was getting updated. So, I pulled up its man page to see what it's about.

Gary Richmond at Freesoftware Magazine looks at Acers' Aspire One, the leatest ultra portable laptop computer to feature GNU/Linus. It runs Linpus Linux Lite (a hacked version of Fedora 8) and so at last we have a version of Linux not tainted with kernel source code issues and GPL violations which characterised Xandros on the Asus EeePC. Read the full story at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/acers_linpus_lin...">FSM

The Gentoo Linux project team today announced the availability of its "2008.0" release of Gentoo. New features of the developer-oriented Linux distribution include an updated installer, improved hardware support, reworked profiles, and a switch from Gnome to Xfce for its LiveCD, says the team.

HP's entry into the sub-Mini-Notebook arena comes in the form of the HP 2133, a sleek-looking, brushed aluminum finished, lightweight but well built beauty. You can see the attention to detail in the engineering when you first open it up. From the sturdy hinge to the scratch resistant display and connectivity options you'll find just about everything you would expect in an ultra-mobile laptop.

Security vendor AVG has issued an updated version of its AVG 8 anti-virus software that fixes the fake traffic issue that has caused a huge online backlash amongst web masters the world over...

Open source technology luminary Stormy Peters has been appointed executive director of the GNOME Foundation, effective immediately. The GNOME Foundation is committed to the task of advancing the GNOME desktop for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. As executive director, Peters will be responsible for marketing GNOME to the public and attracting new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community. Peters says she brings the strength of her relationships with businesses and community members to her new job. "I've worked a lot in the past explaining how the community works to enterprises, explaining how enterprises work to community members and helping them work effectively together."

As Xandros digests Linspire, what does the deal mean to Linux market leaders like Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu â?? and would-be Linux customers? Here are some clues from The VAR Guy.

Back in April we had looked at the ECS A780GM-A, which was a nice low-cost motherboard and had worked well under Linux with the newer desktop distributions. This motherboard had integrated Radeon HD 3200 graphics, which we had found to perform well and equivalent to a Radeon HD 2400PRO discrete graphics card. However, for those interested in NVIDIA graphics, there is the GeForce 8200 IGP that also performs well on Linux. If you are interested in the GeForce 8200 chipset, today we are looking at two of the cost-effective motherboards deploying this chipset: the ECS GF8200A Black and ASRock K10N78FullHD-hSLI.

Alternative Find and Replace for Writer (AltSearch) has the ambitious goal of replacing and enhancing one of the most basic pieces of OpenOffice.org functionality. It's undermined by a chaotic interface, but if you have the patience to continue past first impressions, you will find AltSearch comes far closer to fulfilling its promise than you might initially imagine.

Well, July 4th may have come and gone, but another independence recently came to pass that could be almost as historic. That's Microsoft's independence from Bill Gates, of course, and it was a hot topic last week as bloggers at ZDNet and elsewhere wondered if the change might bring about a Redmond that's kinder and gentler to the open source world.

Today's ISP environment requires authenticated SMTP to be able to send emails. As a policy, authenticated SMTP helps cut down on folks sending SPAM and allows the ISP to track which account is sending what type of email content for further demographic study. While authenticated SMTP is good for the ISP, it is not a configuration supported out of the box by most Linux distributions. This means that all those system emails and log reports emailed by root never make it anywhere anymore.

Apple and Adobe have both gotten some press lately for going to the trademark police after a couple of small business people had the audacity to publicize their products by including corporate trademarks in their business name.