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OpenOffice Impress is an excellent slideshow application with a wealth of useful features, including animations. Experienced speakers know that animations are more often distracting than helpful, but one very useful animation is zooming in to enlarge small details. Rob Reilly shows us how.

There has been some concern among enthusiasts that the emerging netbook market is nothing but a fad - it's fun and interesting now, but it will die out soon enough. Intel and AMD sure seem to be very careful about the netbook market, but according to figures from DisplaySearch, the market for small notebooks has exploded over the course of a year.

Follow along in this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series of articles that covers the new features found in PHP V5.3. Here in Part 2, we look at closures and lambda functions. They are designed to make programming easier by allowing you to define throwaway functions that can be used in many contexts.

Oh no! I spent all that time learning CSS and weaving my tortuous path through many a messed up website, until I finally figured out what works and what doesn't...at least for me. Now Andrew and Yank come along (yeah, I know...sounds like a comedy team) and tell me I've got it wrong? Egad! But wait! There's hope. After all, of the hundreds and hundreds of CSS books and other resources out there, how can a single book containing a mere 116 pages rewrite everything that came before it? That's what we're here to find out.

So, which Web browser has the most software bugs: Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox? uTest, a fast-growing marketplace for software testing, uncovered some rather intriguing answers. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

Hewlett-Packard is set to offer Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop bundle on one of its desktop PCs. The HP Compaq dc5850, which is aimed at schools and small-to-medium-sized businesses, will be available in the US from mid-December. Besides SuSE, it will come with the OpenOffice.org office suite and other applications. Users can also download more than 40 free education-related software applications for teachers and students, along with school administration applications.

Hey Star Trek fans, do you remember the Tholian web? It was sort of an outer space spider web that ensnared the starship Enterprise and threatened to end that five-year mission. I bring that up because two announcements this week -- one by Google, a second by Appcelerator -- look like a few more strands in the open source web threatening to stall starship Microsoft.

Cisco said it was disappointed by the lawsuit, saying it takes its open source software obligations and responsibilities seriously. "We are currently reviewing the issues raised in the suit but believe we are substantially in compliance. We have always worked very closely with the FSF and hope to reach a resolution agreeable to the company and the foundation." Cisco is one of the leading contributors to the Linux kernel. Cisco also is holding a $100,000 contest for Linux developers and uses the open source operating system with its AXP router module as well.

We can debate all we want to about whether Linux will ever beat Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS X on the computer's desktop. To be honest though, the opinion that matters to me the most is my own opinion. Except for the occasional hardware compatibility issue, Linux is the operating system I have found to be the most dependable. I know what most of you are thinking and let me address what is on your mind at this very moment. No, I'm not blinded with nerd goggles. In fact, I'm currently writing this post from a Windows Vista PC while my wife in the next room is on her MacBook Pro. Windows and OS X have earned their roles on the computer stage and I would be the last person to dismiss these great operating systems. However, these days I'm finding that Linux has just as much of a right to this stage when debating the value of operating systems.

To address the Big Issues, one needs to spend less time pushing papers and more effort fighting Microsoft’s (and others’) expansion of software patent laws — or alternatively back doors — into more countries. The suppressors want universal consent that Microsoft owns all sorts of algorithms and that Free software therefore becomes illegitimate or “not free”.

"It was a real opportunity to demonstrate two open source projects working together," Newton says, providing a way for the two to take advantage of the strengths of each platform, and using CMIS to blend the two systems together. "The Joomla! guys have a built a way of accessing Alfresco to be able to search and browse from Alfresco using CMIS," Newton said.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, December 10, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 36. In today's news, we find that Linux and free software are under attack, by school teachers, that Jon maddog Hall is ready to set Obama straight on free software, that there's more than one open source office suite, and that the Chinese government may be using Linux for dastardly purposes!

Adobe Air is getting an open source rival with Appcelerator Titanium, a new platform designed to let web developers build installable desktop and mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Googleton Mountain View, California-based Appcelerator on Monday cooked up a public preview release of Titanium for Windows and Mac. The Linux version apparently needs to stay in the oven until January 2009.

Hi All, Here's the 20th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You need to obtain information regarding the current state of your slapd instance":

File under: what the bloody hell is that all about then? It would seem that the silly season is upon us already as we hear of a Texas teacher with her knickers in a twist over Linux in the classroom.

YouTube has a rather frivolous reputation, the sort of site you might visit to see a video of snowboarding hamsters or jetpacking gerbils. It wasn’t until I started re-learning the guitar, learning to play the piano too and sight reading sheet music that I began to realize that YouTube was a great source of online tutorials. The quality varies from the execrable to the sublime, but I found sufficient quality material to start wondering how I might best use YouTube to organize my digital music lessons. As a committed GNU/Linux user I wondered how to make the most of my distro’s ability to manage my viewing and download experience. Unixland is a free country full of choice and here are the choicest tips, tools, tricks and applications to get the best out of YouTube. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Nepal's first FOSS Training and Research Center is opened at Brihaspati Vidyasadan School (BVS) at Naxal, Kathmandu, Nepal. This Center has been made possible by the financial help from Help Nepal Network and BVS Alumni and technical help from FOSS Nepal, the community involved in spreading free and open source technologies in Nepal.

ubuntu-system-panel is a simple launcher for the GNOME desktop, providing easy access to Places, Applications and common configuration items for your computer. This guide shows how to install and configure it on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric. This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

[Too much cool stuff on this list! - Scott]

Linux has been doing pretty well in China, with recent year-on-year sales going through the roof. However, there can be no escaping the global economic crisis, not even for Chinese Linux.