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The steps for setting up any mail-merge document in OpenOffice are easy; the one potentially gnarly bit is creating your contacts database in the first place. Your contacts list must be in Base, which is a bit of a pain. But the good news is Base can import data from most other databases, spreadsheets, text-delimited files, and email address books.

A year has passed since Linden Lab, maker of the popular 3-D virtual world Second Life, released the source code to its Second Life viewer under the GNU GPL. In that time, a viable community of developers has grown up around the SL code, and the company is pleased enough with the success that it has branched out further into open source and open standards.

Apple has been battling renegade Linux hackers, upgrading the iPhone's firmware every time they hack into the device. "It has been a little bit of an arms war," said Saurik, aka Jay Freeman. Will things change now that Apple has opened up its SDK to developers, welcoming the gaming community and targeting the enterprise space?

Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project. Adding insult to injury, I was asked to stop working with Walter Bender...I was to report instead to a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPC technology.

TorrentFlux is a BitTorrent client that runs on top of a server running Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It extends the functionality of traditional clients by operating almost entirely through a Web browser interface. It uses the BitTornado client in the background to manage the queuing, downloading, and seeding of torrent files. You can run TorrentFlux on your home machine and access it through a folder on a Web server. You can also install it on an external host to increase bandwidth and transfer speeds.

A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford.

A change to GCC for a recent release coupled with a kernel bug has created a messy situation, with possible security implications. GCC changed some assumptions about x86 processor flags, in accordance with the ABI standard, that can lead to memory corruption for programs built with GCC 4.3.0. No one has come up with a way to exploit the flaw, at least yet, but it clearly is a problem that needs to be addressed.

What good is a mobile computing environment if you can't keep track of your favorite news feeds on the go? Even though you can use Android's browser to read your favorite Web sites, you'll miss the chance to integrate RSS or XML data with other mobile applications to make your own mash-ups. This tutorial shows you how to use the Android Developer Tools to read, parse, and display XML data.

Only rarely is something new written or said that cuts through the fog of war that has come to surround the battle over OOXML. A few days ago in South Africa, someone did just that, and that’s what I’ve written about today.

Coming just a day after AMD had opened up their production microcode from their proprietary drivers for the R100 to R600 GPUs, a significant milestone has been reached in the road to open-source 3D graphics capabilities for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. We now have hardware-accelerated glxgears!

The looming Google Android vs. Apple iPhone battle could resemble the old Windows vs. Mac OS war from more than a decade ago. Here’s why.

Drupal is a modular content management system. It allows a user or group of users to construct Web sites, blogs, or forums by providing the framework for users with little or no PHP or database experience. It grows more popular with each new release because it becomes easier to use each new release. Drupal 6.0 (and 6.1) were recently released after a year of development. The new features and improvements make for an impressive content management platform.

This document describes how to set up PC-BSD v1.5. This release is based upon FreeBSD 6.3 and uses KDE 3.5.8 as default desktop environment. Taken from the PC-BSD page: PC-BSD is a complete desktop operating system, which has been designed with the "casual" computer user in mind. It offers the stability and security that only a BSD-based operating system can bring, while as the same time providing a comfortable user experience, allowing you to get the most out of your computing time. With PC-BSD you can spend less time working to fix viruses or spyware and instead have the computer work for you.

This hands-on review compares and contrasts two computing appliances that run Linux on Via C7-M processors. The Zonbu Zonbook and the gOS Cloudbook are both manufactured by Everex, and cost about the same up-front, but that's where the resemblance ends, our reviewer found.

You can find Linux clients for several file-sharing networks. Taking into account how many clients are available for each, the current top three peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are eDonkey2000, FastTrack (derived from Kazaa), and Gnutella. Here are some desktop applications that allow you to become a full-fledged file sharer.

I was doing some research on a paper I am writing about open source usability practices when it hit me..

Remember I told you I've noticed that people who don't support Microsoft's agenda end up the victim of smear campaigns? The New Zealand Open Source Society is reporting that an employee at Microsoft recently sent an email to one of the technical bodies advising an NB involved in the OOXML ISO process, smearing a man's reputation, Matthew Holloway, apparently to undermine his technical input which was critical of OOXML. Standards New Zealand was took the claims so seriously that they responded to parties who received this email. The New Zealand Open Source Society has all the gruesome details, and the reason I'm highlighting it here, aside from wanting to help undo a wrong, is because NZOSS request that if the slur, or others like it, has spread to other NBs or advisory bodies that you please direct them to the defense of Mr. Holloway's good name and reputation by Standards New Zealand on that page.

The second release candidate, codenamed Aceras, for Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (2008.1) is now available.

In the last week quite a few ideas have risen to the top of Brainstorm that point out that could improve Ubuntu in small, but important, ways.

A web-friendly and easy to maintain version of Eclipse has been penciled in for delivery two years from now. E4, as it's being called, has been pegged for 2010, with a working concept prototype ready for next year's EclipseCon.