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GUI presentation software, be it PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, KPresenter or anything else, can be quite time-consuming and distracting. If you need to produce editable slideshows ready to be used in any office and think that the cleaner they are the better, but don't like the time it takes to put them together in a GUI, here's a solution: two scripts that take an empty OpenDocument template and insert into it the content of a plain text outline.

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings. This article will describe some simple to follow instruction on how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall performance. Getting the partitioning part done by aligning each partition can rapidly increase a hard drive's performance.

In addition to the T91MT Asus also has a T101MT netbook/tablet hybrid. If you are in the market for a tiny tablet computer you might be like I was, torn between which of these two netbooks to buy - they are fairly close in price!

"Zonker" picks up right where he left off yesterday. In this Spring's Linux Distro Scorecard, he provides brief reviews of Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Mandriva, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu. Today, we get his take on the final three, and he delivers the payoff - the Linux Distro Scorecard - which can be a handy reference during the months ahead.

In my earlier post ‘How to Sell Linux’ I looked at three different ways how to popularize Linux and make it more mainstream as well as a household name. In the post I will look specifically at how I would sell Linux to schools, examining all the aspects of such a deployment and how I would do it and what distro and software I would use.

Next week at Computex, Via Technologies' WonderMedia Technologies subsidiary will demonstrate low-cost Android-based tablets based on the ARM9-based, 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm processor and related "SmartTouch" reference designs. The tablets will be manufactured by a variety of Chinese manufacturers, and sold for as low as $100 in the U.S. later this year, says Bloomberg.

Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year when they combined their mobile Linux operating systems to create MeeGo, an open source platform that is designed to support multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of mobile and embedded device form factors. The project officially launched last month when the source code and initial installable disk images became available.

A trek into homonym hell. Follow along while I attempt to convert the converted. This post is a summary of a conversation I had the other day with an acquaintance of mine. It started out with him asking me what I do for a living and ended up with me having to choke back tears of laughter. I hope you have the same reaction although I realize that it might be one of those, "You had to be there" moments.

Which Linux distro should I use? It's one of the most common questions for new and aspiring Linux users. There's so many to choose from, how can you pick the right one? Let's see if we can help clear it up a little and help you choose between all the other major distros. In order to give each distro its fair share of space, we're breaking this into a two-part series. Today, we'll review Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint and Mandriva. Tomorrow, we'll cover openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu as well as reveal our final "scorecard," which should provide you with a quick reference sheet for comparing Linux distros.

Ubuntu is probably the best known desktop GNU/Linux distribution at street level, picking up new users by word of mouth and astute viral marketing. So much so that for many users new to Linux, Ubuntu has become synonymous with Linux. Linux is Ubuntu; and Ubuntu is Linux. But Linux and free software come in many different flavours, and the adventurous user goes in search of wider options, other distributions and new desktops.

Google’s WebM, an open and royalty-free media format based on the VP8 video codec, was amongst the highlights coming out of Google I/O 2010. After examining the software license, open source pundits questioned whether WebM should, in theory, be classified open source software. The larger question is why Google allowed this debate to occur in the first place, and what it means for your organization when evaluating an “open source product”.

"What do you expect with only 1 GB memory in Vista?" a random second stage Dell support guy just asked me after I told him that the system crashes with a Kernel_Inpage_Error bluescreen. "It's just not sufficient for Video Processing." Find out how the Dell support tried to help and how I fixed the problems - at least for now.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce the arrival of KOffice 2.2.0, half a year after version 2.1 was released. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. There are two reasons for this very high development rate. Firstly, people have started to notice KOffice again and the developer community is growing. Secondly, Nokia is sponsoring development of KOffice for their mobile office viewer. Here follows a list of the most important changes in this release.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc2 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Rapid growth of Linux into corporate and government IT environments is fueling the need for Linux certified professionals. CIOs and managers are eager to have Linux experts in their organizations. A training or certification provides a tangible mechanism for their hiring evaluation, as well as a means to market the prowess of organizations.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer Linux system administration bootcamp on June 3 - 4, 2010 near San Francisco (South Bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas. All attendees get a free Linux laptop.

Ext4, RPM, distro. A plain-English guide to Linux jargon. Linux is growing in popularity but unless you're up to speed with its jargon the open source operating system could make no sense. We offer a short, plain-English guide to some of the key concepts used by Linux users.

Bad news for anyone with an iPhone 3GS: even if you have the latest OS, even if you have a PIN number, even if it isn't jailbroken - it can be hacked by anyone using a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Here's how, step by step.

One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification. As it stands, the HTML5 spec does not specify a video codec. Browser makers are free to use any codec they like, and the big names are split between the patent-backed H.264 and the open source Ogg Theora. In open sourcing VP8 and rolling it into larger media format known as WebM, Google is hoping to create a single open and royalty-free standard for video compression on the web, and though it hasn't specifically called for VP8's inclusion in the HTML5 spec, Mozilla and Opera see no reason to wait.

You need to process lots of data (more than 1 TB)? You want to parallelise across hundreds or thousands of CPUs and you want to make this easy? You need MapReduce for large-scale parallel data processing. You have lower demands? No problem. MapReduce can do that too…