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Making the switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice can save you a lot of money on licensing fees, and it isn't difficult--most people get used to the changes quickly. But if you've been using MS Office for the best part of a decade and learned a few of its tricks along the way, you may find yourself baffled about how to do certain tasks in OpenOffice. Here are a few tips on using Writer, Calc and Impress.

Zend Technologies, which released PHP 5 last week, announced on Monday that it has launched the Zend PHP certification program, to be offered through the mobile testing facility it is hosting at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention on July 26-30 in Portland, Oregon.

Two and a half years after its chief executive donned the suit of Linux's penguin mascot on an exhibition stage, Sun seems to have fallen out of love with the open-source operating system. Last week the firm detailed plans to focus attention largely on its own Solaris operating system for server lines, on a range of hardware platforms including Sparc, AMD Opteron, x86 and, potentially, Itanium and Power chips.

Oracle is fully committed to supporting the Linux operating system. In fact, Oracle was the first commercial database available on Linux.

Telstra has shaken Microsoft and won a keener commercial relationship with the software giant by talking up its enthusiasm for open-source software. Telstra technology, innovation and products group managing director Ted Pretty last week said the Linux threat had benefited the telco.

The menace of spam has pushed Lloyds Steel Industries to upgrade its mail server, for which the company has initiated a complete evaluation of both Microsoft and Linux based mailing solutions.

This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. The first 2 parts covered the Hardware and core OS. In this third part we look at security, the file system, file management and throw in a couple of other random ideas for good measure.

"Content Management System" (CMS) is an expression that is widely used in relation to Web site development and maintenance today. Maybe even more than widely: the search for "Content Management System" returned 2,190,000 results pages from Google. What's so special about it? Is a CMS a must for any individual or company that owns a Web site? Can you do without it? If you know the answers to these questions, you don't have to read any further - this article is for those who want to find out what a CMS is and whether they need it at all.

Open Country, a Linux desktop and server software management vendor, launched as a company last week with the aim of helping enterprises lower Linux network administration costs on the cheap.

Mark Barrenechea, the ex-Oracle exec behind this move, agreed to reply to my questions. And since then, he's been promoted to replace Tony Gaughan as senior vice president of development at the company. So here's your chance to get a glimpse inside the mind of who seems to be CA's "Open Source crusader". We thank Mr. Barrenechea for the chance of this exclusive interview with The INQ.

Although many open source enthusiasts have an almost reverent attitude towards technology, data center managers have specific business problems to solve, and judge technology only on how well it solves those problems. Let’s examine the requirements that are specific to data centers and see if open source technologies can meet them.

Last week, Grashopper released their newest version of Pagestream desktop publishing software for Linux. PageStream5.0, available in standard and professional versions, runs on x86 Linux installations with Gnome+2.0/GTK+2.0 packages or newer and at least 30MB of hard drive space.

Starting today, all logged in readers of LXer can view the full queue of stories that are not yet posted, and they can vote on stories before they make it to the front page. Click below to read more.

Turn your data and functions into professional-looking graphs with Gnuplot 4.0, a freely distributed plotting tool. In this article, get a hands-on guide to gnuplot that emphasizes the idioms you'll need to use this tool effectively.

nfobridge this week announced DownloadOpenOffice.org, a new website that offers free downloads and support for OpenOffice.org software. For the first time ever, downloaders have access to a professional online support staff free of charge. Before DownloadOpenOffice.org, users had to take it upon themselves to hunt for support options after downloading OpenOffice.org, the wildly popular open source office suite downloaded over 20 million times.