Windows warrior Dennis O'Reilly takes a look at making Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org's Writer app play nice together‐as nice as possible, anyway. For those dual-booting, rocking OO.org without Word, or managing with both apps is keeping documents uncluttered with pictures and embedded objects, setting OO.org to always save to Word file formats, and changing a few config options to help Writer do a better job of importing files. The two apps will still argue over the occasional font and formatting differences, but O'Reilly's guide can help you find some common ground on your desktop.

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So you've just un-boxed your new laptop, and you've been intrigued by all this talk of Gutsy and Werewolf and the like—but how do you know if a Linux installation will be a revelation or headache? Free Linux guide TuxMobil has more than 7,000 installation stories and guides, covering the tricks and tweaks necessary to get nearly any laptop, PDA or even cell phone up and running with an open source operating system. Between this site and Linux on Laptops, you should be able to find an open source operating system that works on any portable hardware, and save yourself some serious headaches digging through user forums and tech support sites.