OpenDocument format offers a new approach to data storage and document exchange for office applications. But what does ODF mean for the user? What’s inside an ODF file? How portable is ODF? We examine these questions in this month’s cover story.

Spammers charge real money for their dubious services, and hundreds of advertisers are willing to pay. We’ll show you some innovative techniques for controlling and containing spam, including strategies for slowing down spam bots, keeping spammers from getting your address, and separating spam from legitimate email.

Gnome’s integrated burning tool is fine for simple tasks, but if you need to do more than just back up a couple of documents on a CD, you might prefer a more powerful program like Brasero.

This month, we examine two Gnome programs: Tomboy gives users Wiki-style notepad management, and Searchparty helps Google users find people with similar interests. We’ll also report on WW2D and the Debian-Private mailing list.

You can create a pleasing image by aligning multiple landscapes to form a panorama. But the alignment can be tricky, especially if the individual photos do not match.Tools like Hugin,Enblend,and Autopano-SIFT help you create that perfect seamless panorama.

In this final part of our three-part series [1][2],we’ll put the finishing touches on our Linux newspaper. You’ll learn how to generate a PDF,and you’ll find out what a real pre-press professional thinks about our project.

Kontact gives you email,address books,and calendaring in a neat package. And IMAP supportmeans you can access this data from anywhere on the network.