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Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts—patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom—but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO—or not—the rise of Linux-based "netbooks", multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...). We look forward to seeing what 2009—and beyond!—will bring.

'Spy' photos of the forthcoming Android-based Kogan Agora caused a kerfuffle, but there's a noticeable difference between what was shown and what will ship. The basic model will be priced at $A299, or you could shell out an extra hundred bucks for the Pro version with a 2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS. Don't forget that these are outright prices for unlocked phones.

Shepherding the safety of your data by keeping the sheep confused ;)

When checking out a recent daily LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope), the migration wizard found in the Ubiquity installer now supports migrating files from an Ubuntu installation. With Ubuntu 7.04 the Ubuntu Migration Assistant was introduced into the LiveCD installer to automatically transfer documents, pictures, bookmarks, and even the wallpaper from a Microsoft Windows installation on the hard drive over to Ubuntu. Two years later it's now beginning to work nicely if you want to transfer your documents and settings from an earlier Ubuntu Linux installation into a fresh Ubuntu installation. Right now though the only option we were presented with is for transferring our Mozilla Firefox settings and bookmarks from an Ubuntu 8.10 setup into this latest Jaunty build...

Vietnam's minister of information and communications, Le Doan Hop, has reportedly asked national and local government IT workers to switch all servers to source software prior to June 30, 2009. Hop also reportedly mandated that all government workers use open source in their jobs prior to 2010. The paper suggests Hop explicitly endorsed OpenOffice, Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox, and Unikey, a Vietnamese typing program.

For the first couple of weeks I was thrilled with the little laptop. I was less than pleased with the stock gOS Linux implementation but once I replaced it with a Linux distribution that actually had the proper support and drivers for the hardware I was really, really happy. I used the little Sylvania for everything. Then, like the Toshiba, it started having an intermittent problem.

How many Linux systems are deployed worldwide? Would you like to know the answer to that question?

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is on the front lines of the battle against global climate change. Their mission? To convince you that saving power is good for both Mother Earth and the bottom line. The Green Penguin chats with Pat Tiernan, Climate Savers' new executive director, to see what the future holds for this green-IT organization.

At its core, gOS 3.1 Gadgets is built from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Modifications include a bright green theme, several changes to the distribution’s default applications, and an increased emphasis on web-based applications -- especially Google’s.

When it comes to monitoring your Linux system, few tools can rival Conky. This lightweight system monitoring utility can help you to keep an eye on virtually any aspect of your system, and it offers a huge list of options to choose from.

FreeBSD has had IPv6 support in the base operating system since its early versions. This support has become more mature in recent releases. We cover the basic configuration for IPv6 in this article like - Classless Interdomain Routing, Network Address Translation, CIDR, NAT, IPv6 Facts, ARP, Addressing in FreeBSD, Interface Configuration, Multicast Routing, Tunneling.

Asus might have lost the netbook war to Acer, but it is fighting back as far as the keyboard PC wars are concerned. With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still a day away in Vegas, the geeky and gadgetry announcements are coming thick and fast. We've already got a taster of the new AMD Yukon platform and now we have the weirdest of wonderful concepts from Asus. The Eee Keyboard PC.

[It looks great. No word about the OS yet, but the pics remind me of Plasma or OpenMoko, so it may be Linux -- Sander]

I've been a Linux user for some years now, and I've decided to start documenting the process I went trough. Today I might be seen as a Linux guru from the point of view of a starting user, from the point of view of a Linux guru I'm probably more seen as a starting user. I see myself as an intermediate, but even as my knowledge level might not be top level, On this day I do manage a business network, a few mail servers and web servers running a few hundred web sites. I do all this with relative ease and I could not have known I would be doing so much with Linux on the moment I started going down this path.

SSH, the "secure shell", is the workhorse of secure remote system administration. SSH is a very strong protocol, and you can make it even stronger by using encryption keys in instead of passwords. Jeremy M. Jones shows us how.

See how you can change the process-execution flow in the target Linux Power systems and overwrite a local variable in 32- and 64-bit modes to correct buffer overflow.

This is a quick tutorial for setting up DomainKeys on Ubuntu (I used 6.06 LTS - but should work the same on others) using dkim-filter with Postfix so emails from your domain will not constantly end up in Yahoo's spam filter.

Cisco Systems is claiming that international interest in its recently launched contest for router-centric application development has been so strong that it must extend the first-phase deadline from Jan. 12 to Feb. 27.

From the 'it's not there yet' files: In my opinion, one of the greatest innovations of the Firefox 2 release was the inclusion of Tab Overflow. For the first time I could actually handle as many open browser tabs as I wanted. While Mozilla introduced Tab overflow in 2006, here we are in 2009 and Google Chrome doesn't have that feature. For someone like me that often keeps 10+ tabs open at any one time this is a (minor) problem.

As appears debootstrap RPM developed for Fedora 9 works fine at Xen 3.3.1 CentOS 5.2 Dom0 and provide an option to create Intrepid Server PV Guest via debootstrapped Ubuntu’s image in RH’s Xen Dom0 environment. Install F9’s rpm then debootstrap would understand non Ubuntu Environment.

Having met so many of you at Akademy last year, I am now glad to notify you guys that we have approval from Bayero University Kano Nigeria to host the Free and Open Source Nigeria 2009 conference on 6th to 9th March. We want to invite KDE contributors and users including organisations and companies who want to come and give talks or workshops during the event. We are expecting more than 2000 participants from within and outwith the university. We will be glad to receive guests from all over the world, especially people with vast experiences in open source.