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As our software becomes more Web-centric and our devices cheaper, Linux is becoming the operating system on everyone’s lips for 2009. Sorry, Microsoft. If this week’s news is any indication, you’ve been served.

Microsoft plans to open Office to other file formats, a move the company hopes will placate government and business concerns about document interoperability. Describing this as a step to foster greater transparency, Microsoft intends to document how it incorporated Open Document Format (ODF) support into Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is still in beta. That product is expected to ship sometime in the first half of 2009.

Welcome to the next step in studying for the Linux certification exams. This tutorial series serves as a comprehensive study guide so you can take the exams with confidence. And even if you're not preparing for Linux certification at this time, this series helps you build fundamental skills on Linux systems administration.

Why settle for black and white (or black and green, for that matter) when you can have teal on blue? How's this for a long-overdue follow up. If my powers of site searching don't fail me, we haven't touched on the Z Shell (zsh) since our post, from July 2008 about multiple stream output in zsh which links back to another post on zsh's extended globbing functionality. This post is more of a follow up to that one than the other, but who's counting? ;)

In a mature IT market, it becomes hard to make any significant changes in hardware architecture or software design without upsetting the installed base of legacy users. This, of course, makes the evolution of a product somewhat troublesome. Change must fit within the strict confines of compatibility, ensuring both hardware and software vendors do something useful without upsetting the entire apple cart in the data center - or on our desks and in our laps.

Laziness, impatience, and hubris: the three qualities that make a programmer, according to Larry Wall, the creator of Perl. Perl earned its fame years ago by being the major language driving web programming, and distinguished itself from the rest of the pack by allowing developers to write full-featured programs using nothing but punctuation. Perl 6, which has been in development for the better part of a decade, has shown Larry to be at least one third correct. Which third, however, depends on who you ask.

Learn how to become more productive on windows with a Cygwin Unix Shell.Cygwin is a UNIX®-like environment for the Microsoft® Windows® operating system. It includes a real UNIX shell, a Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) emulation library, and thousands of UNIX utilities ported to Windows.

Yesterday we had published our AMD Linux 2008 Year in Review where we had provided a recap of all major features introduced in their Linux driver over the past year as well as taking the time to re-benchmark every Catalyst driver released this year. We have been doing this process annually going back to 2005, and now it's time to look at the NVIDIA Linux driver releases from this year.

With the proposal that Wine be included in Ubuntu's main repository, it is important to remember that the most important part is how it is integrated into the rest of the system.

I was celebrating Leap Day (February 29) at a London pub with Mark Antony Kent, Head of Technology Strategy at British Telecom, hoping also to pump his brain for insights to follow up on a contentious FCC hearing at Harvard earlier that week???one convened to visit issues around Comcast's valving of BitTorrent traffic.

The week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) meets every six months at changing locations to discuss what will be in the next release of Ubuntu. The mostly unpublicized FOSScamp always meets the weekend before. The FOSScamp un-conference has no program, no invited speakers, and costs nothing. Like some sort of geek Woodstock but smaller, the Ubuntu hip just show up.

The OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (oBAMP) platform provides a powerful point of departure for the creation of dynamic web content. Learn the procedures for running OpenBSD 4.4 with Apache SSL, MySQL 5, and PHP 5.

[I haven't tried this yet, but explanations on how to deal with dynamic Web content in OpenBSD's chrooted Apache environment are few and far between. - Steven]

If you're using SSH or SFTP and lot, you're probably already thinking that scripting your sessions would save you a lot of time. Jeremy M. Jones shows how you can get up and running with your own custom scripts in no time using Python and the paramiko library, which gives you a nice streamlined interface to build your scripts with.

Chipmaker Intel is currently working on Linux support for its next generation of USB, version 3.0. The new bus specification promises a 5 Gbit per second transfer speed, ten times faster than USB 2.0.

vmbuilder is a tool (introduced on Ubuntu 8.10) that allows you to build virtual machines (with Ubuntu as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server. You can afterwards copy the virtual machines to another system (a Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, or VMware Server host) and run them there.

Debian is on the verge of its next major release codenamed "Lenny" - but before it gets released, Debian developers will have to vote on it. Debian developers have until 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, December 21st, 2008 to vote on six key issues collectively titled the Lenny Release General Resolution. In a nutshell, the resolutions deal with re-affirming Debian's Social Contract (which is Debian's guiding document) as well as allowing for Lenny to released with violations of Debian's Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) which dictate the terms of whether or not a given piece of software may be included in Debian.

Pulse is a build server that can monitor your source repository and trigger a build and test cycle every time somebody does a commit. With Pulse you will always know if the most recent sources in your revision control system compile and if they pass your unit and system tests. Better yet, Pulse allows you to build and test your current working copy of checked-out source, during a so-called Personal Build, so you can see if your code breaks things before you commit your changes to the central repository.

It seems that anymore all we hear about Linux and FOSS is it's free of cost, and that desktop Linux is just as good as Windows because it's all pointy-clicky and you don't have to touch the nasty command line which is frightening and must be avoided, and "just like Mac and Windows" you don't have to learn a thing because it's all magic.

Recently Fred Oliver suggested an interesting patches to install Ubuntu Intrepid Server PV DomU at opensolaris 2008.11 (xvm 3.1.4) Dom0 on AMD Opteron based boxes, but not Intel. It appears that well known workaround helping to install mentioned PV DomU at Xen 3.3 Linux Dom0s may be successfully used to apply Fred's patches on Core2Duo based boxes without any virt-install involvement. In general, same technique should work also for RHEL 5.1 , F8 native Dom0s ( xen bits 3.1.2)

Oh woe is i--iPod, iTunes, iBook, iMac. There may be an answer in iLinux.