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Many times, shell scripts evolve into menu-based scripts, and the scripter wants to display more to users than simply scrolling text. Regardless of the complexity, scripters have always needed a way to change their output to bold, underline it, reverse the highlights, and so on. That's where tput comes into play.

"Twice a year I get to release the song & lyrics, and write a little commentary on something the project dealt with other [than] the release. Hope you guys enjoy," said OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt, including a link to the latest OpenBSD song. The OpenBSD project maintains a six month release cycle, with the upcoming 4.3 release officially scheduled for May 1st, 2008. Each release includes a song relevant to issues faced by the project during the past six months. The song for the upcoming 4.3 release is titled, "Home to Hypocrisy", with scathing references to some recent postings on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list by Free Software Foundation creator Richard Stallman.

With 4 million routers now enabled to be Linux application servers, the world's greatest networking vendor is the penguin's biggest fan.

With tinc you can create a virtual private network (VPN) that lets you communicate between two machines over an insecure network such as the Internet with all of your traffic encrypted between the hosts on your virtual network. Another interesting application for tinc is connecting your laptop to a Wi-Fi router at home. You might already be using WPA2 to ensure that only valid hosts can connect and communicate with your Wi-Fi router, but you might not be able to assign a fixed address to the laptop when it is connected over Wi-Fi. So if you want to connect to an SSH daemon on the laptop itself or access an NFS share on the laptop, you have to play guessing games as to which IP address the Wi-Fi router has given the laptop this time.

It's been a long time in the making, but the xf86-video-radeonhd 1.2 driver has just been pushed out the door. RadeonHD 1.2 is the first new release for this open-source ATI R500/600 driver since December of last year. The RadeonHD 1.2 driver includes support for new AMD graphics processors, 2D XAA/EXA acceleration, and other changes.

I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation.

One of the great things about Linux is the ability to not only install it on your home desktop computer, but the ability to install it on a USB Key. Installing Linux on a USB Key makes it very mobile and today I am pleased to review a commercial version of Linux on USB key called Mandriva Flash 2008.

Mandriva Linux is a predominantly KDE-centric Linux distribution originating from France. This desktop-oriented Linux distribution which began its production in 1998 owes its popularity to its ease of installation and graphical productive draktools. I decided to review Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (aka Mandriva Linux 2008.1) when I got to know that, this new Spring edition has a full support for the Asus Eee PC and also improved support for mobile device synchronization.

As the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS rapidly approaches, the all important question is beginning to form in everyone's mind. Upgrade, or freshly install. It's always an interesting discussion to have with fellow Linux users, because there seems to be an almost religious divide between the two camps. Some feel that to really get the full experience of a new version, a clean install is the only way.

They say that every dog has its day. Could the growing popularity of Asus's low-cost EEE notebook launch Puppy Linux into the limelight? The EEE (pictured at right) comes with Xandros Linux, by default, with Windows XP also an option on the newest model. But there's a third dog in the race now, and one that's capable of running circles around either of the weightier contenders.

The annual conclave of free graphics software developers, users, and artists known as the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is set for May 8-11 in Wroclaw, Poland, this year. LGM organizers are holding a fund-raising campaign this week to help volunteer developers travel to the event. Now in its third year, LGM gathers programmers, users, and designers representing all of the major free graphics applications -- the GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus -- and other apps, plus related projects like OpenICC and the Open Clip Art Library. The conference allows the developers to collaborate, share ideas and code, cooperate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another. End users and artists are an integral part of LGM, too, participating in meetings with developers, showcasing work, and contributing tutorials.

As you may recall, six US states considered open format bills last year. One of them was Texas, where the result was to charge a committee to do further research and make recommendations about what the Longhorn State should do with its documents. A few days ago, I gave testimony at a hearing before that committee along with ODF Alliance members, Microsoft, and others. Here's what the hearing was like.

Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit.

When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

The ISO has taken over control of the Open XML specification and started a committee to consider harmonization with the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Wednesday was the last day that all resolutions to the new standard, called ISO/IEC 29500, were accepted, according to Brian Jones, a program manager for office at Microsoft who has been involved in the standardization process.

Nevada build 85 id the first SNV build implementing Xen 3.1.2 bits. It's well known that straight forward attempt to install SNV85 DomU at Xen 3.2 Linux Dom0 immediatelly crashes due to broken by Xen 3.2 backward compatibility.

I've been using OpenBSD for a few months now, and one of the problems I've had is the inability to find the master configuration file for .fvwmrc. I've read the man page for fvwm but didnt' read it closely enough. The answer was there all the time. I've grown quite fond of the Fvwm window manager. These days I prefer it to Fluxbox, even, and I have OpenBSD to thank for introducing me to it. (Note: I didn't have the same feeling about Twm, the default window manager in FreeBSD. Even though Fvwm is based on Twm, the former is way, way better than the latter.)

Hardware is always getting faster and with it Windows increases it's system requierments, but Linux does not. In time, this could be an important factor driving Linux's success.

An online retailer specializing in mini-ITX boards, systems, and accessories has started selling mini-ITX and pico-ITX systems pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. Logic Supply says that as a Canonical Solution Provider partner, it has staff ready to support approved systems under the popular desktop and server Linux OS.

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.