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One of the great advantages of the OpenDocument format is that it is simply a zip file. You can unzip it with any archiver and take a look at the contents (which is a set of XML documents and associated data), change it, re-zip it and you have a new document. But, the OpenDocument Format specification, section has one little extra restriction when it comes to zip containers. The file called “mimetype” must be at the beginning of the zip file, it must be uncompressed and it must be stored without any additional file attributes. If you don't do this then many applications (such as Officeshots.org) may refuse to open your documents. In this article I will show you how to correctly create ODF documents using zip.

Ubuntu has caught on for the desktop but what about in the world of servers? I think you're about to see a shift in the balance among the "big three" server distros.

Medical imaging is an essential, non-invasive, routine activity performed by radiographers and radiologic technologists. It is a discipline of the health profession which involves using technology to capture images of the human body.

The Linux Foundation has announced sessions for its Collaboration Summit, scheduled for Apr. 14-16 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This year's event features a full-day workgroup on MeeGo, as well as discussions of Linux topics including toolchain, cloud computing, printing, filesystems, ISV porting, and open source compliance.

Social networking and voting site Digg is rewriting its underlying software infrastructure in an effort to improve performance and scalability. Part of that effort involves moving away from the MySQL database that has helped to power Digg since its creation. In MySQL's place, Digg is going with an open source NoSQL non-relational database called Cassandra that was originally created by Facebook. As part of the migration effort from MySQL to Cassandra, Digg developers built a tool to help move data from one database to the other. The tool could soon be open source, helping other developers make the same move.

On Sunday at SCALE 8x, Inkscape developer Jon Cruz presented a talk entitled "Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You," putting the need for color management into real-world terms for the average Linux user, outlining current development work on the subject at the application and toolkit levels, and giving example color-managed workflows for print and web production. Color management is sometimes unfairly characterized as a topic of interest only to print shops and video editors, but as Cruz explained at the top of his talk, anyone who shares digital content wants it to look correct, and everyone who uses more than one device knows how tricky that can be.

Open Source For America (OSFA), an organisation created to promote the use of open source in government, has denounced the IIPA's "Special 301" call saying it is irresponsible and misleading. The International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) had called for the US Trade Representative to place countries such as Indonesia, Brazil and India, on a "Special 301" watch list, normally reserved for dictatorships or repressive regimes, because the governments advocate the use of open source. OSFA say that this request is "both irresponsible and misleading in its characterisation of OSS".

Firefox 3.6—the latest version of the popular open source Web browser—was officially released in January, but there are still many users who have not yet updated. In an effort to increase awareness about the availability of version 3.6, Mozilla announced today that it will start rolling out upgrade notifications to its users through the browser's built-in update system. According to Mozilla's statistics, the new version has already been downloaded over 100 million times since its release in January. That doesn't include the significant number of existing users who have already migrated to 3.6 by using the browser's built-in upgrade system without being prompted to do so.

Today seems to be a very good day for GNOME photo managers. After Shotwell 0.5 release, gThumb got a really nice extension which many of you I'm sure have been waiting for. Read on!

After twitter, now is Digg who decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Casandra, an opensource project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for delivery in the second half of this year. While we already know that it’s headed for netbooks, there are new reasons to believe that its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets. Google is taking several big gambles with its upcoming OS, not the least of which is that it will require users to work with all data in the cloud. That will rule out countless applications and utilities that are, in some cases, beloved to users, and there is a good chance that Google’s cloud-only gamble could backfire. But what if Google adopts an “if you can’t beat them, join them” strategy with its Linux-based operating system, and oversees its shipment on netbooks and tablet devices alongside other OSes? If the idea sounds far-fetched, check out the video below from Mobile World Congress, in which Freescale shows a $199 tablet computer concept that runs Chromium OS (the open-source core of Chrome OS), Linux and Android.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) allows you to log into a full desktop on a remote server (as opposed to just opening windows on your local machine, as with X11 over SSH). It can be very useful, and it's very fast to set up.

You can use a dedicated application like FBReader or Calibre to read and manage ebooks on your machine, or you can do it without leaving the convenience of the Firefox browser courtesy of the EPUBReader extension.

The Linux Foundation has announced sessions for its Collaboration Summit, scheduled for Apr. 14-16 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This year's event features a full-day workgroup on MeeGo, as well as Linux sessions ranging from cloud computing to desktop distros to open source compliance.

Canonical is burying Ubuntu's traditional brown theme and is adopting a new visual style for version 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. The new theme was revealed last week as part of Canonical's broader effort to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity. The new theme includes a richer color palette and a number of stylistic enhancements. The change that has generated the most controversy is the placement of the window management buttons in the left-hand side of the titlebar. In response to some of the concerns that have been raised by users, Canonical designer Ivanka Majic has written a blog entry that describes the reasons behind the change. Majic is also seeking additional feedback from the Ubuntu community.

The CE Linux Forum (CELF) has opened registration and announced speakers for its Embedded Linux Conference on Apr. 12-14 in San Francisco. The event will feature keynote speakers Greg Kroah-Hartman and Matt Asay, and offer over 50 sessions on embedded Linux topics including flash file-systems, RT-Preempt, security, Moorestown, and Android.

As Phyllis Diller would attest, a face lift isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most things — legalese included — can use a good going over from time to time, and that's just what the good people at Mozilla will be doing this year. The face being lifted, as it were, is the well-known Mozilla Public License, the legal agreement that covers use of the organization's many software projects. The original MPL, version 1.0, was released some twelve years ago, the result of what Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker describes as "frantic drafting." A second version (1.1) followed, and continues to be the license in force for Mozilla users everywhere.

In this article by Andrew Schwabe, we will learn how to setup the basic structure of a website using CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language), and adding the capability to render any page as a PDF dynamically using Railo open source.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a CentOS 5.4 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

There's a lot Linux can not do(yet) but you'll be suprised what it's already being used for. Look at this: a microwave running Linux (yes we can!) and a washing machine also.