Jose Luis Landivar Chavez, vice president of sales and marketing for Elastix, discusses his company's appliance, which complements its GPL software PBX. Chavez talks about the overall PBX market, how open source is taking it over, and about the innovations that distinguish his company's solution from others.

The ability to save user settings can come in handy if you want to make your OpenOffice.org solutions more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. In this article, we take a look at how to save user settings in a plain text file and then retreive them from there.

If you've ever asked for help with your Windows computer that won't boot anymore, you've probably been told to "Backup all your data and then reinstall"… but if you can't boot, how can you get to your data? That's the question we'll be answering today.

For the first time we are making codecs for media playback and a DVD player, from our partners at Fluendo and Cyberlink, available through the Ubuntu store. We have had relationships with these companies for a while and to date we have offered their products to our hardware partners as pre-install options.

A few months ago, our own Jon Stokes bemoaned the frustration of managing and accessing data strewn across a multitude of personal computing devices. His description of the challenges of syncing and saving resonated with many of us on the Ars staff and with quite a few readers, too.

After two years in development, VLC, the universal media player, has moved from the 0.8.x versions to version 0.9.2. The release, named "Grishenko", is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other operating systems, is available to download from the Videolan web site.

Mark Shuttleworth, the man at the helm of Canonical and Ubuntu, went into greater detail last week about his thoughts on making future Ubuntu releases more user-focused. In the past, Shuttleworth has made no pretense that he feels Apple has, historically, offered a superior user experience.